September 9th Update

We made some headway!  It’s amazing how long some of this stuff takes, I totally thought we could get more done than we could this weekend, I always overestimate that stuff, we made some great progress though!  James helped immensely getting the ceiling insulated and I dove a little bit into the electrical.   It felt REALLY good to get back to work on the house!  And I had a great birthday weekend with lots of fun, family and food!!!  MMMM!

In other news, James and I went to a cool lecture (cool for us nerds) on maintaining rights on intellectual property, it was very interesting and got us thinking about all sorts of ideas!   We have a ton of great ideas floating around.  Originally this blog was intended to be on minimalistic living and making a transformation to more intentional life, to date what it has focused on is the tiny house build, which is MY first real big step but with that getting closer and closer to completion every day there are a lot of interesting ideas I/we have floating around that are going to start getting introduced.

I am very excited to start exploring some of these openly but I think we/I need to figure out how to go about it a little more privately before that can really start to happen, it’s all just so new now.  As some hints though… there are homesteading ventures being explored, business ventures being explored, gardening/canning/freezing/dehydrating projects being explored, Great Danes being mentioned and chickens!!! I can’t wait for chickens!  That’s not even all, there are so many good things coming down the pipes along with my house plans becoming available in the works!

James (who is really close to being done with his A.R.E.s, wish him luck for the 19th, that’s his second to last test! He will be a ‘real architect’ soon!) and I have been talking through ways to make a set of tiny house drawings, my house plan, that are REALLY easy to read for people who aren’t used to reading plans and detailed enough to be used for construction… and AFFORDABLE!  (free/donation based, we haven’t worked out those details just yet).  I really like how this community is so open and so friendly and SO helpful to one and other.  We would really like to help perpetuate that kindness.  Because of my/our backgrounds in architecture I feel like we can make a set of plans that conveys all this complicated building information in a simple way, ones that make sense to people who have never constructed anything.  If we can do that I feel like we can take a lot of the ‘big scary’ factor out of jumping off the cliff to tiny-housedom and people can understand in more plain/clear terms just how simple building one of these tiny houses can be.   My thought is that if more people saw how simple it could be, more people would want to entertain this idea, more people would build them and more jurisdictions would have to start accepting them, then we all win.  I’ve talked before about working from within the system to enact change, I feel like there is real potential to start doing that and that is how change occurs, if enough people want it will become more accepted…  I could go on and on, but it’s late, I’m tuckered and I’m sort of just going on a tangent anyway but we have been thinking of such exciting things, more to come soon!

Here are some pictures!

Ready, set go! I can't be TOO terribly useful just yet but I CAN strip wires and start to figure out how to hook up my outlets! So here I am, doing that...

James can however be incredible handy still. He spent the better part of a day insulating the ceiling in the tiny house! Man it felt good to see some progress again! Thank you for all your help James!

I have some other tools to add to the 'tools used' list. I picked up some wire strippers today, made the job MUCH easier!

I tried to start with one of the 'easy' outlets. It's been a while since I've looked at this electrical stuff, I didn't want to overwhelm myself too fast... It sorta came back to me... a little 🙂

James was busy ripping down all the pieces of insulation for the ceiling. Mess-making at it's best! We hooked up the shop-vac though so we didn't send little plastic particles everywhere, i don't think the neighbors horses would have approved.

I believe someone is checking the scores??? Maybe.

And it starts to make its way in the house, I am so happy to start to see this! It is surprising how cool the house actually stays even with no insulation and the sun beating down on it. It was 95 degrees today but the house was still relatively cool when we went in there around 1 this afternoon. I think it's mostly due to the radiant barrier but the white roof probably helps too!

I started out by hard wiring the outlet to the wall, fairly typical, right??? It was a little tricky however and then I have also been planning to remove these once I test all the wiring to make sure it works... So I shifted plans, learning process, right?.

Here is the outlet all hooked up. It works but it was tough to hook the two ground wires to the one ground screw... so I decided to pigtail the ground and use a wire nut to simplify things.

I wired up a little pig-tail (adorable) to each ground so I could just group the grounds together with the wire nut and simplify things!

I started thinking that it would be easier to test and then remove all of the outlets if everything was pigtailed! Then all I would have to do is remove the nuts and put up sheetrock, then, when its rocked wire nut them all back together! So, that's what I did!

To remove these i just have to undo the red nut, rock and then re attach them. It's going to be WAY easier and I can test everything since I'm not so secure in my wiring skills! and if it all works now and then it doesn't when i hook it back up I know its because i put the wire nuts on wrong and then I can figure it out...

So I set out to pigtail all of the outlets and switches like this...

Here is a detail show of how to hook up the pig tails

And here are all my switches all done!

James made some good headway, we initially cut them a little too snug so they were a pain to put up but he chopped an extra 1/4 inch or so off and it got rolling a lot quicker! Using the rigid insulation can add a bit to your structural properties and shear strength so it's important to get it snug but not too snug that it takes a hammer to install!

I originally had thought of doing R-30 min the ceilings but after seeing how cool it stays already in the heat I feel comfortable backing that down to just two layers at R-20. It is coming together!

We got it about half done but all the other pieces are cut and ready to go so it should go quickly! I put the rest of my insulation on Craigslist tonight. If you remember, originally I purchased all of the insulation for $1,000. I have since realized i WAY over estimated the amount needed (I would have been WAY ok with one bunk instead of two) but I have been able to sell some of it like I thought I would be, if needed. The price I purchased these for was about 5 dollars a sheet, the price they sell for at Lowe's is $19.95 a sheet... I am selling them on Craigslist for $10 a sheet. So far I have sold 42 sheets, that just about gets me half my money back.... I have the rest on there for $850 bucks, I should be able to get all of my insulation AND turn a profit from selling my excess, that's good because I went a little over budget in some areas 🙂

Here is the rest of the insulation, once that is in we are totally insulated! 🙂

My brother got a new adorable pup, his name is Jack, for short ;-). He's 4 years old and very sweet, he's already used to annoying auntie Macy with her mustache antics!