The trailer arrives!!!
We were so excited the trailer was finished a week early! That weekend we packed up the truck with the dogs and camping gear and started the long journey to bring it home. Spent Friday driving and setting up camp just outside of town so we could get an early start back home the next day.
What an awesome tiny home trailer! We opted for the optional galvanized metal base flashing to prevent rodents and inspects from chewing through a wood one, no rot worries if water gets down there and it provides better protection against road debris should we ever need to move the house. The squared wheel flashing is an awesome feature of this trailer as well. Final dimensions of the trailer are 28 feet long and 100 inches wide and cost just shy of $7,000. As soon as we saw the build quality, features and sturdiness of the trailer, we knew we had made a good choice to get a tiny house specific trailer. Once the trailer was hitched up we headed back to Idaho with a stop off at Home Depot for the first round of supplies to build the sub-floor. The Mahindra tractor we chose to buy is on the right :) We would not have been able to do any of this without it.
It's finally on the land! After unloading the supplies, we went right to work building the sub-floor support structure and adding insulation. To alleviate as much thermal bridging between the metal trailer and house structure, 1 inch R-5 foam insulation was installed on all metal surface and base of the trailer.
Foam insulation to mitigate thermal bridging. The sub-floor support structure was bolted to the trailer through the insulation and we covered all exposed bolt heads inside the structure with silicone to prevent condensation. We were especially worried about condensation because we had special plans for the floor…
Structure support bolt with silicone to help stop condensation. Some tips we learned during this process: The 2×6 framing on top of 1 inch foam was lower than the 1 inch foam around the edges of the trailer. We thought the sub-floor would squish the foam around the edges but it did not and caused the sub-floor to be slightly bowed around the edges. Definitely level the trailer very well before starting any of this work. For whatever reason, we did not decide to do this until later and it has caused many issues along the way. Read the full article