Tiny House Tiny Steps

Well it's officially been over a month since our last post. Since then we have made some significant, although visually small, headway on the appliances. Mainly, Jon has done all the plumbing hook ups and got everything ready for the next big step, which was insulation. However, we also got most of the exterior siding up :) which is a pretty big visual improvement. Below are some more pictures of the siding in progress. Waiting on putting up the siding near the door until we have the floor and door fully installed.

Exterior Siding

End view

Side view

Closer up - the sun kind of ruined this shot, but you get the idea. The on demand hot water heater is the white box on the side of the house. The bathroom is on the other side of that wall.

On to the insulation!!!

We hired Weather Shield to do our insulation, since we received numerous suggestions from contractor and carpenter friends to DO SPRAY FOAM INSULATION!! It cost us $1,300 and that really hurt our budget, but realized that using the foam core boards (AKA blue board) was just not going to give us the R-Value we need for living in the winters out west.

To give you an idea, the R-Value required for code here in Idaho is a minimum of 21, and each inch of spray foam insulation gives you an R-Value of 7. Therefore, we got 3" of the spray foam in our walls and ceiling to give us that total R-Value of 21.

In comparison, the foam core boards only give you about an R-Value of 2 per inch….so the decision was pretty clear.

In our opinion, Weather Shield was good - but not great. Meaning that the end result was good but the process of working with them was not smooth. Rick the owner was very enthusiastic, but seemed to talk a bigger game than was warranted. The job took 4 days of on-site work to complete, which is pretty incredible since our space was so small. 3 out of those 4 days he was late…by a few hours….and no phone call ahead telling us he would be late. One day he said he would be over before 4:00pm to finish up the spraying. Well, finally by 4:30pm I called him to see where he was, and he said he was going to drive over to talk to me because his spray gun that broke still had not been repaired. So I found him to be a very hard worker but maybe bites off more than he can chew for the business.

Then he sent over a worker to cut back the foam that had expanded past the rafters and studs. This took two days to complete….again, we were just waiting for the damn project to be over with by this point and couldn't believe it was taking this long. Finally, the job was complete and we paid them the $1,300 (although I was tempted to ask for a bit off, I didn't). I just couldn't bring myself to ask.

Turns out that we still had to go through the entire tiny house and continue to cut back foam that was past the studs. Not sure how the guy that spent two afternoons cutting back that foam wasn't able to get it all. But I spent a solid 2 hours in there with a saw cutting back that foam and I'm still not done yet. I have about half more to go. Furthermore, they didn't even clean up after themselves after they trimmed the foam back. There was a whole bunch of it scattered around up in the loft. I was tempted to call up Rick at Weather Shield to talk to him about it, but at that point we knew we could get the job done quicker if we just did it ourselves. Sheesh.

I understand that shit happens, but COME ON. Anyways - rant over.

On the positive side of this whole ordeal, we will be super well insulated. We are very happy about that and just glad it's over with. Here is what it looks like!

Facing the living room end of the house

Jon working on cutting back foam around the wheel well encasement we built. All the cut foam pieces you see on the ground are what were left behind up in the loft. Still got a bunch of cleaning to do up there.

Closer up view of that trimming. Using a sawzall is the easiest for this job. 

Michele continuing to cut back foam after it had apparently already been cut back :) #passiveaggressive

This is the loft roof

The Pallet Project!

So one last project we started working on while the insulation was being sprayed in for a whole week was disassembling all the free pallets we had accumulated from local businesses. These pallets will give us the wood we need to side the inside walls and ceiling of the house. The idea came to us initially from a coworker and friend, and then found numerous DIY tutorials online of how other people have paneled their walls in pallet wood. We combined some of those techniques and added a couple of our own "processes". 

Here is the process we went through:

1. Jon cut through the nails that hold the wood boards together with a sawzall (easier than using a pry bar and leaves the boards in better condition…not as much splitting)

2. I collected the individual boards and laid them out on the driveway 

3. I mixed a very concentrated bleach and water solution together and purchased a brush with a long handle that would enable me to disinfect and clean the boards without breaking my back. 

