My First Piece!

November 10, 2011Macy M5838 views

I have my first piece of my tiny house, my bathroom door pull :). We have been moving our office across town and are purging a TON of product samples, this is a sample of our door pulls that we used on our awesome new building that is also going to be moved into tomorrow (lots of moving happening!). I snagged it cause I always thought it was cool, it is going to be the pull on my bathroom door, which will be a sliding type of barn door if all stays as planned.

As plans progress I have also targeted a couple of trailers to go look at, I am setting up a couple of meetings for this weekend. I have come back to using an older RV because of all of the other components I can use from it, water tank, stove, microwaves, A/C unit etc. On top of having all these other parts it will save me a couple grand in trailer costs alone… The main issue with these is the weight limits, RV’s are designed in general to be ‘ultralight’ and to take a trailer designed to carry say, 4,000 lbs. and to put 6,000-8,000 lb. mini structure on it probably won’t end well! I have been doing a lot of research on trailer weight classifications and have found that their capacities are fairly easy to find, except on the early models. Newer models RVs are way out, as technology progressed manufactures have been able to get away putting rather large RV’s on trailers that are SUPER light compacity, as well as these are usually a bit more pricey. The really early model weight limits are often not documented if they are able to carry over 10,000 lbs, or so I read. This is an interesting/scary thing to me. The first trailer below has no weight limit posting on it and was made in the five year window when this manufacturer did not list it if it was beyond 10,000 lbs. That makes me wonder if the trailer can really hold that much OR if somewhere along the way the sticker listing this information was really just lost or ruined, both scenarios are fairly probable…

This is the first one. This one has been on Craigslist for a few months now, the owners recently marked it down a couple hundred bucks bringing it to $1,300. This one is the top on my list because it is 26’ long and would give me oodles of room to have my bed on the same level as everything else, avoiding the loft idea that I’m not too keen on. I really need to go give it a good once over to see if I am comfortable with it but either way it really is a gamble… or shall I say an ‘educated guess’, I will see I suppose on Saturday!

This is the exterior, which of course wouldn’t matter because it would be torn off :).

This is a gas stove/oven which could easily be reused although I am considering keeping everything electric so that it can be entirely off the grid and have no tanks that need refilled… although it will have water tanks… I am not sure on this, I really love a gas stove for cooking so much more than electric so if I were to get one of these I can easily see keeping the stove.

This is the second trailer, it is listed at about double the cost of the other one, sitting at $2,500, I do feel I could wheel and deal pretty well on it though so I don’t want to be too limited by the price here if it’s a good fit. This one is also 21’ long and may be a tighter fit, I may still be able to get away without having a loft though, we will see when I see it in person.