Tiny House as it Sits

Unfortunately, this will be the last post about my tiny house for quite some time.  I moved across the country, but the tiny house is still sitting in my parents’ backyard in Illinois.  The time it took us to re-work the siding took so much time away from other things, such as completing the interior, that it still isn’t livable and it would not have made sense to move it at this time.

As it sits, the exterior is nearly complete, wiring is done for about 1/5 of the interior, and the floor of the loft is sanded and stained.  From the outside, it looks great, but it sits as basically a shell of a house, although we have many of the materials needed to complete it.  We are only lacking the time to work on it.

In sanding and staining the loft, it took many times sanding it and 3 coats to stain it.  we had 4-5 passes at sanding because the boards were uneven, so I had to sand across the grain to make each board level with the one next to it.  Then there were 3 passes with increasingly fine grit to make the floor smooth.  Staining took 3 coats because the wood absorbed so much of the stain.  It also took about 12 hours between each coat because the stain was oil based and it took that long to dry before I could brush on another coat.

The exterior looks great now that it is mostly completed.  The newly stained and sealed siding looks beautiful, and the trim suits the house very well.  Around the windows my dad made frames out of Honey Locust he had at the golf club.  The trim at the top of the house is made out of solid Oak golf club display racks the club was throwing out, and the corner trim are Pine boards which were also to be disposed of.  It’s amazing how much would have been wasted, which I have been able to incorporate into my house.  Even all the English Elm siding I have was going to either be turned into firewood or wood chips, but on the house it is beautiful and great in terms of insect repellant and weather resistant.

Here are some pictures of the loft, and the tiny house as it sits.  It’s been a great time working on it and updating the world through this blog, and I have learned a lot through this process, but for the time being it will sit until I get a chance to get home to work on it.  Unfortunately I do not know when this might be and will be paying rent for an apartment until such a time as I can move my tiny house and live in it, which costs more than a parking spot for the tiny house would.

 

Mistakes are Bound to Happen

A bit of bad news since the last time I posted.  While the siding looked good when we installed it over Easter, we needed to tear it all down and start from scratch.  A storm came through and thoroughly saturated the exterior of the house.  We had planned on staining and sealing the siding after installation, but I had to leave and we were not able to accomplish that task.  My high school shop & construction drawing teacher recommended staining and sealing the siding before putting it up, but we tried rushing things and it bit us in the ass.

What ended up happening is the siding swelled because it was wood and became warped and disfigured to the point that it was coming off the house in some areas despite having screwed it all on.  For obvious reasons it cannot be left like that.

In order to fix it, we needed to remove each board and start again.  We stained and sealed it so that the wood does not absorb water like it did previously and become warped once again.

Some of the mistakes we made were not leaving room for expansion between the planks and not sealing them before the weather took a turn for the worse.  Even if we had left gaps between the pieces, I still believe we would have needed to take it all down and seal it because some pieces are warped so much that they would have popped out anyways.

Luckily, removing the boards was not too difficult of a task.  We simply needed to get a pry bar and get behind the board enough to leverage it off the wall.  The screws pulled out of the wall as we made our way up the board.  In order to remove the screws we had to hit them from the backside if they were in the board enough for them to come to the surface, then take vice grips and unscrew it from the rest of the board.  Those screws that stayed embedded in the house we used the vice grips and again, unscrewed them from the house.

Many of the board were cupping and warping in all different directions, but they are much better than they were when they first came off the house.

In reinstalling the boards we made sure to leave space in between them for expansion and contraction this time, which is something we failed to do the first time we installed the siding.  It is a bit darker because of the stain, but I think it looks much better than before, and hopefully it will fare better in inclement weather in the future.

Here’s an album showing some of the damage and the work that went in to fixing our mistake.

Easter Work

The siding is finally done being milled!  For those of you just coming to the blog, the golf course my father works at had some trees come down in a big storm over the summer.  We had it milled to use as siding for the house.  It was delivered from the mill by the time I arrived home for Easter, so we were finally able to put some of the siding up on the house.