4. I scrubbed each board with the bleach and water solution. This killed any mold that may have started to grow from rain and whatnot. Then I turned all the boards over and Jon scrubbed the opposite side.

5. We rented a power washer from the local hardware store for two or three hours and Jon power washed every board as I followed him and turned them over, preparing Jon to go back and wash the other sides as well. This cleaned the boards to the best of our ability and got any dirt or gunk off them. Honestly, the boards were in pretty good condition to start with, but we didn't want to mess around with any microscopic stuff going on that could turn into a health hazard later on. Plus, the power washer cost us $40 to rent so it wasn't a very expensive process.

6. We are still staining the boards, since weather has been against us the last few weeks. We have had some rain and now we have a few inches of snow. The boards were covered with a tarp but inevitably some of the rain got to the boards. In an attempt to dry them out, I spread them across the lawn….then it snowed like three inches today. So, ya know…I'm pretty much a genius. It's kind of a headache I don't want to think about right now, but we might have to bring the project into the garage and turn on a space heater to dry out all the wood and stain them. Where there's a will, there's a way! We don't have any pictures of the stained boards yet - that will be in a later post. 

Here are some pictures of the pallet process:

Jon sweeping the boards before I scrubbed them with the bleach solution, in order to get dirt and dust off

Michele scrubbing the boards with the bleach and water solution

Forgot to take a picture of Jon actually washing the boards, but this is the power washer next to the boards with water all around it…so use your imagination

And Then There Was Light

WE HAVE POWER!!! Lots has been going on the past couple weeks and I'm excited to share the news. After completing the roof and building the interior walls for the utility closet bathroom, we got to planning our electrical wiring and power. We probably exchanged something like 50 emails between my brother, Kevin, and friend, Seth. They live in Montana and are electrical engineers - so they pretty much saw this project and freaked out with excitement.

The proof is in the pudding

Just to start off, we decided to run the house on 24v DC. What that means: electricity is generated in DC. But many of our appliances run off of AC, so there is an inverter in all our homes that changes the DC to AC. All our homes run off of AC (to give you a frame of reference). However, there are still many devices we use that run off DC (phone chargers, camera battery chargers, laptops, etc), so then what happens is the DC changes to AC and then back to DC again. This inversion process creates a loss of power, which we want to avoid. This is why we want to run as much of the house as possible on DC. This way, we don't need to buy a big inverter for the whole house and we retain most of the power we generate. This means that our fridge will be DC, our laptop will be our "TV", and we will be packing away our toaster oven, blender, and other AC appliances that will not be used in the tiny house.

Kevin's Comment to this section: Today, electricity is generated at AC and then transformed to high voltage and transmitted over long distances.  Edison's original Pearl Street generation plant was a DC plant; however, at the time they had no way of transforming the voltage.  This meant that the customer at the end of the line saw lower voltage than the customer at the beginning of the line due to voltage drop (losses) through the line.  Then Tesla came along and made AC generation possible.  Again the advantage to AC generation is that it can be transformed to high voltage and then transmitted, which results in considerably less losses and therefore the customer at the beginning and end of the line have similar voltage.  Like you mentioned many appliances actually run on DC, so once the power comes into our homes some of it is rectified to DC.  That rectifier is a power electronic device and has some losses.  Solar panels generate at DC, this is different from the traditional thermal generators (coal, gas, nuclear) that generate at AC, so it makes sense not to invert to AC and then rectify back to DC to run your loads.

Side note: I have a desktop computer, which runs off AC. We will have one outlet in the whole house that has an inverter to run AC electricity to that desktop. When the computer is not in use, it will be turned completely off.

Saturday morning discussion of the electrical wiring game plan. Kevin and Seth might have boners if you look close enough.

