Update 5.30.13 – The Freak Out!
May 30, 2013 § 24 Comments
I am totally freaking out. It is just over a week before I move my house now… I have an awful lot invested in this project and I need to figure out how to get it across town on the back roads, preferably passing a weigh station… but probably not because it will be Sunday and they will be closed. I am not worried about the trailer falling off or anything of that sort, I know how everything in it is built and nothing will happen that isn’t completely fixable. I am worried because I am not in control, a very generous friend is going to help me move it. I have the type of tires that are for mobile homes which don’t have a super reputation for longevity. I don’t know the history of these tires exactly but I do know that for the last year and a half they have sat stagnant. The hav had a check-up at the tire store and passed exam, but it makes me worry, what if something does happen… I m sure it will be fine, I think it’s just impossible not to worry.
I am searching for a path that is ‘backroads’. The trip I am going on with the house if generally a 21 minute drive… the path I have mapped below would take 36 minutes, worth it for the back roads I think, slower speeds are good when the last year and a half of my life is traveling down the road 
I realize this move is like, nothing compared to most tny housers but I assure you, it has me on edge! I will feel lots better once it’s situated, that’s for sure!
So, onto the update, I am getting ready for that move and there are some things that need to happen still… The trailer has to be inspected by a motor vehicle inspector so that I can register it. I took a peek back through my state requirements HERE and realized that I think I am actually ok on my dimensions, I went slightly over the standard 8′ max width, about 2 inches over with windows poking out but I see Idaho’s laws are actually 8′-6″, could cause problems if I go to other states but like everything else I will cross that bridge when I get there.
I am FREAKING out, this will be a stressful week getting everything together, that is for sure! Thank you SO much Jed for volunteering to help move me, I promise not to be a pain .
Onto the update, which is sort of related… my trailer is on it’s own 6 feet… It is resting on the ground. I wanted to test out and see how much clearance I have over the wheels, I was expecting not much. I have moved the location of these tires when I added the third axle so that instead of sitting in between the structure of the trailer they are right below it. This wouldn’t matter anyway because there is now a piece of plywood on the bottom of the structure. I think i am going to have to add a spacer between the u-bolts so that there is a little more space between the wheels and the floor. I had to take the trailer off its supports to verify how much I have to raise it up. I should be good to lift it an inch or so up. Here are some pictures to show you what I mean:
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- Had to get a new tire pressure gauge that went higher than standard. With mobile home tires they have a tendancy to blow out, I have heard this was because of age and basically rotting rubber but the tire guys actually said it is because if the pressure is too low they are generally carrying so much weight that the bead blows. The tire pressure in my tires is either 70 psi or 100 psi, compared to the standard 35 psi I can see how someone can feel weird blowing them up that much. It was weird to need a special gauge for it.
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- Dad the muscle-man Miller :) We had to jack up the trailer to lower it, its HEAVY!
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- And that is how close the tires are, pretty close :)
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- It is a little out of kilter now that it’s on its own feet, walking through the house there are no popped tiles of cracking drywall yet, it tweaked probably more in grounding it than it wll driving it, I think. Of course tht driving is a longer adventure.
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- and it’s leaning now :) We will be working on it this weekend to get it set and ready to be registered.
PS, now that my trailer is off it’s blocks it ‘feels’ much more wobbly that it did, to be expected but I get that questions sometimes, ‘does it ‘feel’ solid’, to this point the answer is yes, very, now, it feels like it’s on a trailer
PPS, I am having a little competition on how much this beast weighs, I can’t think of a prize just yet, let me know if you have any ideas but better yet, post your guess in the comments for how much you think it weighs. As a base-line, the trailer itself, before adding anything to it weighed a couple hundred shy of 3,000 (~2,800) pounds, I have taken the deck off and added all that I have documented… post your guesses below and I will think of something awesome to give whoever is closest!