I was only home for a few days, but we were able to get the two long walls, and the rear gable end finished.

We started with the side facing the neighbor’s house because they have been very patient and understanding about us building the house.  We thought it would be nice for them to not have to look at Tyvek anymore.  Also, that side did not have any windows, so we did not need to do too much cutting.

Unfortunately we are almost out of the English Elm, which was used for the siding, because when we had it milled they ended up giving us five 2″ thick slabs.  These are generally used for countertops, but I have no use for them in the house and they would be more useful to me as siding.  We will figure something out though for the rest of the walls.  All in all it was a productive couple of days that I was home.  As soon as the rest of the walls are done, I will be able to focus my energies on the interior of the house to try and complete that in time to move wherever I may get a job.

Spring Break Work

This post is a long time coming, but when I was home from school over Spring Break I was able to work on the house some more.  I focused mainly on the loft because once that is completed, I will be able to move things from the first floor up for storage and have the majority of the first floor available to work on.

The biggest issue with the loft was the fact that the boards were not even from board to board.  This was because I got the hardwood flooring from different rooms of a demolition sale and they must have been refinished differently, making each board a different thickness.  I had to sand the floor 5 different times before it was ready to be a floor again.

The first sanding I went across the grain with 32-grit sandpaper.  The old adage is to always sand with the grain, but the intent was to make each piece level to the one next to it.  In order to do this I had to sand across the grain to try and make it pass cleanly without catching any edges.  Once that was completed, I sanded with 55-grit sandpaper with the grain.  I did another sanding with 80-grit, 120-grit, and then did a finish sand with 200-grit sandpaper.

Overall the pieces are level to those next to them, and the old finish is completely removed.  Now I need to stain it and put a coat of polyurethane on it, sand it again with a really fine grit, then maybe another coat of the polyurethane and another sanding.

Unfortunately the loft took the majority of the week to work on because of the amount of sanding that needed to be done.  We did start on another project though, which is a drawer system.

The kitchen unit will sit on top of the drawers to give me additional storage space.  You cannot see it in the picture, but the drawers will not be as deep in the middle because the fender intrudes 6″ into the living space.  The drawer system saves the kitchen from being moved in 6″ and gives me storage I otherwise would not have.  Six inches may not seem like a lot, but it would be about 1/4 the width of my hallway.  The drawer system is saving a lot of space and making the house much more livable.

That is all the work from Spring Break.  It may not seem like a lot, but I will be able to refinish the loft now.  Once that is done I will be able to move a lot of the materials stored on the first floor up there so that the first floor is more open to work on.

Kitchen

It’s been a while since I last posted because I am away at school, but I was able to get something that will make the house both unique and is useful.  My dad found an old Dwyer all-in-one kitchen on ebay, and I was able to win the bidding war for it.  He and I will need to drive up to Green Bay to pick it up, but if everything works on it, I will have a nice kitchen unit that is small and fits the house well.

It has a sink, 3 burner stove, oven, and a fridge.  I am still going to get an apartment-sized fridge though because I could use the freezer space this one can’t offer.

Here are some pictures of it.  I will, of course, add more once it is installed.  That may be a while down the road because there is a lot of work to do before we move finishing things into the house.

I am hoping everything works on it because otherwise parts will be hard to find as it is nearly 60 years old.

Loft Flooring

This post is long overdue, but while I was home over break I was able to install all of the flooring in the house, including the loft.  It is a good feeling knowing that it is all installed, but I know I have a long way to go before the flooring can be considered done.  I still need to continue sanding it all down so that it is level and then stain and seal it before it is done.

Instead of renting a floor sander for such a small space, we are using a belt sander and sanding across the grain to even it out to the same level.  The general rule is to never sand across the grain because it scratches the wood, but we need to in this case to make sure each piece is at the same level as the one next to it.  Once we get it level we will sand with the grain with a finer grit to remove any scratches we may have made with the first rough sanding.

