Tiny House Build Journal

A day-by-day record of constructing my tiny house.

[tinybuild]

[tinybuild]

[tinybuild]

Days 165 - 185

Woah – I have not updated this in a long, long time.

I've given a number of Days to approximate (vaguely) how much more time was put in on the house, but uh... the more accurate title would be “Many Days”.

Was having a tough time there for a bit, and lost interest in updating about the house. Thought about selling it, regretted building it.

Now, I'm in love again. Feel I'm LIVING in it for the first time. Keep faith, tiny house enthusiasts! Some people can whip up a wonder of construction in weeks, and some people take muuuuch looooonger. Like me! It's been worth it. Loving the freedom of low-cost unmoored housing, and the connection with my living space.

I'm living in Oregon now, about 45 min south of Portland on a farm. The family here rents out some of their land to strawberry farmers, keeps some forested, and practices Permaculture with work-exchangers on other parts. It's beautiful. I have a view of show capped Mt. Hood from my front window, and can wander out into the evergreens and maples whenever I want some head space.

Here's what I can remember of work since I last updated.

-Installed bathroom / closet walls

Attached bead board to wood frames, painted white, screwed into place.

-Installed and wired sconce + bathroom Christmas lights

-Painted bathroom pan with Rustoleum

-Tacked shower wall-lining into place

These are sheets of acrylic that I covered with leaf-patterned window film. Still need permanent fastening and trim work.

-Finished plumbing

-Towed with U-Haul to Oregon

-Installed window films

-Assembled storage shed and moved tools/materials out there

-Installed Envi ceramic heater

When it's above freezing, this makes all the heat I need using only 4amps of power. When below, I sit on an electric blanket which only uses 1 amp and keeps me nice and toasty.

-Installed ladder rail

This is assembled from galvanized plumbing parts, and will be used to support hooks on my ladder. For now I'm using a temporary folding aluminum ladder lent me by the farm.

-Put in a double mattress

-Got an induction cooktop, breadmaker, and pressure cooker for kitchen

[tinybuild]

Houston woman's big idea is a tiny home

The minimalist movement is gaining steam across the nation, and tiny homes are the extreme.

My neighbor Claire's house had a spot on Houston's local news. Found out cause my parents texted me with a photo of my own home (which shares the lot) on a TV screen. I guess that shot was only in the ad, not the segment, but hey. Happy to have the minimalist idea shared.

[tinybuild]

[tinybuild]

Days 158-164

-Screwed water filter into place

-Installed countertops

We bolted them together using hardware sold in the countertop section at Lowe's. Then we screwed them to the base cabinets using L-brackets which came free with the counters.

-Installed sink

We cut the hole using a jigsaw, drew a line of clear silicone caulk on its periphery, and fixed the sink in place using the VERY awkward clips provided for that purpose by IKEA. The trick Steve found was to hold the clip open using a metal palette knife while working.

-Built interior wall frames

These are made out of 2x2

-Installed half of cabinet plumbing

The purchasing process for this has been complicated and time-consuming, though learning itself is rewarding. The gracious Julia who works at U-Plumb-It (a great place for Houston DIYers trying to learn some basics) walked me though all the parts I'd need for this highly atypical project. We went with some braided steel hose, but mostly CPVC (which is cheaper, and can be flexed more than PVC). I'm still unsure about the choice - in some ways I think it might have been worth the extra money to use push-style copper fittings and tubes, as it would spare me exposure to the noxious primer + cement, and would be entirely recyclable when the house is dismantled. Which will hopefully not be for many, many years. But I subscribe to the philosophy of always engineering with dismantling in mind. But, for now, this is the road I've taken and I'm glad to be making progress.

The water inlet branches into two valves. Turning one on will pull water through the pump. Turning the other on will bypass the pump, using existing pressure. This way, I can hook up to either a storage tank or city water.

[tinybuild]

[tinybuild]

Days 153-157

-Assembled base cabinets

What you'd expect. We tried to keep them square, and tacked on the backing. We cut holes for the water supply which runs through the side and out the back, and for the outlet towards the bottom.

-Installed door trim

We had to get a little creative, but it looks great.

So, turns out I misunderstood something in the process of installing my wood floors, and have them more of a setback around the periphery than necessary. So I'm going to have to run an extra piece of trim along the bottom of the baseboard to make sure all edges get covered. Not a big deal, just more work, and it'll look good. In order to manage the transition from door trip to complicated baseboard, we made block pieces out of scrap, much like those I made when facing a similar problem on the exterior, Which rest at the joint and make it look pretty.

-Repaired the drill's power cord - I accidentally cut through it on the chop saw. That's why they pay me the big bucks, folks.