Update 5.5.13
May 5, 2013 § 9 Comments
Here is this days progress. I started the pallet siding. Here are some pictures:
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- The stove being reassembled, it looks gret, I can’t believe how much better it looks
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- And installed
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- Procrastinating the siding I decided instead to plan the seedlings I started a few weeks back
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- Here they are, various flowery vines that should look pretty on the side of my house
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- And planted
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- With no more options I have to put siding up… I prepped a lot of pallet wood previously but I still had to do some, here I am planing down the wood in order to stain it in the end, one pass through
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- Second pass
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- Third pass
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- and final fourth pass, every board has to go through about this many passes or more. Pallet wood is mostly free but ridiculously labor intensive
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- I got a few rows up and needed a break.
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- I was thinking about doing mitered edges at the corners but because they are all slightly different thicknesses and wood tends to shrink at different rates I thought it would be better to do finger joints like this
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- This is as far as I got done today.
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- The porch
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- porch 2
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- overall
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- This is the reason to wear a mask when cutting this stuff, these pallets are all used and coated in various amounts of whatever, in an effort to not breath this cocktail of chemicals in you really should wear a mask, You don’t want this stuff floating around in you. I am using all of the pallet wood outdoors as well, you wouldn’t really want it installed indoors for the same reasons. I think for my rain-screen wall it will be ok.
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- I am also making a lettuce tower.
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- and the tower on the porch :)
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- Another shot I guess
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- this is the trellis which is rather saggy now that it has warmed up a bit. Not a huge fan but it should work and Im just going to cut it down at the end of the season.
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- I also caulked all of the trim indoors
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- My lovely kitchen minus some open shelving up above
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- Much better color match, you can also see the brand of washer I got here.
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- I had to epoxy on the oven handle, the screws fell apart
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- The water heater JUST BARELY fits. I have like an 1/8 of an inch to spare with the vent
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- I cut some boards for the bathroom sink, not complete but planed and ready to go.
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- I cleaned up and showered then got ready to head out and came upon 9 people hanging out on my tiny house porch, my folks were showing their friends, Tobi also showed up, she seems to like the patio
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- and his picture taken
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- I forgot to include how we got the washer dryer in the house
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- It’s handy to have a dad with a tractor.
Update 4.11.13
April 11, 2013 § 6 Comments
It was sorta a lazy night, well as much as I ever have those… mostly because I am SORE! I’m not sure what exactly I did to strain every muscle in my legs but I feel like I was doing squats for 5 hours yesterday! I took the opportunity to get a decent jump on my trellis, there is lots more to do but it only took about an hour to get this far so it should be done soon .
So, to not feel so bad about not doing a ton of work I took the opportunity to think through my process on how to wrap this project up!
Announcement! I was accepted to be a keynote speaker at Boise’s first ever Mini Makers Faire which is pretty darn exciting! (I will probably be asking for advice on getting together some sort of presentation on this in the near future) It takes place over Memorial Day weekend so I have decided that would be a good goal to be complete by (May 25th and 26th). In order to make that happen though I need a game plan, the following is a list of the items left to finish and my estimation of time if applicable:
Trellis (3 hours)
Tile Floor
- Install heat tape (4 hours)
- Apply mortar bed (2 hours plus sitting overnight)
- Install tile (8 hours)
Tile Shower
- Apply RedGaurd (1 hour plus sitting overnight)
- Install tile (8 hours)
Millwork
- Cut cabinet doors (2 hours)
- Paint cabinets (6 hours)
- Build drawers (10 hours)
- Install pulls (2 hours)
- Bookshelf (3 hours)
Siding
- De-nail boards (20 hours)
- Rip boards to size (4 hours)
- Plane boards (4 hours)
- Install Siding (16 hours)
Connect Plumbing
- Shower
- Lav
- Kitchen
Fix the Electrical I messed up (4 hours)
Install Toilet (3 hours)
Replace Tires (trip to the store)
Front Electrical Closet Doors (3 hours)
I have approximately 6 weeks to complete it in the timeframe, 2 and a half of those weekends I will be out of town or unavailable so this will be a tight squeeze and mostly weeknights after work! It has been getting much easier to work on it now that things are getting all prettied up! Each checkmark affects the aesthetics, it’s pretty neat for me.
Last night I was able to just sit and relax in the bed area, it equalled a pretty zen moment and an incredible feeling of pride! That’s it for now!
Macy
I Have an Idea!
