Monthly Archives: March 2012

Tuesday.  Man, I feel so tired.  we don’t even do daylight savings time here in Arizona, so I can’t blame that.  building a house is a lot of work!  we’ve been working what feels like non-stop for 3-4 weeks.  I’ve been taking Sundays off, but then not really, because we always end up needing to work out design details or shop the internet for fixtures and materials.

The house is looking so great though!  I am so excited to have something of our own.  I’ve been renting places since I left for college, so 14 years or so.  I’ve lived in maybe, well, twelve houses / apartments.  I just counted.  It’s feeling a bit smaller now that the walls and roof are closed in with the plywood sheathing…. but we are both so excited to have our own place!  And our utility bills last month were almost $200, combined with our rent of $900 (which is really low, thankfully!), plus cable internet, cell phones – phew.  Too bad salaries haven’t increased with the cost of living.  In the Tiny House we’ll still have to pay our cell phone bills, a little more to get internet through our cell phone, and pay for propane, in addition to rent and utilities in someone’s yard.  But that will be $200 to $300 a month, so an absolute max of $450 a month, all in.  Right now we’re paying out almost $1,300 a month.

Oh yes, progress.  Shane got the roof sheathed with plywood on Sunday, and built our two interior walls (with pocket doors) yesterday.  we were going to do surface mount “barn door” sliding hardware, but realized we needed the clear wall space.  so the doors on either side of the bathroom with be sliding pocket doors.

The walls are sheathed, as well as the roof now.

You can see in that photo that we’re adding a deck on the back.  this will be storage for bicycles and motorcycle while the house is in motion, then they’ll get parked under the gooseneck hitch when we’re parked at home.  The trailer had pull out steel ramps (as it was a car hauler) so there are four steel c-channels under the frame that we’ll weld some 2×2 tube steel onto for the deck platform.  we though about making a folding deck that would close up while we’re moving the house, but it’d be nice to have somewhere to park Shane’s motorcycle. (that’s not the living room – ha)

Tiny House Roof is sheathed

You can see the deck and porch overhang in the photo above.  The porch overhang might go…. we haven’t decided yet.  Was quite the discussion figuring out how that porch should be.  Ahhh, the age-old differences between architects and builders.  I wanted an angle to match the angle on the roof in the back.  So the peak of the porch roof would project 3′-0, the sides only 2′-0.  Admittedly, it doesn’t make much sense other than aesthetics.  Which is maybe “bad” design.  Architects are typically trying to make things look simple and clean and effortless (as well as utilizing design principles like rhythm and balance) – not realizing that it is actually more difficult to build something in a way that looks … well, unbuilt.  as if it was extruded from a lump of porcelain!  kind of funny.  if you’re in a good mood.

Next post I’ll put up our materials palette options.  We were looking at rough-sawn siding, maybe board and batten, but now we found a rain screen look that’s nice and clean, less expensive, and modern looking.