tiny house build

T42 Build Blitz Kick Off

We're so excited to pick up our Tiny House trailer and get to work on the floor system! I can't believe it's just a week until we begin building another tiny house! Eeeep!

The past couple weeks, I've been working on The Lucky Penny Punch List so that I'm ready to focus my attention on my new tiny house. (See April Showers Bring May Flowers and Finishing an Owner-Built House!)

Later this week my partner Isha and I will pick up the trailer for, T42, the tiny house we're building for ourselves. On May Day, we'll begin setting up our build site at Green Anchors.

On Monday, May 2 we'll be kicking off a series of Build Blitzes for T42 and you're invited to join us! As is typical for a building project, we know that our T42 Build Timeline is subject to change, depending on weather, material sourcing, and progress made, but so far we're on track for the following timeline:

  • Monday, May 2 – Thursday, May 5: Tiny House Foundation & Build Prep
  • Monday, May 16 – Friday, May 20: SIPs Wall & Roof Raising
  • Monday, May 30 – Friday, June 3: Rainscreen, Exterior Trim, Siding
  • Monday, June 13 – Friday, June 17: Lofts, Interior Walls & Painting
  • Sunday, June 26 – Thursday, June 30: Cabinets, Built-Ins & Stairs

If you want some hands-on build experience, please join us for a week-long Build Blitz or for the day as a Tiny House Helper!

During this first Build Blitz we'll be working on the floor system for our tiny house, which will involve:

  • installing our undercarriage to protect the house from the ground - whether we're parked on on the road
  • insulating the floor system
  • installing our subfloor
  • making a cut list for our lumber package
  • measuring thrice and cutting once for our window framing, sill plates, and top plates
  • laying out and bolting down our sill plates so that the walls can be raised during our next Build Blitz
  • ensuring that our site and materials are ready for our Wall Raising Build Blitz

We hope some of you will be able to join us for the build if you're so inclined. And either way, please know that your encouragement and moral support are greatly appreciated!

Westermorrow Tiny House Design-Build

Photo Sep 10, 3 03 28 PM On Friday we wrapped up the first ever Westermorrow class – a Yestermorrow Design-Build School course taught on the West Coast. The Tiny House Design-Build class, which has been offered just once a year in VT, has filled up so quickly recently (this past year’s class filled up in just 30 minutes!) that Yestermorrow decided to offer it again here in Portland.

What an amazing experience for all of us! Patti and Lizabeth road-tripped across the country to be here. Dee Williams came down from Olympia to co-instruct with us! And our students came from California, Utah, Virginia, New York, and Illinois. We even had a student join us from South Africa and another from Montreal, Canada! In fact, the only student who was actually from Portland was our client, Merek.

We set up in St. John’s, a neighborhood in North Portland, so that we were able to build at Green Anchors (where I built my own tiny house, The Lucky Penny). We had our studio space at The Colony. And half our class stayed at Caravan – The Tiny House Hotel where they were able to try on tiny living for two weeks while building and designing. Several of them said this was a great experience and two of the seven decided that maaaybe they don’t want to live in a tiny house after all. (They both ended up designing wee houses around 600 square feet - still small enough that they’d qualify as Accessory Dwellings here in Portland, OR and a fraction the size of the average home built in America today!)

We started out our studio time with field trips and presentations covering everything from plumbing and electrical systems to regulations and interior design strategies for small spaces. In the field we started out with safety and tool orientation and then built sawhorses to practice measuring twice and cutting once. By the second week our students were shifting between the build site and the studio to move the house as far along as possible while also creating awesome tiny house designs.

There were definitely some differences between teaching the class in VT and OR. It was strange to not be on a residential campus where sleeping, eating, designing, and drafting are all just yards from each other. But it was also fun being in a more urban setting. I missed being on the scrumptious Yestermorrow meal plan, but it was fun exploring St. John’s eateries (the food carts, Proper Eats, Signal Station Pizza, Super Burrito Express, Big Kahuna’s BBQ, the baowry, etc.) And the second week, once people were comfortable with the area, I switched back to Simply Home’s Community Dinners, which are one of my favorite things!

On the build site we constructed the shell of Merek and his partner Erin’s tiny house on wheels. Their little house has a ½ and ½ roof, meaning that part of the roof is shallower and part is steeper. This allows them to have plenty of headroom in the loft and a more interesting roofline. We nailed the framing together (apparently the Doug Fir we have over here is much harder than the spruce used on the East Coast – we bent a lot of nails as we practiced!) Over here on the West Coast it seems most tiny houses are glued and screwed together instead, so we weren’t aware of this difference! We got the walls framed, sheathed, and raised and the ridge beam, roof rafters, and the first course of plywood on the steeper pitched roof before we had to turn our attention to Presentation Day.

I LOVE Presentation Day! It’s always so inspirational to see what our students create with two weeks of tiny house design and build experience (and for 7 of our students this time the experience of living in tiny houses, too!) We had awesome designs this time around, including several tiny houses on wheels (with a huge variety of layouts and roof shapes and multi-purpose furniture) and a handful of clever ground-bound houses (including an off-grid cabin with creative sleeping for the whole extended family and a small home with space for motorcycles in the living room!)

It was an honor to co-teach with some of my tiny house heros: Dee Williams, Lizabeth Moniz, and Patti Garbeck. I’m appreciative of all the folks who helped make this happen, from Mark, Dan, Luke, and Katie at Yestermorrow, to Matt, Mark, and Kevin at Green Anchors and Rita and Dana at The Colony. I'm thankful that Merek and Erin entrusted us with the beginning of their little home. And I’m especially full of gratitude for our incredible group of 14 students for inspiring me all over again! I can’t wait to follow along on their tiny house journeys! Stay tuned!

