January 16, 2017 Snowed in

We have been side-lined by snow for nearly a week. The forecast for the next few days is super heavy rain. Hopefully the rain will wash all of the ice and snow away, but it will take a few days and we've still a dozen large houses of lighting to take down. And then there's the trouble borne of not earning for a few weeks to deal with. But all of this sitting around hasn't completely topped preparations.

Saturday, after hair cuts, Ann (Heidi Hay) and I (Schmelling Hay) ventured out into the snowy wilds of east Portland to look over used appliances for the tiny double wide. What we need is a twenty inch propane stove and a small refrigerator. We've budgeted buying new into the project, but saving on these is a good idea because the budget is very tight. The roads of east county were close to impossible to drive, but we found the stores we were looking for, if not finding the appliances. So we ended up having a good tie, but not buying anything. The search continues, plans can change, we could win the lottery  . . .

I have also spent some time working on my accounting spreadsheet. I have been at this for a few years. Last year I got to the point where much of my accounting was simplified, but a bit clunky. This year I hope to get the thing smoothed out, simplified, and generalized so that I can sprout new businesses on the Farm without adding a bunch time doing of accounting work. A lot of people  have said I should go with an out of the box accounting package, but this is not my way of doing things.

Sitting around the house makes me nervous. I really need to build a farm.

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 . . .

January 3, 2017 We have trailer #1

It took a few days, but the frame for trailer #1 is out in our driveway.

And I must be out of my mind.

I will put up the walls and roof the thing, then drive it out to the Farm and finish the work out there. Work to start just as soon as all of our Christmas lights are taken down.

December 31, 2016

Trying to find a trailer we could live in while building has proven to be difficult. We have looked around, postulated the possibilities, found that we are either not going to like what we get, get something on payments we do not want, or have little use for what we have after we are done with it.

So last Monday we drove to Creswell to look at a few options then come back the slow way through Junction City (home of a lot of RV lots). We found a nice fifth wheel that would certainly do the job (on payments) in Creswell, from a nice woman too. But the idea of payments, and the long ride home gave us time to look deeply into what we were doing. Eventually we got through re-examining everything and, long story short, the option of finding a derelict trailer, stripping it down to the frame, and building what we want, seemed a possibility worth exploring. When we got back home I immediately found a thirty four foot trailer that would do the thing, and it was already stripped down to the frame! We decided to buy it the next day.

I woke up at 2 A.M. with worries. I knew I could definitely build the thing, had the money to buy everything, and nothing stood between us and the tiny house plan. But having a thirty four foot trailer at the end only had one use: as a house for our son to live in. There really wasn't anything else we could do with it, and re-selling a home built trailer was going to be a problem. We could maybe rent it out, but that is not the business we wanted to be in. And above all else, the width would only be nine feet, when a bed is seven feet, so tightness would be a concern.

Laying there in the wee hours I went through the building plan possibilities for the frame I found. Moving things around in my head I found fitting enough into the trailer to live wouldn't be much of a problem, but the idea still nagged at me. It occurred to me that the square footage alone was not enough to make us comfortable. Eventually I threw the idea out and, with a blank slate, started over (at about four in the morning). This is the decision I made.

Buy two derelict trailers, neither more that twenty feet, and build a double wide tiny home of sixteen by twenty feet. The square footage would be larger, the trailers easier to find and cheaper to buy, and the entire project easier to tow around. I did some looking around and found out that this will be the first ever double wide tiny home. So I messed around with some designs on my CAD program and eventually got the thing done on paper. So we went out looking at trailers. We made a deal on the first trailer we found and made an appointment to see the next candidate, and bought a nice gyro at the Mad Greek Deli.

The next morning I went out and bought the second one, a twenty four footer (bigger than the plan called for). And better still the guy we bought it from wanted to do the demolition for us, leaving a blank frame! But the second trailer (from the day before) fell through.

I changed the design to accommodate the extra four feet and this is the floor plan as of today . . .

The topmost part is the living section, the bottom the bedroom.
The washer and dryer are in the bedroom, but there is a walk in closet too.
And the pass through allows the dining area and sleeping area can blend a little.
One the left, behind the house, is the daytime dog run where the hounds will stay.

Click for larger image

Each side has it's own shed styled roof, the living room side is ten feet at the peak, the bedroom side has an eight foot peak, they meet in the middle and will add interest to the finished product. After we use this house for building, the two haves will be re-purposed.

• The large half will become Jack's apartment home, or the first tiny home rental, and for one person this is sufficient once the couch is traded out for a hide-a-bed (maybe a Murphy bed). 
• The bedroom half will become the boarding and breeding kennel. 

So this should be cute enough and comfortable enough, for long enough. But not so much so that we will want to linger in living there.

We still need a second trailer to do the second half (the lower half on this picture), but since there is no plumbing in the bedroom section, things are easier to build and not nearly so much time and effort. We are beginning to buy parts, and have already begun building shelving into the shipping container so that we can move our stuff out of our home so that we can remodel it before selling. But money has been spent, and we are on the way.

We didn't make the New Years Resolution goal of moving onto the property in 2016, but things look better for 2017. They deliver the first frame on Tuesday. We move in March.

November 25, 2016

Progress has been slow when it came to saving enough money to continue with our project. These past months have been the doldrums,no wind to propel us forward. The election took its toll, the phone wasn't ringing. But our Christmas lighting business has never failed us, and did not fail this time, so things are looking good all of the sudden.

We now have the money for our temporary trailer home, but the time to buy is not yet come. Now we have to find the right  trailer. Something that will double as a home while we build and then become something else. As we were waiting, we were looking. The amount we have budgeted should do the job well, but Craig's List is a hit and miss thing with plenty of people having time to post suspicious and false advertising. We will kiss frogs until we find our prince. . .

Having achieved this big goal, we have identified the next steps.

1. Build shelving into the shipping container so that we can begin moving the thousands of things out of our house. We will do this immediately because we have been collecting and packing boxes for months with no place for them to be while we pack more.
2. Build the fence at the front gate. This is a 75 x 50 foot enclosure where we will put the trailer and park the cars. It will have gates on all four sides and be leveled off using gravel. we can do this once we have saved the money.
3. Get the electricity permitted and installed. Then we will have water too. This is another money saving goal.
4. Buy the trailer and begin moving our family to the farm. We have the money for this today.

All of this should be done by mid-March, we hope to move in early-April with the dogs. Surprisingly, the money to do the renovation is already available, but with four dogs in the house it is silly to buy carpet and paint walls. With the half-million things in the house, everything is difficult.

Once moved we can renovate our house properly, sell it, and begin the building phase of our project in earnest. There is much to do and we are about one-third of the way there.

The goals have moved, but they are being achieved, one at a time.