Monday, April 25, 2011

Moving Around The Outside Of My Mini Cottage

As we started down one side of the trailer I kept looking at the wheel well and thinking how are we going to do that. I had run through a couple of options when it was time to deal with it. Sure enough Stet walked over and grabbed a compass, the kind I used to use in grade school for drawing circles and we just created the gap we wanted and etched them into the board. We did cut a flat angle to get the board in position to mark this. Once we had what we wanted on sample board we cut them out with a steady hand and a jig saw. Each board was numbered and we just flipped them over when we got to the other end of the wheel well. It worked great!

From this point we worked our way down this side and then started at the back and worked our way up the other side.

It should be a fairly smooth process to finish this side and then the tongue end of the trailer next weekend. I would expect to spend the remainder of that weekend cutting out the rest of the roofing joists and any other general prep work that needs to go into the roof. We are taking off May 7th and 8th weekend for some personal business, I am planning weather permitting to put the roof on the following weekend, key phrase there, weather permitting. We are going to coat the exterior wood in Log Oil and this should be accomplished before we put the trailer on the hard outside the barn. All pretty exciting stuff.

Since we are working in a barn, that usually includes some animals. Here in Olympia we had our first day of no rain since October...well almost anyway it was nice, got up to 70 degrees. Boy I hope it is like this when we do the roof. Actually anything not raining would be great. As I ate lunch I had a visitor, it was Tally. She seem to enjoy all the things outside the pen and it earned her my lunch apple.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Looking For Big Gains

There are a couple times during the build project that will mark milestone moments. I think the roof will be huge, I think when I am at point where we put in the door will mark the begining of the end. Right now I am at one of those points, it is the siding. While I have a good couple of weekends to work on this before it is done, just starting it really fired me up. It is bringing the Mini Mobile Cottage to life.
Going through all the wood and am pretty pleased with the quality considering these are all seconds. We started in the far corner working our way to the front of the trailer. The two things we are trying to accomplish is to keep the boards level and to not put any fastner's into the wiring. I took a red crayon and marked where the wires are. You can see we are putting the pieces in vertically. Since I am so long, 24 feet we thought the appearance would be better served by vertical look.

Working our way around the window, this is pretty cool. I am pleased and am looking forward to some big progress next weekend where I will be able to put two full days into it.



Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Life Get's In The Way...Sometimes

It has been tiny steps over the last two weeks. A little stomach flu wiped out the first weekend in April. I did make some progress in getting the outside siding. I am pretty excited about the Cedar siding. It is 6 inch T&G that I am going to install with the rough side out. I got it from a guy in Olympia who runs a home business of wood broker, he buys from regional mills and get's anything that is not number one's. These are number two or better.
I am pretty pumped about this wood, it is going to look sweet. On the external walls this will all be mounted vertically to help the long and narrow building. I have not decided on the stain if I use any at all.

I am going to take the smooth side and use it for the Bathroom. This is going to be stained with some natural tongue oil. This should be a good look and keep to my funky style for the Mini Mobile Cottage.

This past week has been a bit of a challenge that I was not looking for. I have a real tiny house of the floating style that lived in Alameda, CA. It needed to come up to Olympia and get dropped in the water so that I can move it up to Tacoma for a friend to use for the summer (while paying for moorage!). This should be a win/win for all involved. The trick was to move the boat up on my own without paying a company to drive it up. This posed a bit of a challenge that my friend John Hubbard jumped at a chance for a road trip. I drove down from Olympia with rented trailer (craigslist) and a borrowed truck (thanks Stet). Got down there and did not feel safe about driving it back up to Oly without a bigger truck.
So I rented a U-Haul and got everything loaded and strapped down and off I went with John trailing behind in the pick up. This is a very robust trailer so it handled the journey with no issues. Once in Olympia, we unstrapped her and dropped her in the water. I moved the boat over to my marina where my 30 foot Catalina is located and it will rest there till Saturday where I will motor/sail it up to Tacoma for Brian.




It is my goal to have no more pictures of boats on the blog. I am expecting to be able to spend all day next Sunday on the Mini Mobile Cottage. SIDING on my Cottage, really excited about that!