-Bought countertops

We went with the beech Numerar butcher block from IKEA. It was cheap, available, solid wood. Beech is tough. I'm happy with them, though I have noticed they bow in the middle slightly. We also bought hardware for bolting the countertops to one another from Lowe's.

-Bought sink

Also IKEA folks. It was dang cheap, simple design, and uses my full counterspace. It's hard to find sinks that fit all the criteria I was looking for: right at 15" deep, with a bowl which takes up all that space, of rectangular shape, with no faucet holes. But the FYNDIG is near-perfect. 3/4" shallower, and it'd be perfection. To accommodate for the extra depth without adding to my countertops, we're adding metal supports in front and back to keep the thin strips of countertop from being over-stressed.

-Bought faucet

From Lowe's... it's a Pfister... I've decided to embrace the intense brand name.

-Installed countertop wall-supports.

These are just strips of 2x4 screwed into the wall studs, which support the sink countertop where there is no base cabinet beneath.

-Prepped countertops

This involved cutting them down to size using the skill and table saws, shimming the base cabinets and wall-supports, and cutting slots for the bolt hardware with a router.

-Mounted water-heater on wall

-Installed under-sink baseboard and trim pieces ripped from a 2x4 to cover the seams between the plywood sheets I used to make the walls.

[tinybuild]

Pardon, this doesn't have a thing to do with the tiny house. The Downtown Rep Theatre Company in LA set out a couple years ago to shoot a feature film. We did it with hardly any money, but a ton of warm-gooey-lovey-doveyness. The people on screen are friends. Some are family. Somehow, with our guerrilla tactics we managed to pull off a movie that makes me feel proud, and in May I got to hear a theater audience have some laughs with it. Today, it's been released for free on YouTube, keeping in spirit with its content and the free Shakespeare our group has put on over the years.

So if you have chance, give it a shot. It's a good old indie-rom-com-social-satire-heist-movie, about an accidental YouTube star who seeks revenge on pop culture by kidnapping an Andy Warhol painting from his campus museum. And within the first five minutes I am dancing half-naked for a webcam wearing whitey tighteys on my head.

[tinybuild]

[tinybuild]

Days 148-152

-Painted another coat on walls and joists

-Cut upper cabinet parts

-Installed backsplash

This went smoothly, and I'm very happy with the material. It's just standard 20" galvanized aluminum flashing. I cut it with a metal-cutting blade on the jigsaw, including boxes for the outlets, and left seams at the corners to be covered by angle iron. Went on fast, will be easy to clean, and adds hardly any weight. Right now it's held in place by a few nails which will be hidden by the cabinetry. Angle iron caulked with clear silicon running along the back of the counter will help support it and prevent drippage.

-Painted two layers on cabinet parts

-Pasted wallpaper on cabinet backings

Though I think the result looks good, I'll say having messed with wallpaper now, that I recommend you ignore standard application directions in this sort of context. Maybe it's because the plywood is too porous. Maybe I squeezed out too much glue while flattening the wrinkles. But in the morning, the squares of papered backing which had looked so nice the night before were haggard, some with the paper entirely fallen off. So I went back and re-applied using a spray adhesive, which worked well. (And was also ten times faster and tidier than the standard application). So yeah - if ya wallpaper plywood, maybe you just wanna do spray adhesive. OR, I'm just horrible with wallpaper. But I'm typically very crafty with Martha Stewart-esque things.

-Assembled and installed upper cabinets

We put in adjustable shelf tracks bought at Rockler. They look nice, and cleaner than a series of holes drilled in the shelf-sides. The cabinets are bolted in place through washers and a piece of clear yellow cedar running along the back top, and also fastened from below using a pocket screw.

The picture does no justice. It looks great. Once the facing has been painted white it will look even more tied together.

[tinybuild]

[tinybuild]

Days 145-147

-Bought cabinet lumber

We're using maple plywood from Lowe's with thinner lower-grade board for the backing. It was helpful to have it cut in-store so it would fit in the car. The first couple cuts are free, and only 25 cents a cut afterwards

-Prepared base cabinets

We were able to get a lot done in only two hours. The kitchen design is very simple. Utilitarian, even. It's basically two boxes (one on each side). One holds the fridge and the other has shelving. The long narrow sink counter is supported by wall mounts and supports built into the side of each box.

So all we really had to do to assemble the main body of the base cabinets was cut the sides and shelves, cut slots with the plunge router, and cut the crosspieces which provide stability and an attachment surface for the countertops (4 per box: two top, two back).