Wiring Schematic. Artistic Credit: Kevin Marchese

 Another wring schematic of the battery. Artistic credit: Kevin Marchese

Here are some of our electrical specs:

-We have Four 100 Watt solar panels, giving us total of 400 Watts of power (yes, I can do math). We purchased them from a company called Windy Nation. We were thinking of purchasing all the different components we need from different companies or sellers in order to save on price. However, we decided that even if it cost us $50-$100 more in the end, it would save time and mental energy if we got everything from the same company. This way, we could be assured that everything would connect with each other, and all the correct components for those particular panels would be purchased. Each solar panel runs at 12v but we connected two panels in series and then the two pair in parallel, giving us 24v of electricity. Here is a link to the package that we bought: 400 Watt MPPT Monocrystalline Solar Kit

Included in the kit is:
(4) 100 Watt solar panels
(1) 40 amp, 12v/24v MPPT charge controller
(4) Bracket mounts
(40 ft) solar extension cable
(3 pairs) MC4 branch connectors
(1) Wiring diagram

It's electric! doo doo doo da-doo da doo, doo doo.....

-We have two deep cycle marine batteries. We purchased these from our local auto parts store. I basically took their catalog and they ordered the ones I wanted - free shipping that way! These batteries are heavy and shipping can be costly. The deep cycle batteries are very important to get because they last MUCH longer and can be run down more than your regular car battery without much loss of life to the battery. Here is what we got: Optima YellowTop Battery

**Each battery is 12V but we ran them in series to create a 24V system in the house

-We purchased about 10 24v LED lightbulbs to put in our light fixtures (these were not easy to find, but eBay is a wonderful thing). We purchased more bulbs than we needed, since we installed 8 lights in the whole house. Two in the living room, two in the dining room, two in the loft, one in the bathroom, and one outside next to the front door.

-We purchased a Dickinson propane heater. This was a tough decision! We were so set on going with the wood burning stove, but after a lot of discussion with close friends we decided against it. We had to accept the fact that maintaining the heat from the wood burning stove (day and night in the winter months) might be a chore we won't enjoy for too long. This added a lot more cost to our total expenditures, but we coughed up the $700 for the heater.

We then went ahead and bought an exhaust pipe extension so that it would go straight through the roof. That added another $100-$150. We figure it will give off some more heat with a longer exhaust pipe. Here is the heater we purchased: Dickinson Heater. Buying this thing new off the manufacturer's website will cost you much more as opposed to searching around for a cheaper option. I believe we got ours off some marine website.

-We are using light fixtures purchased from Home Depot. We got these $15 pendant light fixture kits for the living room and kitchen, and then you just buy the glass shade that you want to put on it. It was a pretty cheap option and they were new and easy to install. Buying new is great when it's affordable because there are no missing parts and no ghetto rigging necessary! here are the pendant kits: Oil Rubbed Bronze Mini Pendant Kit

Left to right: outdoor light next to front door, bathroom light, hanging pendant lights for kitchen and living room, the tall light on the very right will be returned (bought from local thrift...decided not to use it), and finally the lights in front will be mounted to the wall in the loft on either side of the bed.

-We have a switch panel that allows us to completely shut off power to different areas of the house (this would never have been a reality had it not been for Kevin and Seth geeking out on all these doo-dads). We purchased them from WestMarine.com and here is a link: DC Electrical Panels The one we bought is the one with four switches and two DC outlets on the bottom (AKA car cigarette lighter outlets).

-This is going to be confusing, but most of the outlets we installed in the house are 12v DC outlets. This is made possible by wiring a very small converter at each of these outlets to change the current from 24v DC to 12v DC. 12v DC outlets are the same outlets we all use in our cars to charge our phones, ipads, etc. So we have a lot of these in the house now. There are two or three "regular" three-prong outlets for the 24v fridge, an offshore line (in the rare occasion we could run an extension chord from a regular on-grid house and get 120v AC from it), and for the desktop computer. My brother purchased these and I think he got many of them from Lowes.

