Category Archives: tiny house build

You Get What You Pay For

April 7, 2014more stories and reflections, tiny house build, work and lifeBBS, Big Box Store, build, community, DIY, expert, fail, help, how to, LHS, Local, Local Hardware Store, Maselli's, Mead Clark, Professional, relationship, tiny house build, usefulnessseedswithwings

While I haven’t written here for a while, I feel an update is definitely due. This is not that update.

I’m writing to extol the virtues of the Local Hardware Store which will heretofore be referred to by the acronym LHS.

Big Box Stores (BBS) like Lowes, Home Depot, Friedmans, Amazon…They have everything a consumer could possibly need! It’s cheaper than going to that little store on the corner, right? Plus, they present options beyond your wildest dreams, right? How could an LHS compete with the shear magnitude and inventory at one of these places? However, I’ve proven again and again that, in the long run, getting something at your LHS is a lot less expensive than the cheaper big-box store.

To wit.

We’ve been dealing with a tricky septic situation here on the ranch for the past month or so, and it finally looks like it might be resolved in the near future. I needed some pretty specialized items and went to Maselli’s, our beloved LHS. Upon walking in, one of the owners (actually, I’m not sure if he is an owner, but he certainly takes ownership and knows everything) asked if I needed help. It felt a little like if a major league ball player asked if I needed help with my curve ball.

YES! I DO! I told him exactly what I needed, and he showed me to the PVC fittings. I picked out what I thought I needed, asked a few more questions about possible hacks for a flotation ball that popped off the septic pump (I’m currently using a tennis ball…which everyone approved of) and went to check out. The guy at check out noticed that I had grabbed two different pipe fittings, though they were both three inches in diameter. He explained that one is for drains, and the other for pressurized systems, and pointed out that the drainage one was noticeably smaller. Then I held up my pipe, and he asked if I had all purpose glue. “Regular PVC glue won’t work?” No, apparently my pipe isn’t the regular type of PVC, so I ran back and got the “290” glue like he said and came back to finish checking out. He further mentioned that my pipe plug was 6”, just in case, and I told him it was for a different project completely. He nodded and wished me a good luck.

This visit to Maselli’s, Mead Clarke, or my childhood LHS, Smith and Strebels, would have been the same. The professionals throughout the store offered their specialized help, and the checkout people knew what they were looking at and helped troubleshoot my problem before I had one!

Based on previous experiences in the BBS’s, I can imagine I would have wandered around without any help, left with different size fittings (even though they’re both three inches), inappropriate glue, and the wrong size pipe-plug. I’d get home, try all my fittings, glue the ones that did work with the wrong glue, spend time figuring out where I went wrong, ask Google perhaps, call dad, go back to the store and, after about eight hours, maybe get it right the second time. Instead, I solved it all the same day with the friendly, non-judgmental help from some real pro’s who love helping other people DIY.

So yes, BBS’s are cheaper if you don’t count time and frustration. The prices are lower and so is the quality. We’ve decided, unequivocally that buying something at an LHS for a little more money, makes up for the time, gas, and soul-drainage spent frequenting BBS’s.

For the sake of length I’ve refrained from enumerating my BBS follies, and LHS triumphs, but would love to hear about yours! Go LHS!

Lifting Heavy Things

November 26, 2013framing, learning curve, tiny house build, tiny house thoughts, working togetherbeginner, build, caretaking, framing, gender, hacksseedswithwings

by Sarah

I’ve noticed, both with building and with sheep ranch work, that many of the materials and tools we use are designed for people larger and stronger than me. We bought the ultralight weed-whacker with the easy-pull string, and it’s hard for me to get it started. The tubs of nutritional molasses that we give to the sheep weigh more than me. And the impact driver twists my wrist, rather than twisting the five-eighths bit into the two-by-four. I have felt small and weak in my environment before, but never more so than now, when I am spending much of my time on building and ranch care, and am working side-by-side with Joseph.

These tools were designed, and standard material sizes were determined, with a man’s dimensions in mind. Like many things in our physical reality. Those are very different than my dimensions. Of course, many women are also strong enough to use the tools with ease, but I am not, and may never be.

Instead, I am figuring out how I need to use tools and move materials. Sometimes it’s a little different, and sometimes very different, than how Joseph would. I’ve gotten more playful about this. It feels more like a creative challenge than a roadblock. How can I “hack” these tools that were designed for people with larger hands, stronger arms, etc., and make them work for me?

In the following video, I convince a sheet of plywood and a six-by-six piece of lumber to cooperate with me.

Occasionally, it’s been useful to be small, as in the photo at the top of this post. Screwing the nut onto the anchor bolt inside the Simpson Strong Tie is work for tiny, tiny hands!

I wonder, have any of you felt that you are taking action in a physical space that was not designed with you in mind?

Building a Window Header

November 13, 2013design, framing, more stories and reflections, tiny house build, tiny house thoughts, work and lifebuild, caretaking, design, framing, how to, sheep, walls, windowsseedswithwings

A light rain was falling early this morning as Joseph and I drove to the airport. He will be in New York until the end of the year, and I’ll be joining him there soon. We left our tiny house behind, parked snug in the barn on the sheep ranch. We had a lot of sheep-related work in the past few weeks, which probably slowed down our housebuilding. But it all feels like part of the same life-building.

Yesterday while we were fixing and clearing the electrical wire that runs all around the sheep pastures and protects the sheepies from coyotes, I made up a new phrase, which will be quite useful in ranch life and building life. We were looking at a little plastic piece which snaps onto a fence post and holds a groove for the electrical wire. This little piece is perfectly designed to attach to the fence and to hold the wire the right distance, the right height. It’s “Just Right Tech.” It’s not high tech; it’s a simple plastic piece. It’s not low tech; it’s been manufactured to snap onto a fence post in just the right way. We’re calling it Just Right Tech, and looking forward to opportunities for adding more Just Right Tech to our tiny house.

While we are away, we’ll be updating a little less frequently but we do have some build videos all set for you and ready to send out. Today’s video shows the process of building a header. The header is the structural piece which distributes the weight of the roof down the studs, rather than that weight resting on your window. We’ve built a number of headers (for just about each of our windows), and we’ve gotten pretty good at it. Check out the video for the step-by-step process and Joseph’s explanation of headers.

And if you’re wondering about the photo at the top of the post… yes, we did bring our Lambie over to visit. Lambs are pretty dirty, so she won’t be able to visit once we’re further along. But we wanted her lovely lambie-ness to have been inside our home!