Who says a home can't be 200 square feet or less?

Here is the ABC News broadcast that aired last week on the house! Pretty awesome!

Check us out on local news channel 4 this week!

Last Thursday ABC Channel 4 news came out to the warehouse to check out the tiny house. This is the article they posted on their website and there should be a broadcast of our interview sometime this week.

http://www.abcnews4.com/story/16386340/tiny-house

One of our interviewers, Brian Troutman, is passionate about sustainable, green living and has a great blog on environmental awareness called Environmentally Challenged. It focuses on Charleston issues and is very informative. You can find it here:

http://www.abcnews4.com/category/207857/environmentally-challenged

Yay tiny houses!

Christmas Parade!

The tiny house makes it's debut tomorrow, December 4 from 2-5pm down King St. in downtwon Charleston! Come out and see La Casita in action!

The Skinny on The Tiny

Since we've got them, I figure I'll share a few Google SketchUp renderings of the Tiny House. SketchUp is free, and it is a really useful tool in considering the 2d plans spatially. A few details have already changed (window placement, mostly), and a few things need to be added (water heater, a/c unit, more detailed cabinetry diagrams), but they're too cool not to share.
Here's the house with no exterior walls (how?!)
The shelves in the foreground do not float, they are attached to walls that are currently invisible.
The blue couch is our real, actual couch! It's a really cool couch, and I wanted to model it and make sure it will fit in our space. I think I may have to surgically cut out a chunk of one leg, to accommodate for the wheel wells, but I will have that couch.
Here's a shot without the roof showing the closet arrangement in the bedroom loft. There will be significant clothes downsizing.

Through the kitchen into the living space. Shelves on the left of the far wall also serve as a ladder to Zach's loft-study, over the front entry.
To the left of Wayne is our alternating tread staircase/bookshelf. It's a central feature; I designed significant parts of the house around it! Maybe we can call it the Treppenhaus.
I'm excited to compare the renderings with the product as the build progresses!

Floor Pan Beginnings

Zach and I both woke up around 6:45 am yesterday, ready to dive into the TH build! First, a shot of the trailer without any of the decking. The lower part in the foreground is our detachable porch - 2' deep, and we can do a simple install of Ipe decking and call it a porch! When it comes time to move the house, we can just slide the porch out of the two rails, stow it in the house, and roll down the highway with a slightly shorter load.

First order of business was to lay out and rivet together the strips of aluminum flashing. This provides a mostly structural barrier against any debris that could fly under the house during towing, or any animals that might want to get up ins once it's in place.

All the flashing riveted in - shiny!

Rosie the Riveter: intimidating, or crazyface?

6mil poly sheeting goes down next, to act as an impermeable vapor barrier (except for where I dropped a floor joist and poked a hole, oops).

Floor joists are 2x6" Timbersil: a great, green product! Instead of being treated with toxic rot, insect, or fire retardants, Timbersil is impregnated with glass, making it extremely stable and wonderfully non-toxic! Ours were b-grade, meaning they were a little warpy, but totally useable, and also totally affordable.

All joints are reinforced with Simpson Strong-Ties, to make sure that when we go rattling down the highway, the house doesn't come rattling apart at the seams.

Upon cutting members for the floor box, I discovered that the trailer was not the requested 8'x24', but is actually 6" wider! The Department of Transportation doesn't allow anything wider than 8'6" to travel down the highway without special permits ($), so this thing is built to our absolute max width. It's not what was planned for, but I'm not going to argue with an extra 6" of width - that's an extra 12sqft of interior space!

After completing half the floor boxes, energy was flagging, but much was accomplished today!

An Announcement!

This is Zach, and his lady Margaret. We have been friends with Cedric and Andrea for about a year and housemates for about half of that time. We learned about this new approach to living through them and when the opportunity arose for use to build a space of our own, we just couldn't turn it down.

Now, after moths of planning and prep work, we have started down the same road Cedric and Andrea blazed before us; building a house for ourselves out of reclaimed lumber and building supplies from the Sustainable Warehouse. Through the immense courtesy and patience of Rebecca O'Brian, we had amassed most of the supplies of our build well in advance of the arrival of our custom made trailer.

Margaret and I have also been doing a lot of design work on how we would like the house to look and function. Margaret's amazing skills resulted in this:

A view of the inside:

For the foundation of the house we needed something very special. The wonderful folks over at McElrath Trailers really gave us a break on an awesome trailer with great features that allow us remove the house from the frame if we ever decide to stay some where for a long time or would like to use it to build a new house. Margaret and I ordered the trailer two months ago and on thursday we got word that it would be ready to pick up this weekend. As you can see, we were quite pleased to hear this.

We learned a lot about our trailer as we went along and Rick Conner from McElrath Trailers was very helpful and patient with us as we figured out what we need to get this project done right. He was about as awesome as it gets

We were so tired when we got home from the 10 hour day we just parked it in the warehouse and called it a day. Leaving it to rest in its new home.

Roof Raising Saturday, November 26

It's official! The roof is ready to be raised and we're planning a work party to help get it done! Saturday, November 26 from noon to 4 at The Sustainable Warehouse! There will be lots of different tasks at hand from putting the roof on (!!!) to painting windows to oiling the exterior and much much more! This is basically the race to get the house ready for it's Charleston Christmas Parade debut! Sunday, December 4 from 2-5 is the date and time of the public showing of the house and we are so so excited (as well as a bit nervous as everything that needs to get done in the next couple weeks!). There will also be spaces open in our spot for the parade so we need a few folks who would like to join the tiny house parade celebration. Perhaps a band or some bicycle friends (or a bicycling band) would like to join?

So please come out Saturday, November 26 and join us for refreshments, friends, dancing and roof raising fun!