Roughing It

This building and working at the same time thing is a tricky business. Building comes in surges: when you have time, you go at it hard.

Lately, work has been busy for both of us and weekends have been stuffed with family, so even when we have time, sometimes we're just too knackered to get stuck in to the hard labour. Luckily, we're still making progress since our electrical and plumbing have been roughed in, keeping the ball rolling while we were busy.

From the beginning we'd decided that we'd bring in some ticketed friends of ours to do the plumbing and electrical. A lot of people who build their own houses do this part themselves but we felt it would take us that much longer to learn all the ins and outs (we haven't taken any time off to build this), we wanted it done right, and just in case we needed an inspection, we wanted to have that professional stamp. We're fortunate in that we know skilled peeps who were happy to help us at mates rates, and we're doing a lot of learning in the process.

Plumbing and gas were done first, roughing in our bathroom and kitchen plumbing, as well as the hot water heater and wall heater feed ins. Here's our shower all plumbed in and waiting for us to close in.

The electrical is nearly there, taking a wee bit longer to complete. Who knew a tiny house would use so much wire??? There are so many more decisions than I ever imagined in a tiny house.

Of course getting to this stage means choosing faucets, sinks and whatever fixtures you're going to use. While this can tickle your inner designer, you also have to make decisions about the unexotic, like ventilation fans. There is nothing exotic about ventilation fans.

Ventilation in a tiny house is a BIG DEAL people. We've been pretty focused over the entire process on making sure we will have enough controllable holes in our house to allow it to breath since there will be two adult bodies, a shower, a propane range and laundry drying all over the place (hopefully not really though, we're trying to design in a handy airing space for wet socks and undies). And hopefully a tiny house dog too.

Choosing the fans and range hood was surprisingly agonizing as we tried to calculate just how much more moisture our propane range would emit and how to compensate.

We've got a typical vent fan in the loo, a fairly powerfull wall vent fan in the storage loft (to suck out hot air or whatever) and a powerful range hood in the kitchen, plus all the windows open but one. We're feeling pretty good that we've done a decent job, so in go the electrical boxes.

Finding the right fixtures and appliances for the tiny house has proved another challenge due quite literally to economies of scale. Behold: the tiniest sink basin in the world (shown next to laptop for scale).

Canada seems to have much less variety in building supplies (down to our quaint population) and we've ended up ordering a couple of things from the closest Home Depot in the states and nipping across the line to pick them up.

Originally, we were going to get more of our fixtures used but there aren't many tiny things floating around on Craigslist. If we had all the time in the world to wait, we'd probably have had better luck, but we're on a mission to get this wrapped up by the end of the summer so some stealthy online hunting has been necessary.

In retrospect, it probably would have been smart to source more of the appliances and fixtures before starting the build. We thought we'd had a lot of it pegged but when it came time to order and purchase, things didn't go quite so smoothly.

The water heater we wanted was on back order and the one we bought ended up being a fair bit larger, requiring us to change its location. We lucked out with procuring our shower before our front door but really we had planned on getting a tiny shower and just plain couldn't find one. While scrambling to figure out a solution we stumbled onto the wonderful one we have, but it's a lesson in preparation because there are now a few things in the design we're having to rethink as a result.

Now on to more pictures...

We've finished laying the flooring so next will be sanding.

Below are our fir panels for the interior. These will go up as soon as the rough electrical is done and we can get the insulation and vapour barrier up.

We've been applying the varathane to each piece in our garage in our spare time. When Rory first suggested this I thought he was bonkers, feeling it would make the most sense to just do it once it was installed. But now that we're doing it, this stuff is so goopy that I realise it would be a nightmare trying to apply this to the ceiling, dripping fat globes all over the place. Well played Roar... well played.