Build Days up to 17: Rafters, Wrap, Start of Gutex

First, apologies for the lack of updates for the past week or two. We've mostly been exhausted when we get home, so it's hard to write even a few quick captions. But the good news is that we're exhausted because we've made great progress on the house, despite a huge setback: every one of our rafters was cut incorrectly. I can talk about it calmly now that it's more or less fixed, but I was in full panic mode when I first noticed how far off the cuts were (right on the correct line, but with the jigsaw blade either tilted off 90 degrees, or twisted by the very hard softwood known as southern yellow pine). Perhaps a picture is better to describe what the problem was:

Here's what happened when we put a rafter up. If the cut had been made exactly 90 degrees to the face of the board, it would lay flat against the side of that metal triangle (a.k.a. speedsquare). Also just to be clear, the top plate is perfectly level (we did check), so that's not the cause of the problem.

So, after tinkering, we came up with a good method to use a circular saw to square up the cut most of the way, and a very careful, slow jigsaw cut to finish off the rounded bit left over by the circular saw. Hard to explain, but the end result worked.

Slowly at first, the rafters went in. We tried to space them out as much as possible to give better support to the tarp and keep rain out better.

After the first pass of spaced out rafters, we started at one end filling in every space where a rafter was supposed to go.

An end-of-day progress shot where you can see one end of the trailer has all the rafters up.

Almost finished with the rafters!

The tiny house is, well, too tiny to readily store the giant ladders and piles of tools and materials needed to build itself. So messes like this, where it's a maze to find your way to the door, happen quickly, and often. Oh, and you can also see in this shot that we started cutting out the Homasote sheathing from the window openings.

Putting up the overhang rafters, one on each end, was far more difficult than expected. They wanted to droop down from their own weight, and pull the neighboring rafter over sideways with them. We ended up adding plenty of blocking to reinforce things.

With all rafters completed, we moved on to housewrap.

As this isn't the fancy textured "drainwrap" or equivalent, it's not the end of the world that we didn't manage to keep it completely square to the walls. Still, oops.

Second tier of housewrap up, as seen from inside. Also, many pretty colored bungee cords and Irwin brand clamps. Without both of those devices, I'm not sure how anything would have gotten done.

First Gutex roofing board in place, as viewed from the eave (south) side.

As we worked on the second Gutex board, it started to thunder and the skies got dark. We were expecting rain though, and were quickly ready to pull a tarp over everything.

The end-of-day status shot for today, showing two Gutex boards from the inside looking up.

Tomorrow and/or Monday, we are probably going to see if we can get started on windows and the door, and wait on completing the roof for next Saturday. We'd love to have extra hands Saturday for that, so give us a shout out if you're interested in lending a hand!

Fastener Frustrations

Jeremy just posted on Facebook something that I think pretty well sums up the frustration I've been feeling today: "...construction in the United States is the dumbest shit ever. penny nails? 8d? cause labeling by length and diameter would be too hard..."

Let's take a step back and give some background information. Jeremy and I have been talking about doing at least some posts that delve into the more technical aspects of our design and construction process. If you're only interested in pictures of walls and such, of course feel free to skip such posts :) However, I have felt that, in the community of tiny house blogs, there is a overwhelming ratio of fluff content to useful technical content. Don't get me wrong, I love perusing the likes of tiny house swoon, which (and I hope nobody takes this too harshly) amounts to little more than "house porn."

I recall when researching how to size solar systems, I found literally dozens of posts on tiny house blogs with vague references to eventual plans to maybe install something because it's, like, good for the environment or something. In contrast, I think I found only one post that really delved into this is how many Watt-hours I expect each of my devices to use per week and this is how we calculated the expected actual performance of our panels versus their rated maximum capacity. If I can contribute even one such substantive post, and have it read by just one person trying to puzzle out that aspect of their build in the future, this will have been a worthwhile endeavor. Even if not, documenting my own thought processes should help me keep straight why I reached certain decisions, so I don't waste time second-guessing myself later.

Okay, so with that aside let's jump back into fastener sizes. I'm going to be installing boards over my rafters soon. These boards are 60mm (almost 2.5 inches) thick, compared with the "normal" sheathing board that goes over rafters of half or three-quarters of an inch (that's 13-19mm, to help you compare apples to apples). There are numerous advantages to the boards I've chosen, but this post is on fasteners; maybe I'll do a technical dive post on Gutex later.

