Oh the excitement!  The walls begin to take shape!  With the initial boards for paneling the walls prepped and ready, we could start nailing them in. Continue reading →

In the midst of all the tiny house build tasks, our barn was also getting a revamp this spring/summer. Continue reading →

While I was the master painter on the wall paneling boards, Eli was in brainstorm mode.  Since the tiny house, and therefore trailer, spends 99.9% of its time sitting in one place, we wanted to provide some protection from the elements to the trailer tires. Continue reading →

And now for a less stressful and more exciting part of this crazy project.  I love doing the elements of the build that will be visible finished products.  Where you can see the inklings of the final abode as it will be when we’ll be living it.  More fodder for the dreams of day-to-day life soon to be Continue reading →

Sometimes, we like to just take a recess, sit outside the tiny house, and admire Continue reading →

For those of you who are dedicated readers, you’ll remember way back when to when we put in the first layer of insulation in our walls.  Much to our chagrin, we decided to use foam board insulation to insulate our walls.  This was not an easy decision, nor one we were very happy about as we hate the environmental consequences of plastic and potential unhealthy off-gassing, even if claimed to be marginal, of the foam board.  We are most definitively not excited to be living in a styrofoam take out container…  BUT, this was the lightest weight option.  Continue reading →

You know what’s a great addition to a house — a porch.  Not only does it keep rain off of you when you dash up to your entryway in a downpour, but it also keeps all those drips off your door.  And, we’ve found out from more experienced folks, and also now realized from personal experience, a door is a notoriously difficult place to prevent leaking…  Continue reading →

And, we’re immediately on to the next challenging bit.  Maybe after the relief of the tiny house coming in at a good mid-build weight, we were feeling up to the next big task: the electrical.  Since day one, thinking about doing the electrical work has been daunting to me.

I’m a pretty safety conscious lass, so doing our own electrical made me pretty nervous.  Hearing so many warnings about the possibility of electrocuting yourself had me spooked.  Continue reading →

After our journey to the scales to get a mid-build weight on our tiny house, we decided to park Hygge Hale in a new spot in the yard.  As mentioned in my last post, Hygge Hale had already had a close brush with a large branch shed from our neighbor’s big eucalyptus trees.  No damage to the not-yet finished house, please!

Having moved the house, we had to re-stabilize it Continue reading →

The anxiety was high as I watched the truck and trailer head down the driveway.  And, this was already the third… fourth? fifth? time my cortisol levels had had a rapid spike in the last 20 minutes.  My house was on that trailer and it was moving steadily down the driveway out into the uncertain world for the first time… Continue reading →

Having done most of the plumbing and made decisions on how the rest of it would take shape, and how we’d wire the electrical for the water heater, we’d decided none of it would go through the boxes we made to cover the wheel wells.  So, we realized we could go ahead and finish putting in the insulation around the wheel wells and nail up the boxes covering all that.  Continue reading →

Some of the more astute readers of the last post – or really the more astute viewers of the photos – might have noticed that the plumbing changed in the photos of the loft flooring install from what the plumbing looked like when we initially installed it.

We had gone back and forth Continue reading →

Before we could begin putting the flooring boards for the loft down over the support beams, we needed to add a landing that will be at the top of the stairs for entry into the loft.  The landing extends a small section out from the loft over the kitchen counter to meet the top of the stairs.  We used more beautiful redwood pieces Continue reading →

So, before that 1/3 year hiatus from updating on the build, where were we in my reports???

Ah, the utilities!  The elements that turn what we’re building from a rudimentary shelter into a real livable modern house.  We began with laying the plumbing lines in the wall. Continue reading →

The overwhelm had hit.  Too much to do, too much uncertainty.  We had hit a low spot in our journey of the tiny house build.  We were worried about the weight of the house being too much for the trailer, worried about the weight on the tongue of the trailer being too much for the hitch of a truck, worried about how we were going to do the electrical, worried about if, after all this effort – physical, mental, emotional – we would have trouble even being allowed to live in it.  Continue reading →

If you have a sharp eye and notice background details, you might have spotted in photos in some of the last few posts that we started boxing in the wheel wells.  A unique aspect to building a house on a trailer, is having to deal with the wheels!  Continue reading →

Eli really likes redwood, and redwood beams and boards are not only light, but they’re also readily available at home improvement stores, so both our ledger boards and our 4×4 loft beams are redwood.  It is a really pretty wood Continue reading →

Despite my three month hiatus on posting (I’m looking into starting a breeding program to see about getting days to produce more hours 😉 ), work on the tiny house has continued in force, so I must catch this blog up to the current state of the house!

Now that we completed the exterior of the house, we move to the inside to tackle the interior.  On to the next half. (Half?? Are we really halfway there??) Continue reading →

… well, at least from the outside!  🙂

With Eli back from the field, we made the final push to get the last few rows of siding installed on the bay window side of the house.  Along with the boards around the wheel wells, these boards required the most precise cuts and were some of the most difficult to make look sharp.  Continue reading →

One evening, while Eli and I were taking our daily sunset stroll around our yard, we got a wild hare (hair?) to tear the protective film off of all the windows (well, the lower-level ones my mom had finished sealing the wood with polyurethane) – we just wanted to see how awesome they would look without it and with most of the siding done, well, we just got impatient! Continue reading →