April 9, 2013 § 25 Comments
So, I am building on a goose-neck trailer and I drive a Prius… obviously I am going to need help when it comes to moving my house. Here are a few options I have considered, let me know if you have others!
1) I would rent a UHaul if it was just a standard hitch, but it isn’t. I have called everywhere to see about renting a truck with a goose-neck hitch, they just aren’t out there.
2) Plan ‘b’ has been to put an ad on Craigslist and find someone willing to move it for me with some sort of compensation OR
3) hire a tow truck, either would work ok but I would be tied on schedule, which is hard for me AND I would be out probably a couple hundred bucks every time I want to move… my next thought was
4) to install a goose-neck on my dad’s or my brothers’ truck which would cost near $800 and be sort of an inconvenience for them…
5) So, I had the idea to cruise over Craigslist, see what the prices were like on a truck that is able to pull it. Now I don’t mean a brand new truck, I mean an old, reliable type of farm truck, I mean it’s a farm trailer… why not go for the matched pair. Then the idea is that I can sell the truck back to someone else after it’s moved. As I got to looking at the trucks I had another idea!
6) One of the biggest issues I have had with downsizing my life is that I am a ‘crafty’ person, I like building things, I have a decent amount of tools that I would be storing somewhere or getting rid of… either way it is hard to use them if they aren’t with me. The welding truck below was what gave me the idea… service trucks are often made to be portable shops with toolboxes and storage throughout… I could get a truck that is able to become my sort of ‘shop’ AND pull my house when I need it too… I could probably even throw my plastic car on the porch and be all self contained when I want to move (joking!).
So that is where I am thinking now… just a quick look through CL and there are tons of options well under $4,000 bucks… With how low of a budget I have had on my house I don’t know that that is an option that is out of the realm of possibilities.
What are your thoughts, how have you, would you or do you move your house? or do you?
Here are some pictures of some of the trucks, I haven’t really looked at any in real life but they all seem to be decent deals:
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- Ford F-250 4×4 ext-cab – $4000, already has a goose-neck hitch
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- Ford F-250 4×4 ext-cab – $4000
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- 1993 Ford F-250 PU 4X4 – $3100 -already has a goose-neck hitch
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- 1993 Ford F-250 PU 4X4 – $3100
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- 1986 FORD F-350- w WELDERS/ RANCHER BED $1600 – This is my favorite :) I would totally drive that! :)
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- 1985 F-350 1 TON FLATBED – $2000 would need a goose-neck hitch.
Tiny House Weight Debate
February 26, 2013 § 8 Comments
How do you calculate the weight of your tiny house and how do you know if your trailer can handle it? There are several ways these things can be determined, it all depends on your situation, as does everything… Here is my logic and some of the tools I used to get there.
The first thing to decide would be if you already have a trailer you’re going to build on, if so then you have to decide how much it can carry and design within this. I am not going to go through the details of how to find out how much your trailer can already carry because Andrew already did a stellar job of demystifying that over at Tiny r(E)volutions HERE. So, if you already have a trailer, figure out how much you can load it with and design your house using the basic principles below. Note: If you buy plans from Tumbleweed or the like they generally come with a gross build-out weight to them, that is handy to use so long as you know you’re going to use those plans with no/minor modifications, if however you are going to change some materials around (say you want granite counters instead of plastic laminate counters) you can use some basic calculations with the tools below and add that to their weight to verify that you’re in the right range still.
What if you design your own tiny house, how can you guesstimate your weight so you know how much your trailer will have to hold so you can buy the correct trailer? You COULD find a similar-ish Tumbleweed and err on the side of caution guessing a little heavy but that isn’t really a solid method and I don’t suggest it… For those of you who have followed my project you know that I pretty much had the house designed before I got the trailer and that the trailer I found needed to be modified to hold the weight I wanted it to… Because I had these known modifications I was able to more accurately plan my axles, both the location and the maximum weight. I ended up buying a duel 5600 pound (each) capacity axle flat-bet goose-neck trailer, but initially I was planning on a concrete floor (6000 # in itself) so I ended up installing a third axle just to be safe. If you are going to go this way and customize your trailer be sure to calculate in the weight of your trailer, mine is just shy of 3000 pounds for all the steel. If you add 6000 for the concrete and 3000 for the trailer (it is home made and a little beefier than a trailer shop would make a trailer, so it is heavier than most) it brings you to 9000 pounds before you even add the house! So two 5600# axles would only leave me 1600 pounds for the rest of the house in that example, hence I welded on a third axle allowing me to go up to 16,800# total, allowing me 7,800 for the rest of the building materials. Now, through the design process I have since nixed the concrete in favor of much lighter weight tiles so my trailer is overkill, that was a calculated decision though.
