Siding Pictures!

 

 

A Week in the Life

Last year I did a post like this, called A Day in the Life, but so much has changed, and I’ve been busy getting my siding up almost every day. 🙂 I’ve been working hard!

Friday

I get up, eat some cereal and yogurt, then tie up my boots and head out to the tiny house.

I cut pieces to length, with the angles for the joints.

I’m getting good at these cuts!

I stain edges, and get my sister to help me put up a few rows. My mum also helps for a bit. I get 4 rows done.

Then I go get ready for work. I work for 4 hours, until 9pm.

My sister and I go to the drive-in and see Wonder Woman and Everything, Everything. 🙂

We get home and I go to sleep at 2am.

Saturday

I get up, eat cereal and yogurt, then go outside.

Some friends of friends happen to drive by, and see me in the yard. They pull in and ask for a tour, which I’m happy to give. We talk for a bit about systems and parking.

Then I cut boards.

Beautiful!

So many scraps!

I stain the cut edges. I don’t have help today.

I get ready for work, and work for 5 hours. It was crazy busy.

I go out for burgers with my best friend after work.

Sunday

I get up and eat more cereal and yogurt. I’m addicted at this point. 😛

I go outside and get ladders, sawhorses, and boards set up.

I cut, stain, and put up some small boards on the front of the house.

Nails set in a piece for the front wall.

I cut some boards for the back.

Steph helps for a bit, but then she has to work. I have Sundays off. 🙂

Mum helps me get the rest of the boards up on the side walls! She also helps me get a few rows up on the back wall. 13 rows up!

I think I hit a nail… 😛

I finish up around 9pm, then go inside to enjoy my well-deserved supper and Netflix. 🙂

Monday

I wake up early and take my car in to get all-season tires put on (finally).

I start working on the house, and get some cutting and staining done since I don’t have help today. I get some little pieces up around the front window.

Labeled & nails set, ready to go.

Well that’s annoying.

I was able to take down and replace some of the pieces that split, but some split only after they had been fully nailed down. Some creative fixes will be needed. 😛

A woman who walks past every day calls out, “You’re doing a good job!” as she goes by.

I make myself some food, get ready for work, and work for a few hours.

I spend my evening with friends and we get take-out quesadillas after work. 🙂

Tuesday

I sleep in a little bit after staying up late, then get out to do some more cutting and staining.

I don’t have help today, but I try to get all the pieces I’ll need ready for tomorrow, when I have a friend coming to help.

The difference between a nice circular saw blade and the jigsaw’s cut.

So pretty!

A friend texts to ask if he can bring his dad to show him the house, and I tell them to come on over.

I give a little tour, and receive compliments on a job well done. 🙂 “Keep doing what you’re doing.”

I go get ready for work, and work for a few hours.

I spend the evening with friends again, and we get Subway.

Wednesday

I wake up early, eat, and get out to the house earlier than usual. I get the last few boards for the back wall cut, and I’m staining the ends when my friend shows up to help.

The first two pieces are a pain, and one splits after it’s already nailed down. 😦 We move on to the back wall, and get 17 rows up before he has to leave to get ready for work.

I get my mum to help for a half hour, and we get 4 more rows up.

Then I get ready for work, and I work for a few hours.

I come straight home, change my clothes, and go out to the house. I measure and cut two angled boards for the end walls in the last hour of daylight.

Then I go in and enjoy my food and Netflix before bed.

Thursday

I sleep in a little bit then have my cereal and yogurt (it keeps me full while I build!)

I get in a few hours of work on the house.

I don’t have help today, but I’m working on the front wall around the octagon.

I cut and test-fit and stain, and since the pieces are short, I’m able to nail them up by myself. I get 3 rows up.

I get ready for work, then I work for a few hours.

I come straight home again and ask for Mum’s help.

We get 2 more rows up on the back before it gets completely dark.

I go out to put gas in my car, pick up some groceries, go to the bank, and I get a burger while I’m out.

