Covering the Line Set and Installing all the Vents Part 1

Last weekend we got the line set routed, but it wasn't fastened to the trailer underneath, and it definitely wasn't protected from anything that may jump up at it when going down the road. So this week we had to take care of that. Drew gleaned inspiration from this video on YouTube and decided that he could bend some thin galvanized steel to form a cover and something that held the line set up at the same time.

Below is the back corner piece being bent to fit into place. This piece was the only piece that was cut first and then bent.

The rest of the pieces were straight runs and it was easier to bend them and then cut them with the electric sheet metal shear that Drew's dad left when we worked on the metal roof. Below is what the piece looked like right as it was ready to be cut.

In the next picture, Drew had already worked his way up from the back of the trailer (working back to front so the overlap is favorable to the direction we will be going down the road) to in between the axles. The picture attempts to show how the metal is bent and installed. To the right of the white insulated line set in the picture is a 6 inch steel beam and above it are 4 inch beams with a sheet metal bottom. This makes roughly a 2 inch corner (since the beams are flush on the top of the trailer) that we used to hide the line set in, and only needed to bend the sheet metal to create the other two sides instead of three.

Some action shots of Drew putting in the last piece (photographs courtesy of Abbie).

There is a break in the sheet metal covering where the scissor jack juts out. That's why the corner piece was the last piece.

The finished product!

Now onto some vents! First up was the LUNOS e2. If you look at the linked brochure you'll notice that they come as pairs. So we had two ~6 1/4 inch diameter tubes that needed to be placed. One in the living room and the other in the sleeping loft. We made a frame inside the wall for each LUNOS e2 unit and transferred the center of the frame on the outside using a drill through the wall. Then used a jigsaw to cut the hole for the tube.

The outside of the LUNOS is supposed to be flush with the outside of the siding, so we used a sample piece of the cedar lap and gap to measure how far the tube needed to come out and then sealed it up in place.

Below is the finished product from the outside after it has been properly flashed and sealed.

And here is what it looks like from the inside. We will just put finish trim up around the part of the tube that protrudes inside the house.

Next up was the vent for the composting toilet. We are using a Nature's Head composting toilet and it has a fan that runs 24/7 to expel the smells from the toilet. So it needed a way to vent to the outside. The easiest way to do that was with 1 1/4 inch PVC pipe that the hose, supplied with the toilet, can connect to and that will vent to the back of the house. So we used a hole saw to make the correct sized hole for the PVC pipe and then used some 2x4s to hold it in place.

This is what the toilet vent looks like from the outside once it was sealed up.

Next up is plumbing, more vents, and exterior electrical boxes!

Electrical Boxes, the Line Set, and Joist Cleaning

If you've been following our blog, you might remember a post that mentioned a battle of the light switches... Well we finally came to a compromise and it was time to start putting up the electrical boxes. Abbie took the initiative and started hanging the boxes. Some of them were in trickier locations than others, but Abbie got them done! She did say that her wrists were hurting the next few days because of the weird angles she had to use the hammer in. It is a tiny house after all, but her tennis two-handed backhand sure came in handy!

While Abbie was hanging the electrical boxes, Drew was working on routing the line set (refrigerant lines) for the mini split (laymen terms: the AC/heating unit). The evaporator half of the mini split is going to be up high on the wall between the two lofts and the condenser is mounted on the back side of the trailer. So the lines needed to make their way between the two.

Here are a few options we considered for routing the lines:

• Straight down inside the wall, through the trailer, and along the bottom of the trailer
• Through the studs in the wall all the way to the back of the trailer
• Up through the rafters all the way to the back of the trailer and then down the inside of the wall
• The normal method on a house, which is through the wall and then along the outside of the house all the way to the back of the trailer

After much thought, we decided the best option for us was to route the lines down the inside of the wall, through the trailer and along the bottom of the trailer. It was going to be the easiest (routing copper lines is not fun) while still looking good (not having a channel running along the outside of the house).

So Drew took a 1 1/2 inch hole saw to make three holes in the bottom plate and subfloor.

A 3 inch hole saw to the bottom of the trailer, and cut out the insulation that was in between.

Pro tip: don't cut a hole in metal from below while wearing a fleece jacket... it was not fun picking the metal shards out of it.

Then we had to route the line set from the outside to the inside up the wall, and finagle it over the axles and to the back of the trailer.

