The Trailer

I'm quite behind, but I've been soooo busy the past 5 weeks. Here's the first of many to bring you all up to speed.

We finally (after many delays and worried emails) picked up our trailer.

Isn't it beautiful!

We ordered our 20' trailer from Tiny Home Builders. We opted for the dropped axle which provides 2-3 extra inches of head space. I didn't know until I received the trailer that a dropped axle also decreases the width of the trailer bed from 7' 6" to 7' 3". If I had known, I probably would have for forgone the dropped axles which cost extra anyway. However, the trailer is well made and Dan at Tiny Home Builders jumped through a few hoops for us to make sure we would get our trailer by the time my dad flew in from Alaska to help with the build. 

We spent a long time making sure the bed of the trailer was level so that the house would be level as we built upon it. You might notice in the picture above that we'd already put in the aluminum sheeting we installed to protect our rigid foam insulation from road water. Here's a pic of that installation. 

That's my dad rockin' the pony tail! I ordered my aluminum sheeting from a fabrication shop and they cut it to size for us. Many tiny home builders will cover the entire top of the trailer bed with metal sheeting because they then build a floor frame on top of it. This has never made sense to me since the trailer already has a frame and if you put your insulation down into the frame of the trailer it saves you 3.5 inches of head space!

We did have to do a little bit of finagling to fit the sheeting in because I ordered it before we actually had the trailer. DO NOT DO THIS!!! The only reason I did that was because our trailer was so late coming in and I wanted to save build time because my dad only had 10 days to work with me. We were lucky that the aluminum fit the way it did because even though I called the manufacturer to get the the sizes I needed for the metal, when we actually got it we found some measurements that differed from what I got over the phone. It would have been much safer to just take the measurements I needed myself to make sure. We had to install some angle iron on the edge of one of the channels to take up extra space as well as on the front and back to hold it up on the edges.

 

We used self tapping screws to attach the angle iron and the sheeting to the trailer frame. I destroyed several drill bits in the process. Screwing through metal is not so easy. Then we used silicone calking around all the edges of the aluminum sheeting to seal the insulation off from any ground water that would attempt to make an entrance. Whew... that only took two days.