Thin OSB or plywood sheathing boards can just be nailed or screwed with 2" fasteners: readily-available in U.S. big box stores. But Gutex installation instructions specify "180mm x 6mm" nails, and then have a chart for how many you need per meter, depending on what your roofing material weight and snow load are expected to be, in kN/m^2. I can picture your eyes glazing over about now, reader, but just try and bear with me! The German manufacturer means everything is in SI units, but you'd think: "That's fine, I'll just convert millimeters to inches, viola!" No such luck though: in the U.S., nails are measured in penny size. So, just look up the converted size in the chart, right? (meanwhile, try to shrug off the annoyance that an "8d" is not 50% the size of a "16d", but rather ~71% of the size) Not so fast though: wikipedia is a great place to start, as always, but the whole picture is way more complex. Is the penny size really a measure of length? Well, only sort of. A 16d is usually used for framing, but contrary to the table showing it as 3.5 inches, it could be 3. Or 3.25. The ones we used with my borrowed framing nail gun are both marked 16d, and only 3 inches long. The nails we're using for hurricane clips are marked 8d, but are only 1.5 inches, not 2.5. And these are but two examples in a sea of inconsistency. Why all the discrepancies? Well, when you come down to it, the penny size system is not a system at all, it's a hodgepodge of historical holdovers. Nobody at any point was able to get universal acceptance of a conversion from penny size to an actual unit of length.

And we haven't even started in on the diameter of the nails (the short story there is that those are even less standardized).

Okay, so maybe it's just easier to order some nails in metric size from a German manufacturer? Nice try, but good luck doing so without being fluent in German. Maybe from the U.K. then? Then, all you have to worry about is shipping. Oops, that's not a small issue either. The fact is that, like most industries in the U.S., fasteners are dominated by very few players. In fact, it only takes a few minutes in the right aisle to realize that more than 80% of all nails and screws at both Home Depot and Lowes are all made by the same manufacturer (I'm talking about you, Grip-Rite). Do you think that manufacturer makes things in SI sizes? Not a chance. Like everything else in the world of construction I've come across, the supply chain in the U.S. is great...as long as you toe the line and buy exactly what everyone else is buying from your (not-so-)friendly (not-so-)local store, supplied by the monopoly-holding manufacturer of that type of widget. Deviate at your own risk.

For that one future builder out there struggling to install 60mm Gutex boards in the United States, here's the best answer I could come to. Look for 60d nails: that's about the longest you'll find here (still not as long as recommended, but it will have to do). And when you find those 60d nails, look for ones that are as close as possible to "4 gauge" diameter, which could also be variously written #4, 4ga, 4AWG, and any other number of nonstandard infuriating forms. To convert that to a meaningful unit of length, you're aiming for about 0.2 inches. Was just making and selling a "6 inch by 0.2 inch nail" so hard?

Days 12 and 13

We made a fair amount of progress this weekend, and things are starting to look more and more up.

We took a break already after attaching a small piece of sheathing to the corner of the north wall; staring up at the very pretty blue sky and clouds.

Me nailing more pieces of sheathing to the north wall (also possibly the first picture here with me in it?)

All sheathing completed! This view is from the top northeast corner.

The same level of progress as above, this time from the opposite (bottom southwest) corner.

After very carefully checking every possible place on the walls and floor for plumb and level, we installed a single rafter; here the rafter is shown secured with both toe nails and hurricane clips.

We only have one rafter in, but the rest are cut. Here, we started putting tarps over the roof to keep rain out. We're worried that if we don't control the moisture problem, it will turn into a mold problem.

Sorry for the blurry shot here at the end, but this is dusk at the end of day 13: all sheathing complete, one rafter installed, tarps over the whole roof, and a whole ton of materials moved into the (hopefully now somewhat weather safe) house.

Build Days 9 through 11

I've fallen behind posting mostly because more progress on the house means less energy to write here, but on the bright side that does mean the house is moving along. As of the last update, the south wall was done, the north 2/3 done, and the rake walls not even started. On Thursday and Friday, we finished the north wall, framed and raised the east and west rake walls, and added in the header hangers to all the window/door openings, since they finally arrived. Sadly, I don't have any clear pictures from those two days, but I do have some great pictures from Saturday!

Starting in the southeast corner, we put up the first piece of exterior sheathing.

The first two pieces went pretty slowly, but around lunch time, help started arriving, and progress took off.

Bottom row of sheathing is almost finished!

Here's where the booth dining/desk area will go in the completed house. As it became enclosed, even just by that first layer, it suddenly felt more like a livable, usable space.

Had to get a picture of the car caravan from all our helpers on Saturday. Thanks everyone who came out to assist!

Here's the overall shot at the end of Saturday, which is the state the house is still in (Sunday was a much needed day off). The first row of sheathing is completed, and the second is started. The second row is not full height on the South wall, and a partial third row is only needed on the north wall and the first few feet of the rake walls.

