Tiny House Episode 3: Framing continued Plus 3AM Rainstorm Disaster!

I had to get creative with the equipment I had on hand in order to finish the roof. Here I use a fiberglass ladder as makeshift scaffolding.

In the previous blog post on the tiny house, I review the majority of the framing in the slideshow video I made. In this post, you will see our first live video where I give a brief tour of the framing. I've also included some additional photos and commentary that I didn't share in the first framing post.

I noticed other tiny house projects they used strapping to prevent the house from shifting during transport. I added the board behind our strapping to stiffen the walls even more.

We bolted the walls to the trailer frame in 8 places with 1/2" bolts. We made plates to go under the nuts because we couldn't find washers big enough to satisfy our desire to keep the house secured to the trailer; we didn't want to take any chances of the bolt pulling off the frame. We also made a tiny spot weld to ensure there was no chance of the nut loosening inside the wall where we couldn't reach it once the wall was sealed off.

The entire house including the roof is wrapped in 1/2" foam board to prevent thermal bridging.

Every truss was secured to the top of the walls with hurricane ties.

If you are building a tiny house having it sheltered out of the rain and wind is best. However, we were able to complete our tiny house without this luxury. Once we erected the walls we had to tarp the house to keep rain off of the subfloor because it wasn’t waterproof and we wanted to keep the insulation underneath dry. One morning, at about 3:00 a.m, we awoke to the sounds of a downpour. Both of us had the feeling we should check on the house. Sure enough the tarps had failed to some degree and a large area of the floor was covered with water. We spent about an hour in the middle of the night sopping up the water with towels and wringing them out (that’s dedication!) Later in the week, I lifted part of the subfloor as much as possible to see if there was water under the OSB and, sure enough, a significant amount was sitting on the vapor barrier. More toweling ensued and after that we set up a fan to blow air under the partly lifted subfloor. Eventually, the floor dried out but boy was it a pain to tackle. 🙁

This is the aftermath of a 3:00 a.m. emergency intervention. Although not completely essential, having shelter to build under would have been a great asset.

My First Live Video: Tour of Framed Tiny House

My Website: CanadianRenegade.com