Well here we are…

 

Starting with the Bathroom, the best dollar we have ever spent was on our bathtub. We had originally planned to install a shower because we only had 1500mm in length to work with, and it is difficult to find tubs of that size. However, after browsing on Trademe (a New Zealand trading site like Craigslist/Ebay) for a shower, we came across the perfect sized tub and placed a bid for $1. I guess the tub was a little small for most, so lucky for us we ended up winning the auction. 😀 The tub is in absolute perfect condition, and frugal Jess could not be any happier.

Bath/shower liners are ridiculously expensive here, so we knew we needed to come up with a more feasible option. Ness had previously lined a shower with corrugated iron, so we set out on a mission to find some. We visited the recycling center and scored several sheets of corrugated iron for a fraction of the cost of a plastic liner = awesomeness! After fitting the corrugated steel, Ness trimmed it in nicely with left over pallet wood.

We acquired the bathroom vanity in a garage sale. It was extremely dirty and overall looked crappy, but we saw the potential and it was very cheap! Taps/faucets are also extremely expensive here (well I’m not sure what isn’t ;)) and amazingly inside the vanity contained a kitchen tap and bathroom tap yayyyyyy! We took off the really gross cabinet doors and built some out of recycled pallet wood and left over weatherboard from the neighbours. Thanks again Mark and Tina!

 

Ahh the ladder project. We wanted to make a library ladder; however, the components were too costly and we could not source some of things we needed second hand. However, we did obtain some gross looking, blue painted galvanized piping, where there was a terrarium growing out of each end of the pipes!! After Jess sanded down the pipes and cut them to size, we were able to create an awesome rail system. This permits moving the ladder across the width of the house to be able to climb up at any point.

The Terrarium, and before and after sanding:

After:

 

And the final exterior pictures:

And the final interior pictures:

 

We all know that the end of one project is never the end of ALL projects….

Aka ‘Da Throne!’

 

Who doesn’t like a composting toilet?!?!

 

A composting toilet just makes sense for a tiny house. It means you have no black water waste, you are not wasting an average of 3.6 gallons (13.6 liters) of water per flush, and you can use the compost to fertilize any flowering/plant/tree that is a non-consumption item.

 

A lot of people of people are really freaked out about the fact that it is a human litter box, but with the correct balance of peat moss there really is no smell at all.

 

We simply built a box, which stores a rather lovely rubbish bin 😉 There is also a separate container for the pete moss so it is all contained. We finished it off with a lovely ‘soft close’ toilet seat!

 

A special thanks goes out to Mark and Tina our next door neighbours for the Christmas present of a Mitre 10 giftcard which allowed us to purchase the needed items for our homemade composting toilet… aka rubbish in a box.

Of course the throne has a light, look at her glow:

The pallet couches were Ness’s project.

Thanks to Jess’s Dad for mistakenly taking her vegetarian lunch for “smoko” (kiwi slang for break-time at work!), we happened to come across some very awesome pallets when we were bringing him his correct lunch as requested lol. We spotted these pallets in his work yard and asked him if they were rubbish. It turns out they were, and we scored a couple of awesome pallets and collapsible boxes. These collapsible boxes as it happens are what Ness has always dreamed of making a couch out of! Perfect!! Ness also cleverly built storage within the couches to utilize every ounce of space. This is an important concept for a tiny house as you can imagine 😉

The pallets and Ness building a frame:

Pallet couches:

“Suzy Homemaker” also made some homemade cushions from our left over insulation:

This was Jess’s project, although Ness definitely helped with the kitchen countertop part 😉

It literally took Jess an entire day to sand the nastiness and 20+ years of paint off of these dressers. They were disgusting! However, we knew the ‘bones’ were great, and that it would eventually be a very rewarding outcome. After Jess sanded them down, we mixed our own left over white paint with a tester pot paint of black to get the desired grey color we wanted. We used a broken coat hanger and the drill to mix the paint. We learned this handy trick on You Tube, and it worked great! The plan was to use 1 dresser for the living space, and 1 for the kitchen.

We went through so many ideas on how to create a kitchen counter top, such as, a concrete counter top, a countertop of copper pennies (except the “pennies” in New Zealand are actually worth 10 cents!), an old door, a butcher-block, and then finally the most feasible idea with the resources we had available was a double ply base with a sheet of stainless steel on top. This was the exact industrial look we were trying to achieve, and we believe it looks fab! Once this was done, we cut the hole for the sink, and mounted it to finish the kitchen countertop. We also had to increase the height to countertop height by building a frame to the bottom of the dresser.

Bedfore:

Here goes nothing:

After:

This was definitely one of the easier parts yayyyyy! For flooring we decided on vinyl click and lock. This allowed us to lay continuous flooring throughout the entire house. Vinyl flooring offers many benefits, such as, high durability, waterproofing, sound dampening, it’s free-floating, and there is no need for underlayment. The installation was simple, and the flooring is very easy to clean.

 

Vinyl flooring was an easy choice for us, and we are so happy with how it has turned out 🙂 It was extremely easy to cut which made us super happy; you just score ‘n’ snap and you are away!

And with the final touch below, baseboard 🙂 We could finally use a nail gun and finish nails for the trim, which made things a lot easier!

 

We could NOT WAIT to get to this stage! At each stage during this project you always fervently look forward to a future stage. You learn that “the stage” you were desperate to get to, is always a bit more of a pain in the ass than you anticipated lol. We have also continuously learned that you cannot predict the preparation time for the task you intend to do, and it is usually the most time consuming part!

 

We had originally hoped that we could get away with going for the industrial look by placing the interior siding screws in a uniform fashion so we did not have to fill a couple of hundred holes! Yeah,… nice try! Plans don’t usually got to plan :X …. and because we have a steel frame we have triangular framing in certain places; therefore, we had lots of screw holes to fill and sanding to do prior to painting! You have got to love the preparation phase 😉

 

Getting the paint on the walls was very rewarding; we were starting to see a house forming! We decided to go with white to provide more light and enhance the perception of the size.

We decided to break up the white with a feature wall of pallet wood. We absolutely love how the pallet wall has turned out!

After much thought and researching we decided to go for a lightweight plywood rather than jib/drywall. Jib as they call it here, is quite heavy and we thought  perhaps it was not the best option for a “mobile” home. Tongue and groove was an important factor for us, so we decided to go with the smallest thickness in T&G that was available. It turns out the only product that was <12mm in tongue and groove uses that label very loosely, as we could not see the tongue and grooves when they arrived :O! Ahhh well it looks great now anyway 😀

 

In the midst of this, Ness was offered a “seasonal” job in the South Island and started off the siding in the Bathroom before she jetted off for 3 months!! This left Jess to finish the big job of installing the rest of the siding by herself before she joined Ness in a couple of weeks! There were some very minor melt downs 😉 …. Ah you know, tools malfunctioning, product anomalies, having to drill into the steel frame, and the green stuff twisting around the screws, etc… never the person of course 😉

We started with the ceiling, then Ness got us started off in the bathroom before she buggered off, and to the far right is Jess’s first solo piece.

Site supervisor ‘Shooter’ laying down on the job as per usual 😉