Support The Lucky Penny

Lina cutting curved rafter tales Tonight I’m so excited I’m afraid I won’t be able to sleep. My Tiny House Build Began last Friday and tomorrow is My SIPs Wall Raising! Eep! By this time tomorrow I should have four walls up!

I am already thoroughly impressed by the way my community has rallied around me and my little house, The Lucky Penny. You have been cheering me on, sending me encouraging notes, making trips to the ReBuilding Center to boneyard materials, assisting with tiny house prep, listening while I noodle through design conundrums, oohing and ahhing over pictures of my door and sink, and offering to pitch in when the time comes to make it happen.

The time has come.

I’m ready to ask for your support. That may be moral support or financial support or it may be literally holding up my rafters while we get them in place. Any which way, I’ll take it!

It’s Memorial Day weekend and my build buddy Laura and I will be hosting work parties all four days. I’ve got a great line-up of Tiny House Helpers for this weekend. Here’s my grand plan:

Next weekend I’ll be leading a guided tour for Portland’s ADU Tour (and the following weekend I’ll be at a family reunion), but I plan to host tiny house work parties the weekends of June 14-15, June 21-22, and June 28-29. If you’re in Portland and would like to help, please contact me so we can arrange a time for you to come on out and pitch in!

If you’d like to contribute but you can’t make it out here to assist in person, please consider supporting The Lucky Penny in one of these ways:

Thank you, everyone! I am grateful for your support!

My Tiny House Build Begins!

Lina- -Trailer.jpg

me and my vardo trailer Dee Williams likes to say that when building a tiny house (and most other important things in life, for that matter) "It's 1 part how to, 2 parts why not." I tend to be more of a 2-parts-how-to sort of person myself.

But one way or the other, if you've spent the past few months (or, in my case, years) contemplating your tiny dream house - designing, refining, experimenting, budgeting, and prepping - eventually it's time to start!

I start today.

Christian, one of my childhood friends, is going to help me pick up My Custom Vardo Trailer from Iron Eagle Trailers. Then Alex, a friend from Yestermorrow Design-Build School, will help me do a few more schlepping errands and get started on my floorbox.

My goal is to get my floorbox finished today so that I can focus my attention this weekend on my build buddy Laura's wall raising. My SIPs are supposed to be complete sometime mid-week so my wall raising will be next weekend. After years of eagerly anticipating this day, I'm thrilled it's finally here!

If the past couple weeks are any indication, I can't promise I'll be as good about posting for my own build as I have been for other blitz builds like the Tiny Barn Build and Yestermorrow's Tiny House Design-Build. But I assure you, dear readers, I will do my best to bring you along on this journey. I am considering a more photographic format, so stay tuned to see if that works out for us. Thank you for all your encouragement and support!

I am so delighted the moment has arrived! Here's to one part why not!

Almost Ready to Build

You know you're almost ready to begin building your tiny house when...

  • You're making lists titled "Tiny House Helpers," "Truck Errands," and "Wall Raising Day."

    Laura & Wrench

  • All the nooks and crannies of your current tiny home are filled with components for your future tiny home. (Examples may include: the sink stored in your window seat, the curved rafters on your front porch, or the power tools in your sleeping loft.)
  • Your tool belt is hanging on a hook inside the door - right next to your little black dress, of course!
  • Half the photos in your phone are either price tags or products you're considering.
  • The other half are funny pictures of you and your build buddy attempting to chronicle the experience. (You can read about our adventures Getting Ready to Build over on Laura's blog or in my post Kicking Off Spring with Tiny House Prep.)
  • You change your mind all day long, every day, about nearly everything.
  • You've been to the hardware store three times this week and anticipate at least one more trip.
  • You wake up at 3 in the morning wondering if you should reverse the swing of your door.
  • You've been writing blog posts but you've neglected get them actually posted because it's now 7AM and you can start calling the hardware stores again to see who has the materials you're looking for.

And then eventually the big day arrives and Your Tiny House Build Begins.

Upcoming Workshops: Building & Tiny House Basics

The Pedalpalooza ADU and Tiny House Tours on Saturday were great fun. Now I'm working with PAD to gear up for three exciting workshops in the coming weeks: Tiny House Work Parties are small group workshops that provide supervised, hands-on tiny house construction experience before your start building your own house. Experience and enthusiasm are contagious, and as you help put someone else's house together, you'll gain the skills, confidence, and excitement to you need to get moving on your own tiny house dream.

On Friday, July 5th PAD is hosting a work party to build the foundation of an 8-food Don Vardo that Dee Williams will take across the United States during the book tour of her memoir due out in 2014. The foundation is the most unique part of building a tiny house on wheels and helping Dee build a tiny house is a truly unique experience.

On Saturday, July 6th PAD is hosting a work party to construct the walls and roof of a 16 ft tiny house designed by Kate Goodnight, a graduate of PAD's Tiny House Basics Workshop and author of the awesome tiny house blog Naj Haus.

The weekend of July 20-21 PAD will host a Tiny House Basics Workshop, which is an introduction to Tiny House Design & Building. This workshop is comprehensive but entry-level, introducing you to the unique design and building principles that apply to a tiny house on wheels. It will include: how to properly anchor a stick-built structure to a trailer, considerations for utilities, and navigating codes, insurance, and regulations. The workshop includes a tour of a tiny house where the topics we've discussed are brought to life.

You can register for workshops on PAD's website.