Before she went back to college, Grace, Abbie's sister, helped us out with putting a second coat of paint on some sample interior paneling. We wanted to see what it looked like up on the wall and with several pieces of the tongue and groove together.

We still are a little worried that it may make the house look a little busy with the close lines, but we can't really afford the weight of the thicker shiplap. It would add about 600 lbs to the overall weight?!

Now onto cleaning the Douglas fir joists before they get stained, and it was quite the task... The cleaning process involved clean rags, a scrub brush and some good ol' denatured alcohol. Abbie jumped on this task and did an awesome job, even though she hated every minute of it. She was ready to call it quits several times and just paint the joists. We persevered and while the joists aren't perfect (just don't look too closely if you come visit us), they look much better and are ready to be stained!

Next up is installing all the vents on Rosey Leigh and covering up the line set on the bottom side of the trailer to protect it.

Spray Foam Murder Scene

Before we started on the spray foam, we noticed that our windows had taken on a little bit of water. It had rained pretty hard in Granbury during the week, and it gave us an opportunity to test the windows. Nothing came into the house, but there was some water in the bottom of the slider channels of a few windows that appeared to have experienced some wind driven rain. After a little bit of research it seemed like with slider windows it is normal to have a little water in the slider channel after a hard rain. There are drainage holes in the window that are designed to get that water out, and the next day all of the water was gone. The drainage holes worked!

Now as you may have guessed with the title of this post, we went a little crazy on the expanding foam insulation (Great Stuff). And by we, we mean Drew. While the rough openings for the windows and door were very close to a perfect fit, due to many precise measurements along the way, there were some gaps that needed to be filled.

Please raise your hands if you love a drafty house?! See, no one. For this reasons, Drew spent Saturday going a little overboard with the Great Stuff around every window, the door and even in the headers. Foaming the headers were mainly just to add a little insulation in them to raise their R-value slightly by getting rid of the air gap.

Be warned, you will have to clean up this mess once it dries. Abbie spent Sunday with a knife carefully cutting off all of the extra goop. Carefully, because you want to avoid cutting the window, house wrap, and flashing tape underneath. Below is what a window looks like when it is cleaned up a little bit. The trim we are going to put up around the window will cover the rest of the spray foam once it is installed.

After finishing up with the window and door gaps. We also needed to tape the house wrap to the top of the top plate. This finishes off the top of the house wrap and gets us ready for installing the fascia vents and the rafter baffles which together will vent the roof (you'll hear about this in more detail in a later post).

In the first picture below you can see the house wrap between the subfascia (2x4 in the top of the picture) and the top plate (2x4 in the bottom of the picture). It's not really attached to anything at this point and it just flaps in the wind. So we had to cut the house wrap at each rafter, fold it over of the top plate, and tape it down with Tyvek tape.

The picture below shows the finished product.

Next up will be installing the line set (refrigerant lines) for the mini split and setting the electrical boxes!

Christmas Elves at Work

'Twas the weekend before Christmas, when all 'round the tiny house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse... Seriously though we were getting some work done. Saturday Abbie and Statia (Abbie's sister) worked on experimenting with Japanese wood burning (known as shō sugi ban) as Drew drank his beer.

Abbie used a propane torch to burn the wood and Statia used a brush to get rid of the charring. Statia would then seal the wood with linseed oil. We experimented with varying levels of charring with the torch and using either a plastic or a wire brush.

We came to the conclusion that it was going to be a lot of work if we wanted to do the whole house in the burnt wood. Also the wood seemed to cup up when it was burned which would make it much more difficult to install on the tiny. So we are going to look at other options for the siding such as staining, but we do like the look of the cedar lap and gap.

When Drew wasn't drinking his beer he was assisting Buddy (Abbie's dad) with building a deck on the side of the concrete pad. That way we could more easily get into and out of the tiny house. We plan on building a platform and a ramp/steps also. Working on the deck went into Sunday, but we got it finished up before the extra help was set to arrive.

Now we both had Christmas Eve and Christmas off, and Drew also had the rest of the week off from work. We hoped to get a lot done during that week! Especially since we were going to have some help from some Christmas elves (AKA the Rosecrans' crew). Drew's parents were able to fly down from Montana to spend the holiday with us and help on Rosey Leigh.

