Build Days Through 26: Fascia, Utility Box, and Mini-Projects

It's been a while since the last update, though progress has slowed so there hasn't been much to show. This is due to a confluence of factors: first, that the roof we ordered has been delayed again and again. Originally, it was slated to arrive in a week, but now it looks like it might arrive in six (so, by the middle of October). Second, we're deliberately slowing down to try and save up some more money...we've spent about $20,000 and really only paid for a bit over half of that (the rest is on a promotional 0% APR card, but credit cards are a different story). And last, much of what we have been doing lately are small tasks that are important, but don't look all that interesting in pictures (such as "we fixed this one nail over here which missed the stud" or "we vacuumed the house and organized our tools and materials").

We did finally pick up the exterior siding: 1250 linear feet of "novelty lap" eastern pine. It will take approximately forever, but we intend to stain all six sides of every piece before attaching, then then put a second coat on the exposed side once up.

Starting the blue fascia boards.

Whenever I paint, people feel the impulse to remind me that I should be painting the target object, not myself. This day was no different...

...but I did get the boards blue while I was at it.

We also started the long process of staining the siding "redwood" color.

Even with a couple paving stones stacked up, climbing up into the house was not terribly easy, so we picked up some short pre-cut stringers and added some scrap.

And viola, temporary steps.

This also took far longer that I would have liked, but we did finally get all the battens fastened to the roof.

We cut the Gutex to the 5/12 pitch on the peak side before lifting it up in place, but the eave side we left overhanging by more than was needed, so we had to trim it. As that meant cutting through more than 6" of depth, the only tool we could think to use was the saws-all. That made for a bit of a wavy cut, but it was good enough for our purposes.

Starting to attach the fascia boards.

South wall fascia complete, moving on to the other sides.

As another side project while waiting on the roof to arrive, we started building the "utility box", which will be storage space for our solar system's batteries, and as much else as we can fit.

After two layers of 3/4" OSB for a floor (we wanted some extra strength since I expect those batteries to come in north of 700 pounds), we built a tiny version of the house frame, with the same 5/12 pitch.

Here's the box as seen from the South, to give some scale. It's not that big, but the extra space will be welcome.

Build Update (Days 20-22): Windows and Door Complete!

We've made a bunch of progress since the last update, starting with getting our door in! Subfloor, walls, sheathing, windows, even roof...nothing compares to the door when it comes to making the place feel like a house. Added bonus: we can now feel a little safer leaving tools at the site, since we can lock the door :)

Speaking of feeling more like a home: we have keys!

Here's Jeremy taking the time to finish properly flashing the door while I just tried to contain the excitement of having a door.

On a different front, here's one of the massive "60d" nails - that's 6 inches by 0.25 inches, if we're going to use actual measurements ;)

Remaining rows of Gutex went on quickly. We still need to nail in many more of the battens (one goes atop each rafter), but then the roof will be done until the metal panels arrive (which could be as soon as this next weekend!)

Roof as seen from inside shows that the house is now pretty rain-proof, minus the fascia area on either end. We've stopped putting tarps over the structure, since Gutex is rated to be weather and UV resistant for up to 4 months before needing to be covered with proper roofing.
Also, just noted that all the wane and knots in our rafters make them look pretty beat-up, or dirty or something. Oh well, they're still plenty strong (and I don't think they look as bad in person).

A nice end-of-day picture with some idea of the progress up to that point.

Starting the upper windows. These ones were a bit scary, being around 11 feet up in the air.

But eventually, we got all three in. With the Tyvek cut away and replaced with windows, we get a nice amount of light streaming in (even here on the North side).

Nice overall shot for end of the 22nd build day. I think it's starting to look pretty good with all the windows in!

Build Days 18 and 19

It seems that every time we head back to the tiny to start building, the tarp has either blown partially off, or leaked somehow, pouring water from the inevitable rain into the house. :( I can't wait to finish the roof sheathing so that our house will be closer to rain-proof.

While we waited to make a big push on the roof this weekend, we started installing the windows. This is the first one to go in: an awning style one for our bathroom. This is the only window where, due to the strange circumstances of where studs fell, we went with one header hanger and one old-school jack stud.

After taking our time very carefully measuring and marking to ensure squareness, we put the first row of Gutex boards up on the roof.

As seen from the eave, the first row complete, plus the first board on the second row.

Nailing in the batten over the second row.

We decided to swivel the other battens out of the way while we laid out the next couple of rows, since it made it easier.

After the first row was in place, the tongue and groove made subsequent rows a breeze. Three rows up here, though they are just butted into the tongues from their neighboring rows (not nailed as of yet here).

While my father-in-law and I worked on those roofing boards, Jeremy and his mother worked on putting in another one of our windows. This one on the front end of the trailer is a fixed (non-opening) window, but is very large and gives a great view.

Here the same window as above, and its two neighbors, which together wrap around what will be the booth seating dining/desk area.

We finished up the day with four of five rows of Gutex fastened down on the roof (though the fifth will take substantially longer as every one has to be trimmed lengthwise), and four of nine windows installed. I'll be sure to get some more pictures of the roof as it nears completion. Meanwhile, I've been getting quotes for the metal roof, and researching/designing our propane, water, and electrical systems. More on that to come soon!

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.