Saturday, April 26, 2014

A Little Re-design

I've been thinking about the ladder problem in our house. As much as I could climb up and down a ladder to get to the sleeping loft, I don't really want to. However, I've been very attached to the layout of our living area and I played around a couple times with putting a staircase in, but it just didn't work for me. A couple days ago I thought about putting the stair case at the back of the house instead of the front. When I Sketched it up, I found myself totally in love with the results.

These stairs (which I found instructions for here) also provide lots of storage space which my previous design was seriously lacking. I really like the way it looks and the flow it provides in the house.

It even provides comfortable orientation of and access to the bed, something that I was struggling with before. 

I did this sketch on a 7 foot wide trailer since I've been having trouble finding access to an 8' one and am playing around with settling for less. I'd rather not, but I think we'd be okay if that's what we need to do. 

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Heating and Cooking

Heat and energy are hot topics in the green building sphere. If I were building a house on the ground I would build it to use passive solar heat with thermal mass and local, natural building materials for sure. However, given the extremely limited space and weight restrictions associated with building on a trailer, our green building options are correspondingly limited. Today I want to talk about heating our home.

As far as I can tell, our heating options are electric, propane, gas, or wood. Since we'll be off the grid using solar panels, I don't want to rely on them to heat the house in the winter. Propane and gas have pros for lots of people, but for me, I really don't want to be reliant on fossil fuels that use environmentally destructive extraction methods. The whole point of this house project is to reduce our compliance with the grid and remove as many petrochemical products from our lives as possible. I grew up using wood burning heat and am very comfortable and enchanted with using wood stoves.

There are a couple of beautiful and adorable marine wood stoves available.

This one is so cute, but it takes at least 6 months to be delivered because they custom make each one.
Right now, this is the one at the top of my list. I'm excited about it and it's actually cheaper than the Dickson's Marine propane stoves.

As far as cooking goes, I've decided to omit an oven. They are big and I don't bake that much anyway. If I need to bake anything I'll have to do it in my dutch oven. Today I discovered that there are alcohol fueled cook stoves! Here is an article I found useful about them. Aside from ethanol not being a petrochemical, I really enjoy that it isn't explosive. Also, if I get really ambitious I can make it myself. The Origo 3000 double burner stove is only $350. In the summer I'll try to do most of the cooking out doors on a grille or fire pit. While ethanol or grain alcohol is significantly more expensive per gallon than propane, the pros significantly outweigh the cons at this point.

I really enjoyed reading this blog post and the quote she posted from Ann Holley,  “It’s really important to have all of your utilities before you begin building,” she said, “so that you know the exact dimensions and what you’ll need to do to install them. It really helps to plan that out ahead of time.” With that in mind, we'll be ordering our utilities quite soon. I just want to sleep on it one more night. 

Monday, April 7, 2014

The Great Insulation Debate

I went through quite a journey this morning thinking about how to insulate our tiny house. For the last year or so, I've been planning to use either recycled denim or wool insulation. They are natural, non-toxic products that are safe to install. But, I've also been talking with builders I know to ask their opinions. Specifically I was asking about how to insulate the floor in a way that minimizes the height inches that could otherwise be used as valuable head space. My dad has been brainstorming for me and we considered laying blue board on the deck of the trailer and laying the floor right on top of it. This would take about 2 inches. Yes! Saved 2"! Then we thought about putting the blue board under the deck. Saves another 2". Then he suggested that it might be better to use spray polyurethane foam (SPF) under the deck as it would completely seal the floor of the deck.

 Hmm... I'll have to think about that. Yesterday I asked my uncle his opinion as he is a building contractor. He suggested that we use the foam not only in the floor but in the walls and ceiling as well. It would provide an R-value (this is the unit of measurement for how well an insulation prevents temperature transfer) equal to a standard house with just an inch an a half of foam. It would also contribute greatly to the stability of the structure because when it hardens it adheres to the surfaces it's in contact with and would basically make the floor, walls, and ceiling one continuous solid mass. This seemed highly desirable to me. However, I'm also highly concerned with toxicity in the home.

So this morning I went on a google quest to find out more about insulation. I found this website developed by the EPA to help people use SPF safely http://www.spraypolyurethane.org/. Then I discovered that Ecovative is developing an insultaion made out of mushrooms!!! http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/tiny-house-mostly-made-mushrooms.html, http://www.ecovativedesign.com/products-and-applications/insulation/. I want it. Unfortunately it is not available yet. Bah! Then I discovered this article which put me pretty solidly back on team denim. http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/whats-the-greenest-insulation.html . Apart from the dangers associated with installing the SPF which include inducing extreme chemical sensitivity, this quote reminded me of a lot of other things that are important to me:

...there are many legitimate arguments against the use of a petrochemical, high-embodied energy, non-renewable, non-recyclable, non-permeable, difficult to remove, problematic for renovation, and expensive insulating material.