So starting off on Monday, Christmas Eve, we were hoping to pick up the roofing material from Mueller before we picked up Drew's parents at the airport, but unfortunately they were closed. This just meant that instead of working on Christmas day we were going to have to have family time... Lame, we know. The main reason we wanted to work on Christmas day was because rain was in the forecast for Boxing day (day after Christmas). Therefore the day after Christmas was mainly used to gather all our material. But during the breaks in the rain we also got the fascia installed, so Thursday we would be ready to start the roof first thing.

Thursday morning we started installing the roof and it went pretty well, but the last piece was a little off square. Just bad enough that we'll know about it, but no one else will ever notice without us pointing it out. We also got our windows and door delivered on Thursday around noon, so once we finished the roof we were able to jump right in to installing windows. By the end of Thursday we got all the roof panels installed minus some trim and a few of the windows.

Friday we finished up the roof trim and finished installing all the windows and also got the door installed! It's starting to look even more like a real house!

Friday evening we had even more help come in. Nathan (Drew's brother) came down from Oklahoma to lend a hand. Unfortunately though we didn't have too much work for him. All we lacked for the weekend was installing the loft joists and the bathroom wall with a pocket door.

For the loft joists we decided to go with rough cut Douglas Fir because they were going to be exposed (except in the bathroom). They were a little bit more expensive, but we really liked the look they were going to give the tiny. We didn't install the joist hangers yet for a couple reasons. One, we don't need all this help to install them and also we want to stain or seal (we haven't decided yet) the joists first.

On Saturday we took our time getting started, but eventually got some of the joists installed before we had to take a break and go check out Revolver Brewery down the road. We had a great time at Revolver, but once we got back from day drinking it was clear no more work was getting done that day.

With our last day of extra help we finished up the loft joists and the bathroom wall with the pocket door hardware. We don't have the door yet, but it is going to be a standard 24" by 6'8" door that matches the front door style as much as we can. Once we get it we will most likely have to sand/cut a little off of the bottom of the door because the bottom of the joists is going to be 6'8" from the finished floor, but we did flush the pocket door hardware with the bottom of the joists. As of now, if you don't count the stairs, all the framing is done!

Since we had so many helpers the weekend after Christmas and only so many people can work in a tiny house (we do hope to have that many people in the house at once when it's done though!), there was some planning going on in parallel.

Abbie, Statia, and Debi (Drew's mom) made a trip to Lowe's to look at flooring, paint, and stain (interior and exterior) colors. Debi and Statia helped out Abbie a lot by narrowing down the choices. Abbie was understandably getting some analysis paralysis with all the available options. Anyone who has looked at colors for anything on a house knows that there are definitely way way too many options. Stay tuned, we'll have a whole post just for colors and stains!

They returned with some samples and tested out some stains on the Douglas Fir for the joists, the lap and gap cedar for the siding, and for what is an option for our interior wall paneling seen below. Here is a link to it at Lowe's. It has a good price point and is a good lightweight option because it's only 1/4 inch thick. There are some reservations though that the 3 and a half inch boards making the walls look too busy. So we are exploring other options as well for the interior wall paneling.

So we got quite a bit finished on Rosey Leigh and had a great time over the holidays with family! Next will be foaming in all the windows and door and starting with all the routings (electrical, plumbing, refrigerant lines) that need to go in.

Mystery Water and Hurricane Ties

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, in between all the planning and purchasing (outlined in our last blog post), we also did a small amount of work on Rosey Leigh.

Buddy (Abbie's Dad) really helped us out during the week. He was able to get some of the scrap OSB over the windows and door so the wind wouldn't tear up the house wrap or make a racket when the wind blew. He also installed some temporary lighting inside the tiny so we would be able to work inside until the windows get installed and at night.

The only other thing that we did was install the hurricane ties on the rafters. The hurricane ties make a more secure connection between the top plate and the roof rafters. That way we won't lose the roof when we are driving down the highway with the house.

We also found a little surprise waiting for us inside the tiny. After a hard rain in North Texas a few little water pools were standing on the subfloor.

They seemed a little odd and it wasn't immediately obvious where the water was coming in, but we think we narrowed it down. Either that it was coming in through the vent area for the rafters, that will be covered up after the roof is installed, or underneath the bottom plate, which we will be caulking before we move forward. So hopefully we don't see any more water inside Rosey Leigh after we get these two things done!