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….

Tiny House progress: angles schmangles

Well, if you’ve been reading our posts you’ll remember a discussion we were having about the back deck roof being angled or just a standard gable.  We got quite a bit of feedback saying the angle would look great, and from a design perspective I liked how it would mimic the tapered roof we have going on over the gooseneck.  So.  Angling the roof added about two days of work (one day discussing it, and one day building it) but I really like the look.

Here’s the construction progression in three stages:

And a close-up of the angles (compound angles too…)

We spent all day today running errands, making phone calls, and attaching steel fenders / wheel wells.  The ones on the used trailer we bought were totally mangled.  Turns out that was a bigger bummer than we thought.  These fenders cost $155 plus a days worth of work welding them onto the trailer.  Here is an overall view of our tiny house on wheels showing the new front porch roof  (the porch will be attached later):

The fenders:

TGIF… and we’re going away for our anniversary (our FIRST anniversary ever!) Sunday thru Tuesday so that’s exciting.  We’re both torn about leaving in the middle of this project.  But it’d probably be good to get away from it all and relax and celebrate for a few days.  All work and no play… you know how that adage goes.