I guess we'll just have to use a lot of good screws to ensure the structure is solid.

Friday, April 4, 2014

Designing Your Tiny House

When sketching houses, I just draw whatever I'm thinking about, but when designing houses, I usually start with a floor plan. It's important to know where you're going to put things and that they will fit before you spend a lot of time drawing or building them in. My original floor plan looks like this:
A floor plan allows you to see traffic paths between spaces, to play with the location of rooms and furniture, and to notice how certain spaces may interact with each other. Tiny houses in particular require a well thought-out floor plan. You need to know where you'll be spending time, what you require of those spaces, and the simplest, most practical way to organize them. If you are unsure of how to begin, a bubble chart is a great place to start.
Determine your activities and give a name to the space in which you'd like to do them. You'll probably sleep in a bed for example. Allow the size of each bubble to reflect the amount of time you expect to spend there relative to the other bubbles. Then rearrange the bubbles so that activities you often switch between are close together. You can also make choices about spaces you'd like removed from sight; for example, if you want to have a children's play area, you can decide if you want it to be under your nose or out of your hair. In my plan, I know I want food and family time to be close together and easy to access. I've put all the social space out front. I put the bathroom and Royce's office under the loft because they are private spaces and should be removed from the notice and distraction of the social spaces. There's also a space back there for the batteries and any other work stuff that doesn't need constant attention. The bubble chart allows you to get a feel for how your house should flow. Then you can fill in the details with a floor plan. Then if you want to you can build up the flow plan in SketchUp to see how the house might actually look! Having a plan is so important. Having the image in mind is so motivating!

Thursday, April 3, 2014

The Height Problem

If you intend to be able to move your house on the road, it cannot exceed 13 feet 6 inches tall. We intend to put a sleeping loft in our house, and since the house is built on a trailer that means the potential head space on both levels is very limited and every inch is precious. Since we don't have our trailer yet, I'm not exactly sure how high the floor is going to be. For preliminary planning purposes I've been allowing 2 ft for it. This first problem I had was that I'd really like to put a sliding glass door on the long wall:
These doors basically come in standard dimensions and particularly since I'm planning on picking one up for free on craigslist I can count on it being 80 inches tall. If I build the sleeping loft the way you normally do, with the joists sitting on top of the top plate of the walls (like this is you don't know what that means)
that means we'll only have about 3 feet between the floor of the loft and the highest point of the roof. Also, our bed is 1 foot tall. It was starting to look more like a crawl space than a sleeping loft and I really didn't want to feel like I was sleeping in a coffin. So my solution to this is to frame the loft into the wall rather than on top of it. It looks like this.
This allows me to lower the loft without losing any height on the walls. The other thing I decided to do was to add a dormer in the loft.
This will give us a little extra head space in the loft. A little more feeling of openness. Anyway, this is what I've come up with so far. I'm making this up as I go along, so I'll let you know if it works out! This blog gives good advise about how to customize your trailer to maximize head space: http://tinyhousebuild.com/gain-head-space-tiny-house-design/

Up til now

Royce (my husband) and I have been talking about building a tiny house on wheels for over a year. At first we couldn't decide whether we wanted to spend our money on a trip to the UK to walk the Coast to Coast trail or on a tiny house. A couple months ago we decided to build the house and to do by the time our lease is up in the middle of September. I've been oogling pictures of tiny houses for a long time so I had lots of ideas about what I might want my house to look like. About a year ago I started reading books about drafting and architecture. I started practicing drawing and designing houses of various sizes and materials. I discovered Google SketchUp in January and spent a couple of days developing houses on it. (SO FUN!) Ultimately I decided that this is the design I like the best:
Luckily for me, Royce is perfectly happy to let me steer on designing at this stage. Then we decided on a budget for our house, $10,000. This is for everything including the photovoltaic system. We plan to be completely off the grid. I'm fortunate to know several handy people including my dad who builds custom full scribe log cabins in Alaska. I've been reading his books and picking his brain, asking him questions, and solving problems for the last couple months. I'll go into some of these in detail later. Where we are now: I'm looking to have a trailer by May. I'm collecting building materials for free from craigslist. Considering that we have less than 6 months for finish it and move in, I'm eager to get started!

A Good Suggestion

I was having an extended tea time with a dear friend today. We were talking about stuff and things including my husband and my current mission to build ourselves a tiny house on wheels and my ambition to become a Landscape Architect. She suggested wisely that I use a blog to document our progress and that I could use it later as a component in my portfolio. What a smart girl.