Offgrid tiny house build, Day 2 Brian: 6 hours, Liz: 6 hours. . Framed the front and rear trailer walls today. It felt like slow going for two simple walls, but we’ve both learned from previous projects that it’s better to pause and take sanity checks. That extra time on the front end makes up for itself...
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Framing the end walls
Framed the end walls today, which felt a bit sluggish due to the awkward work surface and being out of practice. We had to remember to compensate for the 2 1/2 inch difference between finished floor height and trailer flange to make sure the windows were in the right place. There’s no substitute for...
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Timelapse: framing the floor
Offgrid tiny house build, Day 1. Brian: 7 hours, Liz: 5.5 hours. . Today was our first day truly building, after plenty of site prep, staging, and the nail-biting experience of backing the trailer up our narrow city driveway. . I spent the morning staging our massive haul of reclaimed lumber, which will become the majority of the framing...
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Framing the floor
Started the day by leveling the trailer with a laser level and the leveling jacks to get the weight mostly off the wheels. We’re using the leveling jacks while we frame the walls because they make leveling fast and easy, however, these are not designed for heavy loads so we’ll be switching to blocking...
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Lumber score
We scored a windfall at the Rebuilding Center in the form of enough reclaimed lumber to frame most of our tiny house.The Rebuilding Center is a local nonprofit organization that deconstructs old homes and diverts valuable building materials back into the building stream. They also accept donations.I’ve bought SO MUCH stuff from them over...
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Bringing the trailer home
Prepped the site and backed the trailer in today. There was the usual last minute frantic re-measuring and changes, but overall things went pretty smoothly. The driveways was TIGHT, but the only real casualties were a row of Hellebores that should pop back up eventually. Before backing in we dug the wheel locations to...
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Trailer day!
We picked up our new Iron Eagle tiny house trailer today. Originally a collaboration between tiny house pioneer Dee Williams and the owner Rob, these tiny house specific trailers have evolved over the years to become the literal foundation of west coast tiny house building. With fender flashing, custom widths, leveling jacks, a perimeter...
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A visit to Green Anchors
On our trip down to Green Anchors yesterday we spotted this gorgeous modern-styled tiny house under construction by @mcmustache. With its balanced proportions and always classy black-on-cedar ultra clean lines, it shares a lot with the look we are after for our own tiny house build. Brian, the builder, happened to be on site...
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A visit to Green Anchors
Checking out tiny houses under construction is hugely helpful in planning a build. Green Anchors, a remediated WWII shipyard that now rents space to a variety of artists and builders is a veritable hotbed of tiny house activity and while not officially a place to tour, if you keep a low profile and are...
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Material research
Spent the day pricing lumber and looking at siding profiles. One of the most frustrating parts of any building project, in my opinion, is the amount of time and gas spent driving around sourcing material. Or even worse, researching material. But the truth is that sometimes you need to see and touch something in...
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