It's supposed to rain more or less all week, and the next several weekends have various plans, so I'm not sure when the next build day will be, other than a quick trip over to try and protect things from the rain with tarps. Still, stay tuned...the exterior of the house has to be finished before the first snowfall, so we'll find the time one way or another to work on it.

Last note, for anyone wondering: the sheathing that went up is called Homasote, a board made of recycled paper fiber. It actually was in very wide use prior to the introduction of cheaper OSB about 50 years ago. Currently, it's still more expensive than OSB, but it has several distinct advantages. Homasote is made from 98% post-consumer recycled material (OSB can't claim anywhere near that percentage), mixed with only a bit of wax and a tiny bit of copper pesticide. It contains no urea or phenol formaldehyde binder, nor any of the possibly worse alternative glues like MDI or PVA. Homasote also seems to have higher shear strength and other durability characteristics than OSB or even some plywood. Last, unlike a wide range of the low emitting, safer, and/or greener materials out there, Homasote is actually widely and easily available at a local big box store.

Build Day 8

This time we did not finish a full wall. You might think I would be disappointed in working a whole day and not even having one wall to show for it, but:

1. The wall was too high for any of our ladders to safely reach its top plate, so we'll try and purchase a more suitable ladder first.
2. I didn't actually set a goal to get it done. I'm not a fan of goals, actually (I may write more about how that fits in with a project like this later).
3. Being the largest wall with the most complexity in headers and other variances, it's likely the most difficult.

First section of north wall raised and braced!

We had plenty of helpers show up today: setting a new lifting world record, while being shot by dual clamp guns. All our helpers did real work too, and we very much appreciate their help!

End of the day. North wall is maybe 2/3 done; the big hole in the middle needs to be filled in.

Build Day 7...ish?

The day started, of course, with beating the short section of wall that we had completed apart, moving every stud 3/4ths of an inch, and re-nailing it. That went surprisingly quickly. After that, we moved on to the other side of the south wall, and raised it; finally we filled in the middle of that wall. As dusk approached, we had the south wall mostly finished. We're still waiting on the header hangers to arrive by special order, so the headers are only temporarily nailed for now, but other than that, the framing for that wall is done.

During the day, we met with a local amateur filmmaker, who is interested in doing a short piece on our build. I'll post here if he doesn't mind once there's some completed work to share. Super exciting to have someone actually be interested in our project, though I fear I'm not great on camera :)

Nails come out all the way on the studs that needed to be moved, but also had to come mostly out of the correctly positioned ones.

Me hammering a cripple stud back into position.

The first section repaired, lifted into position, and braced.

Framing the second half.

Overall shot of the end-of-the-day progress.

Obstacles, but finally, Walls!

We're completely exhausted at this point from three consecutive days of building. But we're dedicated to working through the week and next weekend, to try and catch up (the goal is, after all, weather tightness before snow -- and knowing Rochester, that will likely be before Halloween). We are certainly making progress, but let me just say (sorry if you've heard this already on every other tiny house build blog!), everything takes longer than you think it will.

It's shocking, really, how long it can take to get a trailer level. We spent half our day today checking level, extending the lift jack, adjusting the screw on a support jack stand, lowering the lift jack, and repeating.

In the end, since the ground is so much lower on one side of the trailer, we had to have one support jack on the back extended over two feet high, while the one on the opposite corner is screwed all the way in to its shortest setting.

Here Jeremy and all of us are relaxing under the popup awning while we wait for the rain to subside a bit.

This is one of the rocks we put on the tarps to weigh them down against the wind. Great for the wind, but we have a tendency pull the tarp off and fold it over the rock, making it invisible under there...until you trip over it. Again and again. All day. Really, it's a miracle none of us have broken an ankle tripping over these rocks :)

Finally started laying out the studs for the south wall.

We got this far before I realized, with a sinking feeling, that I had measured incorrectly. It was late, and we needed a supply run anyways, so we just called it a night. Tomorrow morning, I get to start by ripping out the nails on most of these studs, moving them a few inches left, and re-nailing them. Still, I'm happy we noticed the mistake 6 studs in to the 19-stud long wall!

Subfloor Progress

After several days of the laying under the trailer and screwing up the aluminum flashing, that step is finally done and it's time to move on to the remainder of the subfloor. Working above was still hard work, but so much faster.

First batts of wool insulation going in.

We dry fit the OSB over as we went down the length of the trailer.

Next step was vapor check; here you can see all three layers: insulation, vapor check, OSB.

Last of the vapor barrier down!

Didn't get a picture of the completed subfloor since we had to run around cleaning up and pulled a tarp over the completed subfloor within seconds of the rain starting. Rain has been a near constant so far during the build, but we've been able to keep things pretty safe and dry so far by having tarps ready to pull over at a moment's notice.