Weekend progress #1

The rails are cut off the trailer and I am constructing the floor framing this weekend. I've adjusted my foundation plans a little bit due to the excessive amount of time and work it would take to angle-grind the entire metal lip off all the way around the trailer. So instead I will be stripping off the unnecessary wood planking and lag-bolting 4x4 beams along the long axis of the trailer. My floor framing will be bolted to this foundation. I'm probably going to over-engineer this thing to the max, but better to have too much anchoring and securing than not enough. In these pictures I have placed the floor framing approximately where they will be so I can template how I will array the 4x4 beams to bolt to the trailer frame. Another advantage of doing it this way is I will be able to bolt the beams vertically and horizontally into the side lip, just adding an extra measure of stability and integrity.

Trailer Is Here

Got the trailer today and here it is. It is a Big Tex 70PI-X tandem axle trailer. It's got brakes on both axles, and they are both rated for 3500 lbs. It is 83" wide by 18' long. The next step will be to stockpile all my building material and then I will have to cut off the side rails to install the subfloor/foundation. But first I have to finish stuccoing my other building project, which is a sandbag playhouse. I was supposed to be done with it by now, but somehow I got behind… I have a feeling I will have to be working on two building projects simultaneously in the next two weeks. Oh well. It's doable.

Examples

Here's a couple more pictures for an idea of the end-state. We will be modifying our loft a little bit over the doorway to extend it out somewhat for added sleeping space. I should be able to pick up the trailer on Friday, so then the building can commence!

First Post: Introduction

Hello and welcome to our blog! We are getting ready to begin building our new, tiny, portable home: the Tumbleweed Fencl. Our hope is to keep a thorough log of our building process with plenty of pictures of every stage of construction. Our endstate: a small simple home we can take with us wherever we go, soundly built to meet our needs and within our modest building budget.

It might take a lot of folks by surprise that we will be moving a family of seven into a 130 sq ft house. Is that so crazy? Well, our first idea was a tipi, so this is actually a pretty big step up in modern conveniences. We have found in our experience that lots of space in a house is rarely optimal. There is more to clean, it's harder to keep track of little ones, there's more temptation to acquire a bunch of stuff we don't need in order to fill the space… In our current 1900 square foot house, we spend 90% of our time in 10% of the house. So shrinking our footprint and adopting a much simpler and more efficient lifestyle is a challenge we are excited to embrace. Our biggest challenge for now will be finding the time to work on the construction between our daily duties of training for deployment and deploying, plus raising, caring for and homeschooling five small children. The trailer has already been ordered and is currently being built to meet our specifications. It should be complete in the next week or two, at which point I will begin the construction. So keep checking in every so often and see how the progress goes!