-Chose wallpaper

The wallpaper will be pasted onto the cabinet backing before assembly. Since I'm doing open faced cabinets (doors annoy me, and they would REALLY annoy me in a space this small) I thought I'd take the exposed backing as a decorating opportunity. (Matt takes a bow in the direction of the northeast, where he assumes Martha Stewart must be.)

Looked through the books at Lowe's. They carry almost none in stock - but wallpaper stores seem to have gone the way of the dodo bird. I liked a lot of the patterns they offer on order though, and even after searching for a while online opted for a pattern I'd found at Lowe's. There's a picture of it with today's images.

-Bought water heater

Having deliberated for a long time, the time finally came to make a choice. I went with the Stiebel Eltron 2.5 Mini Tankless water heater. It uses 21amps/2.4kw. This means when my main power inlet is plugged into a standard 15amp outlet I won't have hot water. But. The plan is to run off a 30amp power supply. I am (perhaps irrationally) unappetized by propane. There are small electric water heaters with tanks which draw less amperage (Stiebel's 2.5 Tank draws 11A), but I prefer to have the heater only drawing power when in use, so I can have a better idea of power usage at any given time. This could be important, as there may be times (cooking with electric stove + oven at the same time) when I need to divert power to other things. Plus, I mean, tankless feels one step closer to the Jetsons, and I like that. And it was only $160.

-Painted kitchen wall, loft joists, and gable-ends

I'm using the white Valspar paint + primer from Lowe's. It's nice that it has no VOCs, cause with the cold weather I was painting all day with the windows closed. The smell is significantly fainter and less irritating than other white primer I used recently.

You can't tell from the photo, but painting the joists white made an unexpectedly large difference. It sort of opened things up and tied the space together somehow.

[tinybuild]

[tinybuild]

Days 143 & 144

So satisfyin'!

-Bought a WeMo switch for the porch light.

I'd been thinking for a while of doing a timer switch, so the light could regularly turn on around the time when I get home. A major point in having a porch light is so you don't have to approach your house then find your keys in darkness. But I don't like it when people leave their porch lights on all the time. (Even worse, those in my neighborhood who keep natural gas lamps burning 24/7 - gaudy, not cool.) It's weird to have a switch outside, and motion sensors are triggered too easily - I didn't want the porch light turning on every time a cat walked by or a leaf fell from a tree. So a timer switch seemed like the best bet, despite the fact that I usually have an irregular schedule. Then I found WeMo switches. So cool. They install easily, requiring no central control unit, and cost $50 (the same as a good timer switch). They are linked to your home's Wi-Fi network, and use it so you can control the switch with an app on your phone! Okay maybe it's just me wiggin out, but I think we live in the future. So now, when I pull up in my car or on my bike, I can whip out my phone and turn on the porch light. Love it.

-Installed last switches and outlets, including the WeMo

-Inset latch hardware, which had been biting into the door a bit. This was done with hammer and chisel, old-school style.

-Wired breaker box

I admit - Steve did it. No idea how. Yer welcome!

-Checked wiring with meter

We did all the outlets and switches in the house. Checked for shorts. Even tested that each wire - ground, neutral, and load - was connected correctly. I found it exhilarating to hear each little beep confirming a hidden electrical connection from one part of my house to another.

-Enjoyed the thrill of electricity

This was a whole glorious task of its own. We plugged the house in using the exterior inlet for the first time, and I marveled like a kid at Christmastime as I got to switch a desk lamp on and off using a wall switch, and light up my porch with the WeMo. I got to operate the chop saw by plugging it into a wall! So fun. Cool, cool day.

-Installed weatherstripping on door.

It may be a little too snug - the door is hard to lock. Might need to go back and adjust later.

What a good day though. One of those gratifying times when you get to watch magic come together.

[tinybuild]

[tinybuild]

Days 140-142

-Bought interior trim lumber

It's prime-coated pine and some fiberboard from Lowe's. 3/4" thick flat pieces to line the interior which are then masked with patterned 2 1/4" pieces on the wall. I also bought trim for the ceiling transitions and some of the loft trim, but haven't installed it yet.

-Finished cedar elements in porch trim

-More wiring

Outlets, service boxes, switches. We haven't had much time on this, so the going is slow.

-Casing and trim on the big windows

This has been pretty pleasant to work on. I do the fiberboard pieces first - bottom, top, then sides. Then follow suit in that order with the decorative trim.

I now have a richer appreciation for working on trim with a nail gun. Compared with what I did on the outside trim (pre-drilling, screwing, patching with wood filler) this is of course a breeze. All I have to do is go back and paint over the finish nails.

-Removed stickers from all windows

Even armed with the razor blade and Goo-Be-Gone I'd found at home, this took over an hour. But it's nice to have the windows open to full view.