Tiny House Posts

Not so tiny assistance!

| Tracy

A stroke of luck for us!

Despite having just spent a number of days being put to work assisting on a remodel Eli’s brother and sister-in-law are doing on the house they just bought, Eli’s parents were kind enough to stop by our place on their way home and be put to work assisting on our house build, too! Continue reading →

It’s Actually a Rocky Road

| Tracy

I had a request to know more about the trials and tribulations, not just the fun and successes, of the tiny house planning and build. Although I tried to at least touch on some of our frustrations as we’ve gone through this process in other posts I’ve written, I do want to express, perhaps more specifically, that this process has definitely not all been smooth sailing and simple decisions. Continue reading →

Sheathing is Seeing

| Tracy

With it being the busy time for wildlife field work, Eli’s often in the field right now for week long stints, so when he’s back home, we make it count with work on the tiny house!  Our weekends (and some of Eli’s weekdays) are full of 2x4s and saws and toolbelts and nails and screws… and now sheathing!  We’re currently working on getting the framed-out skeleton covered.  Day by day, it looks more and more like a house!

But first, with all the walls up and squared, we had to make sure those walls were well secured to the trailer!  Continue reading →

Walls to Vertical

| Tracy

The Independence Day holiday was a working holiday for us.  Once we started up again with the actual physical construction part of this tiny house build, we’ve been very eager to continue on with the wall framing, so pretty much every day recently that we aren’t working our normal jobs, we’re hitting the build to keep our progress momentum.  So, the fourth of July was a day spent slicing and dicing 2×4’s and a few 2×6’s.  We got our third wall (one of the long walls) laid out and Eli, having just worked a slew of long days in the field, had time on Thursday to assemble it all.  So I came home from work to a third wall framed and ready to go! Continue reading →

Physics, shmysics

| Tracy

Because my idealist being (live the ideal!) does not like to be squelched by the piddly details of physical laws, it’s been difficult to reign my tiny house dreams in.  This has created substantial frustration, research time, and a lot of anxiety for Eli and I, particularly as we try to remain within the bounds of a realistic budget for this tiny house build.  I’m not going to lie, it’s been a stressful lot of months – pretty much since January – with a good bit of hindsight do-over wishing and a lot of feeling ignorant about many things on my part.  Damn you, physics, bringing me back down to earth!  (Literally – the law of gravity is the basis for our concerns about our tiny house’s weight.  🙂  )  Is this going to be just a really expensive learning experience?!  Continue reading →

Jack of All Trades

| Tracy

Literally.  That’s us.  ‘Cause we’re those people that just have to do everything ourselves.  Not sure if that makes us handy, self-sufficient, or just stubborn… or, as I feel in regular bouts of confusion and uncertainty, really just foolish…  It’s a foggy line.

We’ve got to figure out not only construction to build this house, but also Continue reading →

A Time for Purchasing and Ordering

| Tracy

It seems this is our season for tiny house elements compiling.  We seem to be doing a lot of ordering and purchasing these past few weeks.  When we put in the order for our Andersen windows, we also went ahead and placed the order through Lowe’s for our Fakro skylight/roof window.  And it already arrived last week (we’ve got much longer to wait for the rest of our windows).  So, we headed to our local Lowe’s store over the weekend and brought that bad boy home.

Although nowhere near the heart-swelling capabilities of the Sardine, Continue reading →

Have they given up?

| Tracy

I imagine many of you are wondering just where in the world we’ve been for the past two months since I last posted about the tiny house.  Maybe even a few, “Have they abandoned this harebrained idea??” (Which just might be something that has also crossed – and I’m sure will again – our minds on occasion with this adventure…)

Well, we’ve continued to slug and drudge through the black box of window purchasing these many days.  If only we’d had some foresight into how the window industry works!  Continue reading →

Portals to the World

| Tracy

And, just when the complexity of decisions was getting overwhelming, we remembered that we were also dealing with choosing windows for a house made to be mobile.
~

Windows — how very much I appreciate them, how very little I knew about them.  I had no idea there were so many options, and that those options might have a huge variety of exceptions and contingencies.

We saw a glimmer of this unending, but conditional, window options situation Continue reading →

They Don’t Make Themselves

| Tracy

A decision made… and another one… and again… and again…….  and AGAIN.  Because this is a tiny house, every decision we make very obviously affects a number of other elements of the house.  Want to move the loft floor down an inch to provide more headroom in the loft?  Well, then will the fridge and the water heater below it still fit?  Shoot, now the shelf in the kitchen will no longer fit a quart-size ball jar.  And, the bookshelf in the living area that runs the length of the wall below the high windows no longer is in line with the loft, but Continue reading →

Don’t miss out on the tiny house explanation page

| Tracy

If you’re following my blog via email notifications, you’re most likely skipping straight to my posts from the link in the email notification.  So, I just wanted to highlight that I put up a background-and-finding-the-ideal page about my tiny house.

Check out the tiny house “why” page.

It’s also got some tantalizing shots of the 3-D model of the Hygge Hale (our tiny house) I’ve created!  (Okay, maybe it’s only me that finds the model images tantalizing…)