My head hurts from just typing all that gibberish. Let's look at a picture now. MEN AT WORK!!

-We also have switches at each outlet to make it functioning or not. Again, this is just another little "geek moment" on the part of Kevin and Seth to conserve as much power as possible and not have the tiniest bit of power lost from the outlets being connected but not used. Engineering grad students....can't live with em, can't live without em.

Kevin's comment on this section: You should make some points about energy efficiency and general electrical safety.  Anything that is plugged into the wall that doesn't have a switch is consuming energy whether you use it or not (the common vernacular for this is phantom voltage although I don't know where that came from).  Putting the DC/DC converters on switches allows you to turn them off when you don't need them, as you mentioned.  Also, it's just good practice to unplug things that aren't being used because appliances can short out.  Every girl has probably had a hair dryer short out, so you're familiar.  If that happened while you weren't there it can cause a fire.

-We installed a battery volt meter on the wall so we can see how drained our batteries our. This will help us to know when to conserve power, and when to REALLY conserve power (for those cloudy days). Basically, is the meter reads 24.0v, the batteries are about 50% depleted, and for the health of the batteries it should not be depleted any more than that. So at 24.0v we need to start shutting everything off and living by candle light. But we hope this doesn't happen. Despite the house running on 24v, it will always be slightly above that as long as power is being generated. Today it was at 26.7 I believe. We got a toggle switch to activate the thing. Oh, and it's really cheap: Volt Battery Meter

-Finally, we have not purchased the fridge yet, but we will be buying the Sundanzer rf134 (24v DC). It is 4.7 cubic feet and it kills out wallets to buy this thing, but its the most power efficient refrigerator we found and it runs on DC! For the one appliance that will be running 24/7 in the house, we had to make sure it was as efficient as possible. Here it is: Sundanzer rf134

I am probably forgetting something, but I think this covers all the basics!

We took this picture into the Paint program and sent these details to Kev and Seth so that they could come up with a wiring map...or something like that. Helps everyone else understand the layout as well!

More deets!

It Looks Like a House

It has been a couple weeks without an update, but we have made some serious progress and shit's getting exciting!

We finished the entire roof, which ended up being pretty quick and easy. We used red metal sheet roofing and have made some strides with prepping the door and windows with paint. Some house wrapping has gone up and we have successfully enclosed one wheel well so that it is weather proof and no water can escape up into the house through it. 

Finally, we made some big deal purchases which include the solar panels, on-demand tankless hot water heater, water pump, batteries, propane wall heater, and water storage containers. My brother and friend are coming down next weekend to help install the whole electrical system, and we hope to receive some much needed help from local friends as well! Should be a fun weekend and give us a real boost in motivation to make this house into a home before the snow falls.

We just recently completed building the one and only interior wall that we will have in the tiny house. It will be the wall that separates the bathroom from the kitchen and living room, and also doubles as our utility closet. We might even fit some drawers in that structure for clothes. Check out the progress-to-date below!!

On a side note, I promise to give more details once the project has slowed down a little bit. Work and life and this project does not leave much time for blogging, and I've been slacking in the amount of detail I was hoping to give when I started this thing. Hoping that everyone enjoys the progress photos for now and I can add much more detail later on! 

 Yellow fascia!

Utility closet and bathroom

Top view

We Have A Roof!

Like I mentioned in our last post, we recorded a video of the method we used for the loft roof, which was WAY easier than what we were attempting for the first section of roofing. I would love to put those videos up, but alas, I have not taken the time to upload them yet. I was waiting to post this entire update for those videos, but after a week of NOT doing that, I figured that this needs to be published already!!! Check out our progress from like a week and a half ago below. I will try and get another post published quickly (in the next few days) of the progress that we made from last week up until today. For now, enjoy what I wrote over a week ago!

