You know, with Eli out in the field almost continuously for the past two months, and therefore progress slowed on the tiny house, you’d think I’d have had more time for writing blog posts…  “The days are just packed.”  Work on Hygge Hale has continued, albeit at a much more leisurely pace.

Continue reading →

With the shingles finished and all the utility inlets/outlets squared away, it’s now full out siding on the lower half of the house.  We can’t wait to have the exterior fully completed.  It will feel like a significant landmark, for sure. Continue reading →

The days disappear, and I wonder why the items on my to-do list don’t go with them…  Writing this blog post has been hanging on that to-do list for over a month and a half!

Before we could dive in full tilt on installing the siding on the lower portion of the house, we had to first put some holes in the walls!  Continue reading →

Now we’re back to continuing on the shingles and trim – since I’ve already talked about these two things in a previous post, we’ll just get straight to pictures. Continue reading →

I mean, I guess somewhere in my subconscious, I realized that people used to build doors themselves all the time, back in the days when folks had to be much more self-sufficient, but how many people do you know who’ve made a door?  Because most of the exterior doors I’ve lived with have been metal, I never really thought about the potential for building a door on one’s own. Continue reading →

The day has finally come!  The Sardine woodstove has ARRIVED!!!  I’ve been eagerly anticipating this since we ordered it last year.  It took a bit longer for it to get made and sent to us Continue reading →

I’m excited to finally be getting to the parts where we make the house look good, not just being sure it’s solid.  Here comes the window trim and siding.  We decided to start on the short back wall of the house hoping our technique and showmanship would improve with practice. Continue reading →

It’s been much too long!  I’m letting the time between my updates on our build stretch and stretch some more.  But, life is such a full thing with so many experiences and to-dos and building tasks and lovely moments and TAXES (ugh, ugh, ugh) to vie for our minutes. Continue reading →

Keeping a house cozy in the winter and comfortable in the summer is no small feat, but one we so often take for granted in our modern homes built by other hands.  Creating our temperature-regulated cocoons with just inches separating our pleasant interiors from the large temperature fluctuation of the world is a job well done.

So we’ve been contemplating the most efficient way to do this.  Continue reading →

Alright, that title’s a bit dramatic, the “belt” we put on our tiny house is really just for aesthetics, so I guess a fashion belt versus a keep it up or contained belt.  We decided to put both cedar lap siding and cedar shingles on the exterior of our house to add a bit more texture complexity and a little more fun for the eyes (see a visual of this on our model), so we needed a clean line between the two siding types. Continue reading →

Instead of just leaving our tiny house as a plywood pentagon, we decided we needed some portals to the world – those windows that have been hanging out in our barn since last spring.

But first, with us spending more and more time going into the house, Eli was so kind as to make that climb easier. Another surprise when I came home from work was a set of entry stairs! Continue reading →

And, we thought the roof would take a day or two!  Ha!  As is so often the case with human minds, the other side appears so close – it’s just right over there! – but the time of completing a task really twists to follow the path around to the back of gully, then back out again to that other side.  Along with us ground-stranded beings, undertakings don’t seem to fly as the crow does either. Continue reading →

After all that roof prep work, we’re finally putting the roofing metal itself on.  Since our tiny house has a tiny roof (who’d have thought!), first step was to Continue reading →

Since we’ll now be spending a good bit of time on the roof, we decided it was a good time to cut the hole in the roof deck for the roof window and get that framed out.  This will allow much easier access to the roof.  Our roofing materials arrived and look good!  So, we set to work getting the roof on!  Continue reading →

Breathing may be a necessity of living beings, but even an inanimate house needs to breathe.  Moisture control in any house is really important, but this is especially true in a tiny house with the wet-breathed inhabitants and their boiling cook pots spewing moisture into the small space.  So, you need some air flow to vent that moisture and dry things out. Continue reading →

Roofing ordered – check!  We wrestled a bit with the best roofing to go with.  We knew we wanted standing seam metal roofing, but, of course, there are many brands and models of such.  We decided we wanted the standing seams to be as short as possible, so that limited our options.  We ended up going with ASC Building Products’s Skyline Roofing.  It has one-inch standing seams, a dark gray color option, and a manufacturing plant right here in Sacramento.  Continue reading →

I didn’t realize how hard it would be to find the minutes for sharing this building adventure!  We’re still working away, but with the build (and researching and planning it) taking up most moments of our free time between our full-time jobs and fieldwork stints for Eli – okay, and some backpacking and canoeing and wedding trips squeezed in, too! – there’s little time to share the progress with you all here!  Excuses, excuses.  Enough with that.  On to the photos showing all that has been done…

Continue reading →

There have been some substantial changes to the Sketchup model of Hygge Hale since I first posted screenshots of the model, so I figured I’d show you all what our current vision of Hygge Hale looks like.  There are still some things I’m working on in the model (ignore that half-finished roof over the bay window!) – just like the physical build, it’s a work in progress.  We’re slowly making headway to bring this visualization into the reality of the world! Continue reading →

Although the tiny house isn’t yet built, we’ve been enjoying a tiny fridge for quite some time.  When we moved over a year and a half ago to the house we’re renting now, a refrigerator wasn’t provided.  After living out of a borrowed cooler for a few weeks, our initial thought was Craigslist, which is our norm when furnishing a new living space.  However, we realized if we were going to pay for a fridge, we should do a test run of the fridge we were planning to buy for our future tiny house.  Continue reading →