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…

Wait, back – the – truck – up.  Literally.  Let’s rewind a bit.  Tiny house back up the driveway into the safety of our yard, not yet hooked to the hitch, and still resting in it’s original build spot…  Pause.

Okay, backstory before that moment of truth as the tiny house headed on it’s maiden voyage out to the local certified truck scale for a weighing:

We had been wanting to get a mid-build weight check for awhile to see how accurately we had been estimating what the Hygge Hale might weigh. Our estimates had been getting higher than we were comfortable with for the completed house to be under the weight restrictions of the trailer axles and build of the trailer.  We needed to know if we might be overweight while we still had the opportunity to make changes to lighten the load of the house.  The thought of finishing up with a house too heavy to move filled us with dread.

But, we wanted to have the lofts fully installed first as these would provide more structural integrity, tying the two long walls more tightly together.  Driving down the road, the load on a trailer has some motion, so the more tightly together our walls were tied, the more the walls would sustain those movement forces with no problems or damage.

We were also pretty concerned about the tongue weight (remember that bay window right over top of the trailer tongue…), which is the weight that the tongue of the trailer puts on the hitch of the towing vehicle.  The tongue of a trailer is only rated to a certain weight and the towing vehicle and hitch have weight ratings, too.  It can be really unsafe to exceed these ratings.  Again, our estimates were making us uncomfortable.  So, our first order of business was to buy a tongue weight scale.  This is a tongue weight scale (how can something so small weigh our 24×8 foot trailer that can hold 14,000 pounds??):

Then, we weighed the tongue of the tiny house trailer………

Tongue weight scale in action

Tongue weight: ~1200 lbs

WHEW — we were under the 2,100 pound tongue weight limit of the trailer, no problem.  That was a HUGE relief.

Next step: A friend with a big ol’ truck and experience towing large trailers offered to tow our tiny house to the local weigh station he’d used in the past.  Awesome for us not to have to spend the money to rent a large truck (yet), and to have someone with experience guide us through the certified scale process (something I’ve never had the need to use before).

Next: Trim the tree branches hanging over our driveway that might hit the tiny house, clean all the construction paraphernalia out of the tiny house, and protect the bay window from road debris.  Eli used some of our left over roofing material to create covers to put over the bay windows.

Cleaned up

Covers over bay window

I decided those covers over the windows need to show Hygge Hale’s excitement for his maiden voyage.

Hehehehe!  Eli said I “tagged” the house when he saw it.  Love it, just love it.

All that was left was to schedule a good time for our friend to come pilot the trek.  The tiny house was sitting in our backyard by our barn for ease of construction, less for ease of moving it.  It was going to be a tight fit between our neighbors fence and the decorative fence holding our grapevine in our backyard, which made a narrow lane out to the driveway.  The phone line running from the power pole to our house was also really low, so we used the longest telescoping pole we had, our fruit picker, to hold up the phone line while the trailer rolled under it.

We threaded the needle with literally only about an inch to spare on each side!  WHEW!!  Luckily the phone line over the roof wasn’t such a tight squeeze.  Still holding the line up and out of the way was no easy task for Eli as the house rolled by.

I couldn’t believe I was seeing my tiny house rolling down the driveway!  Even the sharp turn onto the road from our driveway went smoothly (slowly, but smoothly).  Our friend was totally on top of it all!

Hooking the trailer up to the truck

The voyage begins

Holding the phone line out of the way

Squeaked through the fence with only an inch to spare (literally)!

Down the driveway

On to the road!

And we were off!  Eli jumped in with his buddy who was doing the towing and I hopped in our truck to follow and keep my eye on things from the rear.  There was only one instance where our friend had to drive on the other side of the road for a quick bit to avoid a low-hanging power line that angled down steeply from a power pole to a house across the street. (No photo of that as I was too busy holding my breath that there wouldn’t be a collision to worry about anything else!)

On ramp to the highway

Size comparison next to a semi

Weathering the journey without a hitch

Since the scales normally cater to tractor-trailer trucks, it was convenient that it was right off the highway.  What a relief to arrive!  It was only about a 20 minute trip – but an anxious 20 minutes.  As I mentioned earlier, having never been to a certified truck scale before ourselves, we were stoked to have our friend know the drill and show us the ropes for this first weigh.

We were even more stoked when we saw the weight!  Since we weighed the tongue weight with our tongue weight scale, and we were already late in the evening on a weekday upon arrival at the scale, we didn’t take the time to do the second weight with only the truck to get a precise estimate of the tongue weight.  We just decided to add the trailer axle weight from the certified scale (6040 lbs) to our tongue weight scale reading (1200 lbs) for a pretty good estimate of our current tiny house weight: only 7240 pounds!  That was considerably lower than what we had estimated before weighing the trailer.  Yet another relief!

On the scale

Super excited!

Weight!

The journey back home was much more relaxed.  I hit a bit of traffic so got far behind the guys towing Hygge Hale, so missed the process of getting the house parked back in our yard.  We’d decided to put the house in a new spot in the yard due to concerns about our neighbor’s very large eucalyptus trees, which are apt to regularly shed, hanging over the old building spot – a very large branch dropped right next to the tiny house last summer making us quite nervous.  With no insurance on our tiny house, we didn’t want to take any chances.

So, without incident, after its maiden voyage, Hygge Hale parked safely back in our yard.

Whew!!  And, WOOHOO!!!  This accomplishment and relief warranted a celebratory beverage!  Eli’s home-made, persimmons fresh from our tree, “persinnamon brandy”!

YES!!!!