Well it's been a slower week because of how involved the roof building is, but we have finally finished putting up all our roof rafters, and OSB. After pushing through the last few weeks to get the house water proof-ish, we now feel like we can breath a little bit and take our time. We went to Yellowstone over the weekend to meet up with Michele's brother and his girlfriend for some camping (wet camping, to be exact). It was a nice break in the project to get away and be in the mountains.

Now back to the Tiny House! There's not too much to report because most of our process was explained in the previous post. The only news I would say is that we approached the loft roof in a very different fashion than we approached the first floor roofing.

This picture shows the angle we wanted to use on the loft rafters (front rafter) and the one we ended up having to use (back rafter) which is a much shallower pitch than we had originally intended. If we wanted to go with the 3/12 pitch we would not have been able to get any overhang. The pitch ended up being something like 11 or 13 degrees...around there. Not sure what that is as a ratio.

The loft floor being framed out

Loft floor is framed and sheathed. Now for framing the walls.

More loft wall framing

OSB plywood to sheath over the framing

And we have a roofed loft!! I was going to be working a 12 hour shift at work the next day so Jon put some OSB plywood onto the roof ahead of time (sitting on those pieces of 2x4) so that he could do some sheathing while I wasn't there.

The M****** F****** Roof

Well this week has probably been the most challenging and the most frustrating. Want to know why? THE ROOF. If someone told me that I would have to resort back to high school geometry with Coach Leicht I would have hired a contractor to come over and just do the damn calculations for us. The Pythagorean Theorem has never brought out so much anger in both of us. It wasn't even the equation itself, which is pretty straight forward...it was the fact that it didn't work! Every time we solved for C, a.k.a. the length of our rafters, it somehow did not sit flush when we actually made the cuts.

Please tell me that you don't get a headache just looking at all these scrap papers filled with our multiple attempts at the Pythagorean Theorem. This isn't even all of them....yea.

Bottom line is that when Shannon tells you to use the Pythagorean Theorem, don't do it. Sorry, Shannon...we love you. After using the guess and check system for the half of the roof that we actually got done this week, we realized that the ridge beam was not 100% centered (it was off by maybe 1/16" or 1/8") so one side ended up being a 41 degree angle and the other side was more like 45 degrees. This explained the whole math thing not working out.

Once we got one rafter on each side to fit perfectly, we kept them as templates, and traced their cuts onto the rest of the 2 x 4s that would become the rest of the rafters. We also left about 6" after the bird's mouth (the cutout in the rafter that sits on the framing of the house) for an overhang. We decided we would worry about the accuracy of the overhang later. We will just go back and with the SkilSaw and cut the overhanging boards to be even.

Queen of the Chop Saw! I was the designated rafter tracer and cutter

The start of screwing in our supports for the ridge beam. The diagonal board is just a temporary brace.

The supports are up and the ridge beam is in place. We decided to use a 2x7 x 20' ridge beam made of manufactured wood. I don't remember the exact name of it. It was more expensive because it is stronger, but we figured if we are going to splurge on any wood, it would be the wood that's holding our roof together. 

Not sure what Jon's doing here. Something important, I'm sure.

Next, we started to nail on the hurricane brackets that we purchased. These secure the rafters to the house framing/wall. Here I am, owning that ladder and nailing away.

Here is the video that we watched in preparation for doing the roofing. Even though, in the end, we didn't use the Pythagorean Theorem to determine our rafter length, I think this video is helpful in understanding roof framing and installation...like if your house is actually even...and straight.

Jon and I actually filmed an amateur YouTube video today of our easier strategy that ended up saving us a ton of time in the end. That video will be uploaded in next week's update blog post! Get ready for some serious carpentry. Here is a picture of the progress we made as of Sunday 8/24...damn tree is in the way but you can get an idea.

Last week's progress!

Galena, the poster dog for what neglect looks like. She will pretty much be satisfied with any of these three balls being thrown. She no longer has a preference. Sadly, we have not been playing with her nearly as much as before. This project has been pretty time consuming. POOR LITTLE GALENA!!!!