Then I finally get to sit, relax with some TV, then a bit of reading before bed. ❤

~

The siding is far from perfect. Gaps here, splits there, less than perfect joints, extra nails… it looks great from a distance. But done is better than perfect, and the siding was definitely doing its job as it poured rain today (I finally took a break). I’ve ordered some caulking in a brown that matches my siding, and I still have a few little pieces to put up and some screw holes to fill and paint over. Then I’ll show you my fully dressed beautiful little house. ❤

Porch Puzzle Pieces

Trim has been put up! It took a little longer than planned because one of the door trim pieces was a smidge longer than the other. I took it down and trimmed it, but a piece chipped out of it. I messed with some wood filler and took a couple of days to sand, prime, and paint multiple coats before putting it back up.

Notched to fit around the metal threshold.

Wood filled and sanded.

The last eight pieces of trim are finally up!

The lil side wall.

All of the furring strips are up, as well as the black bug screen. And I put the screens in the windows and had them all open on a hot day. 🙂

I love how the pieces I add are visibly changing the house. Progress!

I’ve been working on the siding. I bought nice blades for the saws, picked nails to use, made a couple of jigs, did some measuring and planning, and did some test cuts. Click on the pictures for details in the captions:

From top to bottom: 3″ spiral nail, 2 1/2″ spiral nail, 2 1/2″ siding nail with rounded head, 2 1/4″ siding nail with rounded head, and 1 1/2″ nails I used for the furring strips, all galvanized. I chose the middle one.

My story pole. The left board has all the heights of the top and bottom of my trim, and the right board has the siding spacing so I can compare the two. I was able to line them up so I don’t end up with any awkward skinny pieces.

A jig I made to make sure I have a 6″ reveal on the siding. The pencil line is the nail height.

The chop saw I have can’t cut the full 7 1/8″ width of the siding, so I tried flipping the board over the get the rest, and this kept happening.

I wasn’t getting very straight cuts with the chop saw…

The circular saw did the trick, but requires careful cutting.

Blue paint from my brand new blade. New blade with more teeth = less tearout. 🙂

Now that the porch is all puzzle-pieced together, I could finally start on the siding, and I’ve been getting rows up with the help of my sister and my friend Jake. I’ll post pictures when I have a full wall or two done, but it looks great so far!

Mini Porch

My porch floor is finished! It’s so pretty and new that I don’t want to step on it with my dirty work boots!

It’s taken a lot of little steps to get the porch done. I covered most of the work in my last post, but I still spent six hours today working on it, as well as several hours throughout the week. I did a third coat of paint on the post. I primed and spray painted the porch and the back of the trailer (after sanding away a few spots of rust).

The porch has so many weird little corners that I needed to figure out. First off, the side wall sheathing was installed while the plywood porch was in place, so when I took the plywood out, I had a 5/8″ gap to deal with. I was planning on notching the porch boards to fit, but then I realized gluing in a strip of plywood would be way easier. I decided to paint it purple, so in the gaps between the porch boards, you would see a little colour.

Primed and painted!

Test fitting.

I added some black tape so no red tuck tape will show.

Just a lil bit of purple!

I glued in the piece, then I thought I should caulk it as well, so no water can get stuck behind the piece.

No more purple, oh well.

I spent a while fiddling with the boards to get them just right.

Test fit!

I marked them, then predrilled, countersank, and set the screws partway in.

The edge of metal on the right side of the porch was simply not wide enough to accommodate the thick screws for drilling into the trailer, so I used some heavy duty adhesive. The first piece is almost completely underneath the threshold of the door, so that piece doesn’t have any screws in it:

First piece down!

I didn’t want to put any screws into the flange (the 3 1/2″ on the left) where they’d be exposed, and besides, the wiring for the trailer lights runs underneath there. So that’s why there are no screws on the left.

After that I glued down the next five pieces and clamped them. Then I used the impact driver and burned through some screws and an hour or two. Drilling into metal is not fun! But it’s done! Oh and one screw unfortunately lined up exactly with some c-channel underneath, so it couldn’t tighten up and had to be glued in.

Yay!

First screw!

Last screw!

I shimmed the threshold because it was just a little higher than the decking:

Then some caulking and it was finished!

