After some interesting battles with the rain lately, we finally found a few sunny days to get some work done! After receiving our tiny house trailer earlier this month, we have been hard at work. We made one big trip to Placemakers (our local hardware store) and bought all of our polystyrene insulation for our floor, along with plywood for the subfloor.

Most tiny houses we have seen have constructed a subfloor and set it on top of the trailer. Since we did not want to lose any height in our design, we decided to have galvanized sheeting mounted to the trailer, and just use the trailer as the subfloor to save on space, weight, and lumber costs. After purchasing the supplies we needed, we headed home and got straight to it. All of the polystyrene needed to be measured and cut to fit perfectly between the crossbeams of the trailer. We made sure to cut all pieces to squeeze in perfectly, while still leaving some depth for the polystyrene to breathe under the plywood subfloor.

Once all of the polystyrene was in place, we were losing daylight and decided to stop for the night.

The next day, while Jess was at work, Ness decided to take on the job of installing the subfloor. After a full day of maneuvering, cutting, and fitting the pieces, all of the sheets were screwed down. Jess came home from work just in time to point her finger, boss a little bit, and put in about four screws. Project Bosser clearly has a rough life!

In between battling the rain, our creative wheels were always spinning and we made great use of the rainy days. We have been conversing back and forth with Frametek, a local steel framing company. After much research we decided to go with a steel frame over typical lumber framing for a few different reasons. The two main reasons we chose steel framing were price and weight. Steel framing is significantly cheaper than the cost of wood here in New Zealand. Overall, we saved exponentially on weight as well!!! And who can complain about shedding a few pounds 😉

After a few afternoons of back and forth designing and redesigning, we finally came to a solid design. Our design was converted into a 3D model.  We are so excited to see how it looks when it all comes together!

The front (left) and rear (right) views of our tiny house design.

Here is a little peek into our day trip to Frametek to see our frame being cut and pieced together.  A big shout out to Steve, Cameron, and Roger over at Frametek, these guys are awesome, if you ever get the chance to do business with them, tell them we sent you!

What’s next for TinyHousewives???

We will be making our trip to Frametek this week to have our steel frame installed on our trailer!!! Later this week, there will be more pictures and posts to follow. Thanks again for all of your love and support!!

           

Did I mention…..

WE HAVE A TRAILER!!!

Our tiny house trailer finally arrived and if you notice, it did not arrive when we expected it to….. back in October (A lesson we are beginning to learn very well…. Everything will take longer than expected, especially on Kiwi time!!!). Nonetheless, we had plenty to do in our “free time.” We took the time to level our spot and bring in some mulch. We also need to give a special thanks to Jess’s Dad, Jamie, for trimming the low hanging branches off the overgrown tree just above where we will have our tiny house.

What’s next???

Now that we have our tiny house trailer, we will be placing polystyrene insulation in the floor, and installing the subfloor. More photos and updates to follow! Thank you all for your kind words, your love, and support throughout this journey.

Today is Ness’s 28^th birthday and oh what a birthday it has been! We have some catching up to do and need to fill you in on some of the back story. We were expecting to receive our tiny house trailer back in October and knew that there was some intense preparation that needed to be done before it arrived.

 

A few pictures of the workings and progress of our trailer in October.

There was a pretty decent slope in the area that we wanted to park our tiny house and we needed to level the ground out before receiving our trailer. We looked into renting a little dozer to help us with the work. After a full day of play and getting carried away demolishing our neighbor’s shed 🙂 we finally had a level spot.

Some of the pictures from our day. The bottom right is a picture of the remnants of the neighbor’s shed.

We knew we needed to add rock, or some type of landscaping material, to keep the dirt pile we created from turning into a mud pit. The next day, we ventured out and bought some weed mat as well as some large bark mulch to beautify our mess. After a weekend full of work and play, our patch is now ready and willing to receive our tiny house trailer!