Trim

Trim

A Productive Vacation

Posted on October 25, 2013 by biglaketinyhouse

Pete and I had every day last week to work on the tiny house; typically we only work two days every weekend. While we didn’t accomplish everything we had wanted to, we got a lot of little details taken care of and are that much closer to having the exterior complete. My mom also spent the week with us and she got busy staining boards and sealing the door when she wasn’t working her own job.

Here is what we managed to accomplish:

We installed the Denver gable trim on the back of the house, but still need to trim it at the top; we installed the soffit boards at the front of the house along with the Denver gable trim; we installed the soffit boards on the dormers; we installed the end wall trim under each of the dormer windows; we installed one 10′ 6″ section of ridge cap over the 12:12 pitched portion of the roof; we framed in the dormer windows, storage loft window, and finished framing the window opposite the porch window (we still need to frame in the porch window but we were waiting for the door to be installed first); we installed sidewall trim on one side of each dormer along with the fascia boards and Denver gable trim; we put up more corner trim in preparation for siding; we stained the porch ceiling; we sided the back of the house; and had the door installed.

We brought the door over to the tiny house for the first time since we picked it up from the door people. My mom was going to start sealing the door and before she got there we decided to put the door in place and see how it looked. The company that made our door did a fantastic job; however, they apparently didn’t pay too close attention to our rough opening size because the door/frame was a half-inch taller than our opening and it just barely fit from side to side. We figured our only option was to sawzall the door header. We borrowed our friend Eric’s sawzall and Pete went to work taking out an extra inch. We then proceeded to put the door in place and start leveling it. After messing around for about half an hour, we decided installing a door was beyond our skill level and had my mom call for help. She called our long-time family friend John who runs his own carpentry business, JW Ferguson Contracting here in Marquette. John showed up just before dark as Pete and I were still putting siding up on the back of the house. We watched John quickly go to work and while he said we could continue doing what we were doing, we wanted to see how a door is supposed to be installed. We had watched a few YouTube videos, as usual, but quickly admitted defeat. While we watched John work, we realized we were on the right track to start out, but he knew the order of how to go about screwing and shimming and in no time the door was installed. When I asked him how much we owed him, he said one hug! Apparently that’s only his rate for long-time family friends; he has after all known me since I was a baby! Thanks John for showing up in the evening after a busy day and installing our door!

We had really wanted to get the roof completed this week, but realized we still needed to order a few trim pieces and that would take a week to come in. We also had to get more trim boards and since we cleaned ProBuild out of their stock of 5/4 cedar we were going to have to wait a few days for that to come in as well. In another couple of weeks we should be able to declare the exterior complete.