🙂

The boards are spanning three feet and bowed a little when you stepped on them, so the green screws in the center are for some support pieces underneath. My sis helped me with those. 🙂

The board without screws is supported by the one metal cross piece.

No more bending!

My porch floor is done, so now I can get the trim up around the door and on those corners, and get the siding going!

I’ll get some less fuzzy pictures soon. 😛

P.S. I bought a third caulking gun, and it works amazingly. It is fifty times easier to use than the others I’ve used. I caulked around the octagon before I bought the new gun, and I was switching back and forth between two half-broken ones. With the new one, it took less than 20 minutes to caulk and tool one window, when before it was taking over an hour! I easily finished the last two windows, as well as around the wheel wells. 🙂

Beautiful!

$5, $10.50, & $13.50, respectively.

The porch ceiling will be the last exterior piece to go up. Trim and siding first!

It’s been a great week. I’ve been picking away at little to-do’s like priming and painting the plywood edges to protect them. I put together my porch! I’ve been researching HRVs and HVACs, as well as fans and vent hoods. I also did some 3D modeling of my future furniture, and it’s looking good!

It was pouring rain last night, so I went out and laid in my loft for a while, smiling in my little house that I built, listening to the rain, protected. I need to do something about the rain loudly hitting the wheel wells though…

And today was T-shirt weather! I had the windows in the tiny house open. 🙂 Cheers to warm weather!

Colour Reveal!

Hi lovelies, I’m back again! It seems that the blog is not as high on my priority list as it once was… Truthfully, I just really prefer to write a post about one step when it is fully completed. Building isn’t that neat though. Tasks are constantly dragging on and overlapping. I don’t get to neatly finish one aspect of the house. At this point, multiple tasks require my attention and time simultaneously. I’m always balancing, doing a bit here, getting behind there, then switching to something else, and so on.

The other difficulty is that I never feel like I have time to write. If it’s daylight, I feel I should be outside working on the tiny house, and if it’s nighttime, then I should be researching or working in the garage. And if I did work on the house all day, then I’m too tired to stay up and blog.

I’m going to try to post more often, with simple updates, rather than lengthy posts about the past month and a half, but that’s what this is! Look, purple paint!

Victorian Plum!

I painted this with a cheap brush and it looks terrible…

So I bought a paint roller!

Yay pretty! And so easy to use.

First coat

This is the 2nd coat with the roller, over the 1st coat with a paint brush.

The center two have a second coat of paint.

Top piece has 3 coats, bottom piece only has 2.

3 coats done!

Checking the colour in sunlight. Still icy!

I wasn’t happy with the coverage, even after three coats, so I decided to do a fourth coat.

It took me 25 and a half hours to do one coat of primer with cheap brushes (which were recommended to me for primer because it can wreck your brushes). Then it only took me 15 hours to do four coats of paint with a roller! Priming and painting does get a little monotonous, but I took my laptop out to the garage, and listening to a show on Netflix kept me from getting bored. 🙂 I primed for nine hours one day!

My dad was home for a week in March, and was able to help me with the corner trim pieces and a couple of windows. 🙂

First window!

It goes a lot faster if you get all the screws set first.

We screwed the short corner trim above the porch together before putting it up, to make sure the visible bottom edges were perfectly lined up.

Corner trim!

🙂

Entrance window 🙂

That’s all we had time for before he went back to Ottawa, but my mum kindly helped me put up the trim for three more windows! 🙂

A countersink bit, a bit to predrill, and a robertson bit for the screws.

First I predrilled all the pieces.

Then used the countersink bit so I could wood fill over the screws later.

Third step: set the screws partway in. I used coated decking screws.

Kitchen window!

Main room window, and you can see straight through to the entrance window.

There were still icicles!

My window seat window 🙂

Then I went on a trip to Toronto! I got to visit some of my favourite people, including my sis, and I got to celebrate her 19th birthday with her! 🙂 The following weekend I was away, and after that was my 21st birthday, then halfway through April I finally had time to get the tools out again.