Through the planning phase you will most likely be doing a sketchup model or somehow actually drawing plans, tiny houses are small enough that you can pretty easily take a volume or square foot count of materials fairly painlessly, you have to do this to buy your materials anyway. Once you have those calculations you can apply weights to things and get a pretty decent idea of where you’ll stand.
I have collected a list of common building materials that you can use. I like to add a contingency onto the end weight to account for things that are harder to pin down, like the faucets, hardware, furniture etc., I suggest about a 20% contingency, that may seem high but it’s better to be over than under! If you make a material list and add things up and it’s too heavy you can start to massage your finishes to make things work out better. This is a pretty important part of the process so spend some time on it. I keep saying that this project is weird for me because there are three main design factors that went into my project and the least important is aesthetics (weird for someone with a design background). The MOST important has been weight and number two is cost since I set a pretty tight budget. THEN I get to worry about looks .
Common Material Weights:
Wood Stud, 2×4 (pine): 1.31#/linear foot
Wood Stud 2×6: 2.05#/linear foot
Metal Studs: 1#/linear foot
SIPs Panels, 6″: 3.47#/square foot
Insulation, rigid – 1″: 1.5#/square foot
Insulation, batt 1″: .04#/square foot
Insulation, spray-in 1″: .5#/square foot
OSB Sheathing, 3/8″: 1.22#/square foot
OSB Sheathing, 1/2″: 1.63#/square foot
OSB Sheathing, 5/8″: 2.03#/square foot
Plywood, 3/8″: 1.08#/square foot
Plywood, 1/2″: 1.44#/square foot
Plywood, 5/8″: 1.8#/square foot
Gypsum (drywall), 1/4″: 1.1#/square foot
Gypsum (drywall), 3/8″: 1.65#/square foot
Gypsum (drywall), 1/2″: 2.2#/square foot
Gypsum (drywall), 5/8″: 2.75#/square foot
Metal Roofing: 2.5#/square foot
Asphalt Roofing: 2#/square foot
TPO Roofing: .7#/square foot
Carpet: .3-.7#/square foot
Porcelain tile: 4.5#/square foot
Hardwood Floor (birch), 1/2″: 2.4#/square foot
Hardwood Floor (oak), 1/2″: 2.05#/square foot
Hardwood Floor (poplar), 1/2″: 1.45#/square foot
Wood Planks (pine), 1/2″: 1.46#/square foot
Cement, 1″: 12#/square foot
Granite, 1/4″: 3.6#/square foot
Hardie Board Siding, 1/2″: 3#/square foot
Linoleum: .75#/square foot
For a more comprehensive list click HERE.
For a more comprehensive list of various woods click HERE (a board foot is equal to a 1′x1′x1″ section of wood, you can do simple math from there to get to your thickness/width).
You’ll notice some of these are assembly weights, if that is the make-up of your wall skip adding up the individuals and just use that weight per /square foot of wall.
In addition to your building material weights you will need to account for your appliances, the best way to do that is, if you order them on amazon there is an exact weight. If not you can certainly get an idea on how much a stove similar to the one you’re getting will weigh, again, lean to the cautious side and round up… If you are going to have a water tank on board or a water heater use it’s ‘when full’ weight (water weighs 8.34# per gallon).
Once you have all of that added up figure out your contingency, I use 20% to account for the faucets, the furniture and all those little pieces that it wouldn’t be efficient to add up… Then you have your weight or at least a healthy stab at it to get you started!
Hopefully that is a semi helpful bit of info! Anyone else? How did you determine this? Did you figure it out beforehand or just build?