The toughest part of working in the loft was the definitely the limited space.  As of now I have just under 3′ in the loft because I wanted to be sure I had headroom on the main floor.  Being bent over all day sawing, placing, gluing, and nailing everything in place was a lot tougher than when I did the flooring on the main floor and was able to stand and stretch from time to time.  Now the challenge is sanding it all because there is very little ventilation in the loft besides the sunlight.

As can be seen in the gallery, there is quite a bit of dust from the sanding, and we are nowhere near done with it.  We really need to focus on safety when we sand it and wear a mask and safety glasses to prevent the dust from getting in our lungs or eyes.  The other picture shows how we intend to do the walls of the house.  We are gong to glue and nail 1/4″ OSB to the walls, then nail the pine planking we got from the demolition sale to that.  This will make installing the planking go much quicker because we don’t need to try to make each piece line up to a stud.

Flooring

We were actually able to get a lot done on the house this weekend, as we installed all the hardwood flooring on the main level!  We first had to lay plywood on top of the solid plastic subfloor as we were not sure how well the plastic would hold the staples used to secure the flooring.  I must say that it is not going anywhere, and if I ever sell the house, that the owner should never try to change the flooring.

We first both glued and screwed the plywood onto the plastic subfloor.  In securing the hardwood we again glued it down, then used staples roughly every 18″.  My dad’s friend, Chuck, let us borrow his flooring stapler he uses for work and it saved us tons of time.  Instead of needing to hand-nail everything in place and worry about the angle of the nail so that the groove of the next board would fit the tongue through which we nailed, we simply had to put the stapler over the tongue and hit it.  It delivered the staple at the top of the tongue on an angle through the flooring and into the subfloor to hold it securely.

We split the work up into 2 days because my dad was busy yesterday, so it took a good deal longer.  I was able to finish about half of the “open living” area of the house before calling it quits for the day.  Today we were able to finish what was left of the main floor because we were able to work in unison and quickly move down the line.

Here are some pictures of the work from this weekend:

One thing we did to make the work go quicker was to lay out the rows before securing it down, as opposed to doing one row with cutting the pieces, securing it, then doing the next one and so on.  It makes it less work because there is less walking to use different tools, and it allowed us to get into a rhythm while installing the flooring.

In the pictures you can also see a pile of the hardwood standing in the corner with a stack of it on the floor.  One of the biggest challenges with working in the tiny house is the lack of space for storing materials.  All of the hardwood seen in the pictures had been stacked under the loft, which is the long expanse I am seen standing under.  After getting the first portion of the work done I had to move all the flooring to where it is now so what we would be able to work in the area it had previously occupied.

Another thing about the flooring is that while it may look nice in the pictures, it is a long way from being done.  Because it was taken from a demolition sale, none of it matches up quite how it should.  If you walk on it or drag your foot across the seams you can feel that the pieces are not at the same level as the ones next to them in some cases.  This is because the wood was probably refinished before and they sanded it down.  We took the wood from 2 different rooms in the house, so their thicknesses may have varied between them.  This just means that we need to rent a floor sander and refinish the floors ourselves.

Now all that is left as far as flooring goes is the flooring in the loft and refinishing all of it.  The loft will be extremely tricky because there is very little room for one to work, much less 2 people.  Also the refinishing will be more difficult because we may not be able to use the floor sander.  After all the flooring is done we will be able to continue work on the electrical aspects of the house, then insulation and wall and ceiling coverings.  After that, plumbing and furnishings.  It is all beginning to come together!  I wish I had been able to get more accomplished so far, as I have been home for 3 weeks, but I unfortunately had surgery and had to recover for some time.  That is all done though, so I have to do as much work as I can to make this last week count.

A final consideration I am still giving thought to is the bathroom.  I really like tile, but I am afraid that the bumps of traveling with the house may crack whatever grout it used and could potentially ruin the tiling.  I am open to suggestions as to how I can finish it if anyone has any ideas.