When Dad and I put up the three corners, I realized my measuring had been a bit off. Because of the angles were the trim meets the roof overhang, the side wall corner trim pieces were about a quarter inch longer than the end wall pieces. I decided to put them up anyway, to be trimmed later with the jigsaw, and that’s exactly what I did:

First, jigsaw the corners to length.

Then prime and paint (x4). Ignore the tearout; I’m not particular enough with the chop saw yet. 😛

A quick 15 minute touch-up several days in a row, and done!

Next was the tricky octagon. I wasn’t quite sure how well I could get 8 pieces to line up. I sanded the end grain a little, because the roughness was keeping the pieces from fitting tightly together. Then I predrilled, countersank, and set the screws, and got out the ladder. I ended up using Tuck Tape to get the pieces exactly where I needed them, and it held until I got the pieces screwed down. 🙂

Taped up!

Done!

I also put up the trim around the wheel wells, now that there isn’t snow sitting on them.

I purposely cut all my trim to leave about an 1/8″ gap around the windows. Another tiny house builder left a small gap as well, and it seemed better than having anything tight together. Flexing, expansion, draining – these all seemed like good reasons to have a little space. Add primer and four coats of paint to both ends of a piece, and that gap ends up bigger than planned. But I wasn’t about to delay putting the trim up so I could trim the ends a little, then have to prime and repaint them. I was also wondering whether or not to caulk the gap, so that made the decision. I bought white, paintable, permanently flexible caulk. I chose to caulk the top of the trim as well, so any water that gets behind the siding won’t get behind the trim.

I was then reminded of how much I hate caulking. It’s such a pain, and a mess, and uncooperative. I only got three out of six windows done in one day. The tube said not to tool (as in smoothing it out, usually with your finger), so I did the top of the trim on five windows and the wheel wells without tooling, because that will be hidden by the siding. But it doesn’t look great and I ended up tooling around the windows. It’s still not super tidy, but I’m going to paint the edge along the trim.

You can see the gaps between the house wrap and the trim.

Fixed! This is the first bit of caulking that I did, and it’s also the nicest.

Bead, no tooling.

Scraped. I was wasting a lot of caulking, just because I needed a bead big enough to fill the gap.

I tried using the flat end of a pencil, rather than pushing the caulking in too much with my finger. I ended up just using my finger for the last window.

Cleaned up the vinyl with mineral spirits.

It doesn’t look bad if you’re not looking for it. 🙂

I still have eight pieces of trim to put up, but I can only do that after the porch floor is finished. And I can’t finish the porch floor until I paint the post. And it keeps raining!

I bought some decking that was frozen together because it was “all they had”, then had to exchange the pieces when the ice melted and the inner sides were black. I also had to go back for an extra piece of decking. So many trips to the hardware store!

I cut the decking, sanded it all, stained it all, and drove to a specialty store for the right screws. I also had to cut, prime, and paint a little strip of plywood to take the place of the old temporary porch floor (which I had to cut out). I cut and primed a piece for the ceiling as well, and bought some little trim for around the porch post.

😦

What I’ve been using to build a porch!

Haven’t seen this in a while!

Going to sand, prime, and spray paint this black before the boards go on.

My trusty old porch.

Little bit of water damage around the edges.

The beginnings!

Cut and spaced!

Sanding!

A couple of support peices for underneath.

Left – what I used for the subfloor. Right – what I bought for the porch decking. I’ll have to predrill the wood, but the decking is thicker so I need the extra threads.

Half stained.

Finished! I love the grain!

I brought in some of the lighter purple paint to the hardware store, and they darkened it for free. 🙂 I primed the post, then did two coats of paint. I think I’ll do a third. The door will eventually be this colour as well. 🙂

Little can of Victorian Plum

Darker?

Tried the roller, used this crappy brush for the first coat, then went out and bought a nice brush. Isn’t the colour lovely though!?

Beautiful!

I think that just about catches you up to now. I wanted to have the siding up by the end of April, but then little things kept adding up on my list of “Before Siding”. The house wrap isn’t showing any signs of wear, and I’m doing the best I can to get everything done!

Oh, and the first half of the house is completely paid off! I am debt free, for now!

Now I just have to figure out air circulation, heating, cooling, plumbing, electrical…