The House Has Arrived!

Tiny House Assembly Time-lapse

 The YouTube link in case the video won't load: https://youtu.be/So7cWAknkvw

Tiny House Assembly

The finished tiny house shell!

I am in North Carolina as I write this, because yesterday I was watching and photographing as the SIPs panels were assembled onto the trailer. The trailer has been ready for a few weeks, and the panels were manufactured during the past week. The process of assembling the panels and trailer into a house took only about 5 hours and 30 minutes.

            For a while I had been hoping to do the assembly myself, and I was thinking that I could have done it until the construction team got to putting the roof on. This took two forklifts and six people to accomplish.

            So if materials for the walls are more expensive than they would be in a stick built house and I had to pay someone to assemble it for me, why did I decide to use SIPs? Simply because the SIPs will create a better insulated home, so in the long run, I expect to save money on heating costs.

 Because stick built houses have studs every few feet, a lot of heat can be lost by being transmitted through the wooden studs. This is called thermal bridging. Even if the insulation material in a stick built house has a high R-value, the house can still loose a lot of heat through the wall studs, since wood has a much lower R-value than materials that are designed for insulation.

      Eco-panels makes their SIPs with a polyurethane foam. This is one of the things that first caught my attention about the company. Unlike polystyrene, which is the material most often used for SIPs panels, polyurethane does not outgas any harmful chemicals.

      Eco- panels also makes corner panels at 90° angles and 135° angles. Having one piece corner panels is stronger and better insulating than attaching two flat panels to make a corner. My house uses four of the 90° panels at the corners and two 135° panels at the peak of the roof.

During the assembly, I was given free range of the shop, so I was able to photograph everything. Here is the first round of photos. Check back tomorrow to see a time-lapse video of the assembly.

When I arrived, The floor panels had already been attached to the trailer.

The walls are partly finished in this shot.

One of the 90° corner panels.

Inside of the house. All of that bracing in the middle is just temporary to support the roof. I will put the permanent bracing up in a way that does not take up much space.

In the home stretch!

Its 12°F this morning, a good day to get some work done indoors. I put in a few hours painting siding for the tiny house. I can only work on that for about an hour and a half before I run out of space to put freshly painted boards to dry. I am hoping to finish painting this afternoon.
In the meantime, my dad and I are scrambling to get the last details finalized and sent off to Eco-Panels. Before the SIPs panels can be made, we need to know where all of the windows and doors will be as well as where every light, electrical outlet, and light switch will be. The panels will be made with openings for the windows and doors and electrical conduit already built in, all we have to do is run wires through it.

We have had all of the windows and the door mapped out for a while. And we have had a general idea of where lights and outlets would be, but at this stage of the project, we need to finalize every detail. Every bad decision made now will cause a lot of trouble down the road. Every detail needs to be carefully thought through.
As we are finalizing all of these details though, a light has appeared at the end of the tunnel. We got the news that the floor panels are being manufactured right now. And as soon as we get the electrical diagrams to Eco-panels, they can work on the walls too.
The hardest part about this stage of the project is that I have been putting in a huge amount of energy and time and have very little to show for it. When the panels are finished, there will finally be something to show for the time and money that I have spent.