Phase 2: Wall Framing - Completed!!!

Well we apparently are moving at record speed and kicked it into high gear this week to finish ALL the wall framing and sheathing.

We started with the wall at the front of the trailer to get ourselves warmed up for the rest of the trailer, because that wall is the only one without any windows or doors. Super easy! And if it weren't for the wonderful YouTube videos of the channel "HouseImprovements" with Shannon to teach us everything we now know, we would probably not be finished so quickly. Shout-out to Shannon - who we now refer to in conversation casually, like we just spoke with him on the phone about how to connect two different framed wall sections together. Yes....we are building our house thanks to YouTube...I mean, Shannon.

For reference, the videos we found to be the most helpful for this phase of construction are the following:

How To Frame A Window And Door Opening

 Wood Stud Wall Framing

So we realized that before doing all our framing we had to decide on which windows we were going to install, and where they would all go. We visited the local Material and Building Thrift store in Hailey and picked out four windows and a door (all salvaged/used) for $250 total. Can't beat that! The real challenge will be prepping those windows for re-installation. They are not in perfect condition and are missing the mounting flanges needed for...well... mounting.

Jon testing out the location of our composting toilet

After taking all the necessary measurements, and adding on a 1/2" here and a 1/2" there for error and insulation, we began to frame out our walls. We framed each end wall in one section. However, we framed each side wall in three sections, because it was just easier that way. It's much less stressful framing out one window per section instead of a window and a door, or two windows, etc, in one section. Turned out to work out perfectly and we only had one or two minor hiccups along the way.

Jon nailing together some framing

One of those hiccups was not accounting for the 2x4 bottom plate on one of the wall sections, so that particular section ended up being 1 1/2" taller than the other wall sections. Ugh. So we took down that wall and cut and re-screwed and raised that baby back up to be flush with the rest of the walls. It was more mentally draining and annoying than it was time consuming.

After framing out the walls, we would apply wood glue to the whole section, place our OSB plywood on top of it, square it up, then screw in screws every 8" to make sure we had a secure adhesion. Then we measured where the windows or door were framed out behind the OSB, and took a Skilsaw and cut that section out. And voila! Ready to be raised.

Framing out the second wall

Let the wall-raising begin

Raising a wall!

Raising another wall!

Aaaand another one

Jon looking out through the kitchen window

Making progress

My poor little finger got a boo boo!!!!!

Raising the walls was probably the most fun! Every time it fit in perfectly (LIKE A GLOVE!) and was pretty satisfying to see it sit so snuggly (made-up word) against the other walls.

For the walls that were put up first and had very little support besides the screws that were holding it to the floor, we screwed in temporary 2x4 braces to make sure it wouldn't rock or blow in the wind.

On Sunday, we pulled a 10 hour day working on finishing up the walls, and we finally screwed in the last piece of OSB around 8pm! Such a great feeling.

Sheathing with a pile of windows behind us

Final screws

We are feeling a little burned out after devoting every free hour of time after work to this project, but it's been therapeutic in its own right. It's been fun to learn about the construction of a house, and be able to make decisions that will be integral to the process of this house coming to fruition - being able to see the fruits of our labor, if you will. However, we decided that we need to get back to doing some things that used to be part of our weekly routine (getting out into the woods/mountains for a trail run or a climb or a hike). This upcoming weekend we are going to try and spend at least a half day dedicated to getting some nature therapy and just enjoying the afternoon, instead of banging nails.

Phase 3 is putting up the roof, which we figure will take some time, but once that phase is complete we can breath a little easier. Once the house is weather proof we can take much more time doing the "inside stuff" and not feeling rushed to do so. Honestly, we have not felt rushed up until this point...just more anxious to get it all framed out. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but at least we won't have to worry about the monsoon season that Idaho is experiencing right now setting us back any more.

She's a beaute