January 11, 2017 Snow Day

We woke this morning to a snow day, with ten inches on the ground. Sort of puts a damper on any thoughts of doing anything (for the next day or so at least). So let's talk about tiny homes and trailers a bit. . .

The plan is to build two tiny home trailers to live in while we sell our house and build a new one, the first ever double wide tiny home. Each ought to be twenty or so feet long, eight feet wide, and nothing costing over $1000. Craig's List is a bit of a problem, but nobody uses the newspapers anymore. You have to "kiss a lot of frogs" to find anything and many of the ads are false or misleading. Coupling this with a lack of time, no truck big enough to haul a large trailer very far, and little money, finding the right combination of trailer, seller, and time means things have to line up fairly straight.

I found the first trailer in out by the airport in the gateway district from a nice guy named Dan, who runs a cabinet shop. He's got a friend that has a tow company, who sometimes tows trailers abandoned on properties. He had two. I bought one.

This thing is 27 feet, nose to tail. 24 feet of deck space. Perfect for the living - kitchen - bathroom side. It had already been striped on the inside and Dan wanted to do the demolition of the camper shell to salvage parts, so I let him. This saved me a bunch of time, and quite a few dollars in dumping fees and time. He delivered the trailer a few days ago, so it is tarped and standing out in the snow awaiting our first build day Tabula Rosa.

The plan is to build the first tiny home backward facing. Normally you would see the tongue in the front, this time it will be at the back.

Construction of tiny homes, like those seen on television, is usually very involved. Those guys build thick walls, heavy roofs, and often attempt to instill all of the cool and expensive stuff they can think of into the design. In the end they usually put twenty thousand dollars into a thirty foot trailer, about 250 square feet, at about $51.00 per square foot. They usually waste a bunch of money on expensive siding and trailer (usually paying ass much a six thousand for the base). Often they do not get anything like a full bathroom, nothing resembling a kitchen, and always they put the bed up in a little "loft" near the ceiling (a shelf if they were honest about it). These things are always built for cute, never for simple living space. The end result is a very heavy little wooden tank of a trailer which can be only be moved using a really large truck. Generally has a retail value of around $40,000.

Our project will much simpler and much cheaper by far as we intend to build around 380 square feet at ten dollars per foot. Starting off with a cheaper base (about ten percent of the norm), the end result only needs to be moved a few times: once from our driveway to the farm (ten miles); once from the first position while we build, to the last where it will remain thereafter (one-hundred feet). We will not spend anything at all on "trailer" parts, putting all of the money into interior space.

The walls will be thin and light weight, using 2x3 pine, cheapo shop siding, fiberglass insulation, and wood paneling. The roof will also be light. The intention of the shell will be to maximize space and hold the roof up in moderate weather. There are few windows, few doors, and little in the way of luxurious appointments. The only thing cool about this is that nobody has done built anything like it. The outside will be very cute, simply because it will look like a miniature ranch styled house.

Imagine you entire house fitting inside of a standard sized kitchen, living room, or master bedroom!

This will not offer much in the way of luxury, but will have a full bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, laundry, and a small seating space. There will be ample heating, cooling, lighting, and cooking area. There is a walk in closet (six feet deep) and shelving wherever it doesn't interfere with walking. There will not be much insulation, but the "bubble" of the moisture and vapor layers, coupled with a few inches of insulation, and the small interior size, heated with a 1300 watt fake fireplace, cooled with a small floor model air conditioner, ought to be very comfortable unless the weather is terrible. It ought to be just comfortable enough to live in, not so much that we would want to live in it permanently.

We will build it, put it out there, move our living and our dogs, sell our present home, and build our future on Creekside Farm. Just as soon as the snow melts . . .