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.

Painting

I spent the afternoon working on painting the siding for the tiny house. It is too cold to paint outside so I am set up in a heated space. Painting is going fairly quickly and I am hoping to finish next week.

Announcing My Tiny House Project

Tiny house scale model exterior view.

I am announcing my major project that I will be working on this winter and into the spring. I am going to be building an 8’X18’ tiny house on wheels!
I have been planning this project for the past few months, but I am just now starting to do actual physical work. First up is painting the wood siding.
The tiny house will be built from SIPs panels (structural insulation panels). With SIPS panels you don’t need as thick of a wall as you do with a stick built wall to have adequate insulation, and when you are constrained to have you house be under 8.5 feet (the width limit for a trailer without a wide load permit) every inch counts.
These SIPs panels are made from two sheets of oriented strand board with polyurethane foam insulation in between.
The walls of my house will be 6.5 inches thick and R40. This number will be significant to some of you and mean nothing to others, for the benefit of the others, I will say that that’s good insulation.
I am purchasing the SIPs from a company called Eco-Panels. The SIPs are made with window and door

Boston Trip

I took a bus to Boston yesterday for a big climate rally. I brought my guitar and played a few songs on the bus (which as it turns out is really difficult! You are constantly having to focus on not falling and you can't really hear yourself or your guitar. But it was still fun!) It was a beautiful event with about 2,000 people in attendance.