T42 has windows! Hip, hip, hooray!
They were two weeks late, but our windows finally arrived yesterday afternoon and with the help of my Tiny House Sidekick Meg and my friend Sarah we got them all* installed in an afternoon!
*Okay, well not quite all of them. Our hiccup on windows is that one of them was misordered. More on that in my next post...
Meg and I spent the morning installing our Z-flashing over the bottom boards and building and installing our first corner trim. We're using 5/4" by 6" boards which are, of course, really 1" thick by 5.5" wide. To make the corners look the same width in both directions we used a table saw to rip 1" off one of the sides. We then glued them together and screwed them with GRK trim screws which have a pretty star head. We were careful to set the corners up so that on the tongue side we have a full board on the tongue side so that rain won't get driven into the seam as we take the little house down the road. The Z-flashing is installed over the bottom trim board to protect it from any water that might sit on that horizontal surface and rot the wood. They're attached with tiny self-tapping metal screws to the lath. The siding will go right over the top leg of the flashing and all that will be seen is the little silver edge that comes out and over the trim. Our house is cedar, silver, and black and it should look pretty sharp!
When the windows I arrived I was so excited I nearly hugged the driver, Joe. He and his sidekick helped us unload the windows and as soon as my friend Sarah arrived we got to work with installation. I've found it's great to have three people for window install. Two to put the window in and hold it in place and then shift it whichever way it needs to go while there's one person inside the house checking for a consistent reveal all the way around the rough opening and adding shims as needed to get the window in place. Once the window is where it needs to be, the people on the outside secure it in place with fasteners through the nailing fins.
Window installation is one of my favorite moments in a tiny house build because the windows are the eyes of the house and the give the house so much of its character. Installing windows also closes up the gaps we've cut into the walls and brings us much closer to being dried in. They house is now almost ready to be outside on its own!
