Starting the wall insulation

Once I had the trailer blocked back up I got to work on the wall insualtion.  We got a few siding furring strips cut and pre-drilled to help hold up the insulation temporarily.  I placed the first strip at 36" and the second at 68" (4" shy of 72" to accomodate for the 4" overlap) so we could use them as guides for the 36" housewrap.

Wow!

The tiny house is falling down, falling down, falling down.....

After probably a week of not even looking at the house I had to go check it out.  Only to notice it seemed a little crooked.  We had had some pretty wild winds lately and I'm guessing it was mostly the doing of the wind, but also the poor choice to use jack stands at the rear of the trailer.

You may be able to make out where a cinder block was suppose to be opposite the one still standing.  I made the mistake of putting the cinder blocks on edge, not the way they would be stacked for a wall/foundation, and they are not so strong that way.

All in all, I was happy this happened.  I feel more confident in my structure and the weld joints I made throughout.  While jacking it back up I had to jack at extremes, with more weight than it will actually support, and in ways that the trailer wouldn't usually see and everything did fine.  When jacking up the rear at the corner there was almost no torsional flexing.  If one side was going up, so was the other!

Movin': Interim Tiny Living

Between the Holidays, that sweet new Lady, Sera, and needing to get all my stuff out of the sweeeet house I'd been living in for the past 2+ years I haven't had much time to work on the house.  Here's some views of the kitchen in my basement apartment where I first W.W.O.O.F.ed upon coming to WNC.

I've much organizing to do, but am so excited to have this little bit of learning/adjusting time in a place where I've been before with my wonderful friends/family.

Loadin' Lumber

Well, Christmas was wonderful, keeping it chill with Sera and Jill.  Playing Set, eating lots of good food, and enjoying hot buttered rums (we probably each consumed a half pound of butter between Christmas Eve and Day.

Sera and I got all the lumber loaded onto Gib's trailer on Monday, which got stuck, or rather Big Red got stuck and broke the trailing eye on the driver's leaf spring, trying to pull 6000+ pounds of lumber on soft, wet ground.  We called it quits for the day and picked up a friend's tractor on Tuesday.

Even the big, heavy tractor (8000#) with 4wd engaged couldn't pull it uphill like I wanted, so I went WITH gravity, for a bit anyways.  I got jambed again and ended up using a chain and blocks to pivot the trailer without being attached to a vehicle.  I finally got it down the road, but again it was time to call it a day.

So finally, on New Year's Eve, I worked alone to get all the lumber off the trailer and loaded into the tiny house, which will temporarily be a solar kiln.

I'll  cut off those ends with my chainsaw before the wall insulation goes up.  I selected the bad ends of those pieces to stick out so I wouldn't be losing much important.

Subfloor Installation and Ripping Framing

After the insulation comes the subfloor.  I knew I had just barely enough well cured (2+ years air-dried) lumber so I took it all over to my friend Tom's and we made quite a pile of wood shavings running it all through the planer to get a consistent thickness of 1 and 13/16 inches.

Good for the composting toilet and pee bucket!

The first step was getting the biscuit joiner setup properly.  Start by cutting a slot and putting in a biscuit, then marking a line with a very sharp pencil where the edge of the board meets the biscuit.

The flip the biscuit around in the same slot and make another line where the biscuit and board edge meet.  I marked the side from the first line with sharpie so it was easy to tell what was going on.

Then pull it out and look at the two lines.  Depending on your biscuit size, mine are #20, the largest, you should have some gap, in my case about 1/16" plus.  This gap will allow room for glue which I hope I'll not need as these biscuits are made super dry so they swell some and should be dually clamped by the boards as the boards lose some of their residual moisture.

Getting the first subfloor board in place using clamps to remove the bow.

You can see a bit of the bow here.

Using special "wood to metal" screws to make this all happen in one step.

They're not cheap though, 60cents each for screws meant to fasten 2" lumber into .25" steel.  I got a box of 200 totaling $135 or so shipped.

Whitecap had the best price by far, others wanted almost double.

Don't try to remove the bow too much or this may happen.  Fortunately not a big deal here.

Big Progress!

Home-sawn lumber is far from lumber yard lumber.  I decided to rip the edge of the first full length section so things would be a little more even the rest of the way.

I taught Sera how to do all the steps necessary and she was quick to take over the subfloor.
 

So I got to ripping 2x4's into 2x3's for the framing.  Setting up the rip guide.

And...ripping!

 I really liked sitting on the board.  It was a good position to push from (as opposed to working from the side) and my weight kept the boards from sliding on the saw horses.

A few butt scooches later.

Voila! (Almost)

Floor Insulation

With the gussets welded in and spray paint on all the metal that would soon be sealed off by the insulation, I was able to get to work on putting in the floor insulation.

I went to the hardware store to get a few things I needed or would need in the near future and somehow this box ended up costing 300 Bucks!!!

Also went by the plumbing supply and got some pipe cut to make some "super clamps" for squeezing the subfloor together, another $30 with the cutting fee.

 

I left enough of a gap on one side of each piece of foam to get the nozzle from foam in a can in between.  When it expanded it pushed the other side tight enough to hold quite nicely.

I also sprayed between the top of the foam and the "rim joist" so that it would push the insulation down as it expanded.  Worked like a charm.

Then trimmed it up so I could start work on the subfloor.

Girder Gussets

So a week or so later I got back to work on the house.  I was really wanting to be done welding at this point because my setup is not nearly ideal, but these gussets really needed to go in before I could get on to the flooring.  I rigged up the welder to my big generator and got to work.

It eats up a surprising amount of cutting disk (3 4.5" disks to make two 12" long cuts) to cut through this 1/4 steel plate.  So happy I paid the extra to have my other materials cut at the supplier.

Ready to be tacked.

Once tacked, I tried hitting it with my engineer's hammer to bend it to shape.

But my welds were obviously inferior.

I cranked up the amperage on the welder as the generator was probably not supplying the actual current or voltage (not sure) that it was suppose to be.

 Much better.

Ran beads at all intersections.

And got the other side done, then spray painted it all so I could work on the flooring tomorrow.  This is a typical weak point in most trailers where the main support beams, which I'm calling girders, are either cold formed to shape, notched out (like I did), or two separate pieces with angles cut at their ends, to form the tongue.  It is especially important in my design as at least 1/4 of the load will be transferred by the columns to the two girders here.  The gusset almost doubles the strength of the girders at this point to keep them from bending and wanting to deflect sideways.