Tiny House Progress: Wood Flooring, Finish Plumbing, Finish Electrical

Well…  (I can’t seem to find another way to start a blog entry)  Good morning!

We’re wrapping stuff up on the Tiny House.  And we have an interview with a news crew on Wednesday, so that’s exciting.

I had a big shopping day on Wednesday and got all the rest of the little finishing touches: a ceiling fan, a futon mattress for the couch, a shower curtain, hanging rods for the closet curtain and shower curtain, the final light fixture components, and light bulbs!  Our plumber was out yesterday connecting all the plumbing for our kitchen sink, bathroom sink, propane cooktop, and propane wall heater / furnace.

Tiny House Progress: Electrical Wiring

Yesterday we got the house wired for electrical.  Went pretty smoothly, nothing to report.  The panel selection was a process, but we ended up going with a standard 120v panel for a regular house, rather than an RV panel that has low voltage circuits in the panel.  When we go solar down the road we’ll have to have an inverter anyway, so that will step our power from 12v to 120v.

Lighting: a challenge in a small house – we don’t want a bunch of lamps sitting around cluttering up the space.  Track lighting is so hideously ugly.  Not many places to hide recessed / indirect lighting.  We decided to make our own sconce and ceiling light fixtures using LED lamps (bulbs) that we can buy off the shelf at the hardware store.  Really low power use, and a white frosted globe.

Also, here’s a photo of the wheel well boxes we built on the inside, as the wheels of the trailer intrude on the interior of the house.  almost all of these boxes will be covered by cabinets or the couch.

Here’s a photo of the propane tanks we installed on the hitch of the trailer (see previous post):

Shane welded steel angle iron to the trailer frame and then welded the tanks’ platform to that.  Tanks aren’t the most gorgeous things, but they’re necessary.  We only need propane for our cooktop and our space heater, so we shouldn’t go through it too fast.

More debate on the finishes….  On the exterior we went back and forth on whether we wanted window trim, or just butt the siding up to the windows with a slim, clean galvanized J-mold.  After deciding to skip the trim we held one of the windows up and realized that we need trim as they project out from the face of wall too far.  So, trim it will be!  We’re trying to do drywall on the interior because it is the cheapest, cleanest wall to cover a wall.  It also has no VOC’s so it’s a fairly healthy product.  Gypsum mining isn’t great for the environment, but we’ll leave a few trees in the forest skipping wood interior wall cladding.

Okay, we need to get to work!  Installing windows today…..

Tiny House: Tiny Progress (propane tanks, electrical and plumbing)

Well… we ended up not getting away for our anniversary.  We had about two feet of snow here in Prescott, and the weather and roads were just too bad to be driving.  So instead we had a really nice snow day, which I love, as we don’t get that many of them in Arizona.

The driveway was shoveled (by Shane) but see the snow piled on the car!

Dog included for scale… haha.

The last few days working on the house have been tedious (but important) details.  We decided to get steel fenders instead of building custom wheel wells so we got those installed (welded to the trailer frame) and we built the interior framed boxes over where they project into the interior of the house.  I didn’t get a photo of the boxes, but here is one of the fenders / wheel wells from the outside:

You might be able to observe in those photos that our tires and wheels are in bad shape.  We got the trailer at a pretty good price, but in the future we might want to pay more to have tires that are all the same size, for instance… and tires with some life left in them.

Today we welded a steel shelf onto the front gooseneck hitch for the two 30-gallon propane tanks.  We also met with a plumber and figured out the location of the on-demand hot water heater, as well as the plumbing for the shower and sinks.  We are locating the hot water heater on the exterior directly outside the kitchen, between the kitchen sink and the shower so we won’t have to wait for hot water, nor waste water waiting for the hot.  The plumbing fixtures are all centrally located, thus easier and less expensive to install.

Yesterday we did a lot of shopping!  Bought the propane tanks, rack and regulator, a few light fixtures, all the outlet and switch boxes and the wiring.  This week we’ll be wiring the electrical and installing the plumbing.  Then we can schedule the spray foam insulation and get started on the exterior siding.

It’s really coming along and I’m starting to get so excited to live in a small house of our own.  Especially with how cold it’s been and how big and drafty our current house is – the windows are single-paned so you can actually feel a cold breeze coming across the living room, even though the curtains are drawn.   Brrr….