Take Two - Framing the Front End

Using  the garage wall as a canvas and
a strip of 1/4" plywood to determine
the arc or radius of the front end

This time, I came into the framing process with a more open mind and realistic attitude that not everything might work out as I had envisioned; setbacks and changes are all part of the process. I did take a few weeks to step away from the project and returned to it over the long Thanksgiving weekend with a new motivation from James' helpful guidance.

Cutting the arc or radius

The framing began by reassessing the height needs and coming up with the ideal arc for the front end since this time I would be cutting the arc in 1/2" plywood and would need to get it right the first time! Using a strip of 1/4" plywood, the same material that would cover the exterior of the trailer, I determined the ideal arc or radius prior to cutting the 1/2" plywood for the walls of the front end. Both walls were cut together with a circular saw to maintain symmetry and then trimmed with a jig-saw and sanded smooth. The pieces were fit into place using most of the existing framing from my previous "fail" then glued and nailed in place with 18 gauge 2 1/2" finish nails.

Epic Fail - Framing the Front End

Failed first attempt at framing the front-end.

Often times when reading about people's experiences building Teardrop Trailers or Tiny Houses, it all sounds like roses and butterflies. "It only took me three months!" or "This was the most rewarding experience of my life!", these are not phrases that I used during this phase of the project (writing about this months after it happened). I had built a test wall out of 2"x2" white wood, 1 1/2" EPS foam core insulation, 1/4" underlayment (plywood), some low VOC liquid nails and finish nails. While in concept the test wall worked great, was very strong, and seemed to fit the bill, but it was only successful on the 2' x 4' test wall (which is now the wall separating the bunks from the queen bed).

Trying to use the same process to frame a very unique size and custom arc to the front-end proved to be incredibly challenging...and VERY frustrating!

For one, the low VOC version of liquid nails I used, while a "green" product with good adhesion, was not flexible. With the trailer movement just from walking on the platform in the garage, many of the joints cracked. I can only imagine the damage once the trailer was on the road. So in this instance I deviated from my "green" ethic in the name of strength, longetivity, and safety. Unfortunately, unless I can find a fleixble low or zero VOC product, I have resorted to working with standard liquid nails on this project.

Secondly, using only 2"x2" white wood and 1/4" underlayment for sheeting and structural support quickly became apparent that it would not be sufficient, especially after my good friend James, who works in construction and is remodeling his Seattle Craftsman home, came over for a few beers and gave my structure a shake. His reaction was this thing will get torn apart in a cross wind! THIS was my epic fail and he was right. I had a hunch this was the case, but as I had spec'd the whole thing to be built with only 1/4" rather than 1/2" sheeting, I didn't want to try and comprehend how much additional weight this would add. So it was back to the drawing board, literally!

Fitting Everything in the Garage

Cramped garage before the grand reorganization.

One of the major stipulations from my wife Heidi was that the trailer AND both of our cars would fit in the garage...this was an imperative of the project...not negotiable. The trailer itself fit just fine in the garage, but with a 7' 2" wide platform on top, the garage became a bit more cramped and would only become more so as the walls went up. We are fortunate to have a unique garage with adjoining basement underneath our house. It is a three car garage in essence, although we have never owned three cars, and one side is a "tandem" space. It was one of the reasons I bought the house initially as I wanted a dedicated indoor workshop space and exercise area. With this garage I was able to have it all including a climbing wall in the corner used for working out. Since I needed more space to work on the trailer, I made an executive decision one morning to completely reorganize the garage after realizing that the current configuration was NOT going to work for this project. Especially since I would likely work on the trailer project only between 4 & 8 hours per week depending on what my schedule allowed.

The new configuration moved the climbing wall and workout area to the single bay side of the garage and required that the car be moved out for a full workout or climb, not really that big of a deal. I left a small corner on the two-bay side of the garage for riding my road bike on rollers and accessing weights and medicine balls, the elliptical trainer in the picture above came inside. This allowed me to have easy access to everything accept the garage wall side of the trailer, which once framed would not be an issue as the door faced the opposite direction. If more space was needed, the care on the two-bay side could be backed out, the trailer rolled back about 10 - 12 feet and I would have about 150 square feet of workshop space with the trailer still inside. Quite the luxury for a project that started in October and would take most of the winter to frame before it could be outside in the elements.

Framing the Sub-floor

I can't begin to explain how fortunate I am to have support from my wife and family on this project. My parents have begun to pick up our two girls (4 and 6 years-old) from school each Friday and keep them overnight through mid day Saturday. This allows my wife and I to have "date night" each Friday and gives me 4 - 6 hours each Saturday morning to tackle my new project and any other "honey-do" items that need my attention...luckily we have lived in our house for about 6 years and my "honey-do" list is now quite small!

This weekend I was lucky enough to get a bout of cold but very sunny weather to roll my new trailer outside, grind off the remaining attachments from its days carrying a sailboat, clean off the moss, and lay the freshly prepped base platform in place to cut wheel wells and build the sub-floor.

I quickly realized that there is a bit of a warp in the trailer, but was able to shim one corner an get the platform level after cutting it to size. The platform is framed with 2"x3" studs around the perimeter and 2"x2" white wood at 24" inches on center in the middle which will accept 2" EPS foam insulation in the next few weeks and also support the wiring for both the side/tail lights and interior 120 volt outlets that will run off an inverter and battery charged by solar.

In some ways now that it is real, the trailer looks HUGE, but when I think about my family spending many nights in a row living in this small of a space, it looks TINY. Guess I will have the best of both worlds!

Construction Begins!

Rubberized roll-on truck bed liner paint for an undercoating.

Although I still don't have all of the details worked out, I am ready to begin! I think what makes this project so much fun is that there will be plenty of opportunities ahead to make mistakes, test ideas, and deviate from the plans that have been set in place so far.

The first step is to build a platform that will become the sub-floor upon which the rest of the structure will be built. Since the bottom of the structure itself will be exposed to the elements and bombarded by rainwater and all matter of debris from the road, I have opted to use a roll-on truck bed liner as the under coating for both the base and the wheel wells. It was messy work as the paint is laden with rubber bits that coated my gloves, sleeves, and pants while working, but I anticipate it will give the trailer a long life. I used three and a half sheets of 3/4" tongue and groove plywood to create a base that measures 7' 2" x 13' 6". When it is all said and done, I will have about 85 - 90 square feet of living space inside the trailer and an overall length of about 17' 6" from the trailer hitch to the rear arc of the trailer.

Did I Find a Trailer?

It's ugly, low to the ground, cheap, registered, and exactly what I had in mind

Could it be that I have found the ideal trailer, minus the moss? This showed up on Craigslist for $350 and had already passed the WA State DOT test, received a VIN number and was ready to hit the road. The best part was that it only weighed 350 pounds and had a 3500 pound axle. Most of the commercially available new trailers with a 3500 pound axle weighed in at nearly twice that amount and in some cases up to 1000 pounds...not ideal for a concept that would ideally weight less than 2000 pounds total. I drove about 30 minutes to inspect and decided to pull the trigger...he even dropped off a few days later as I still don't even have a tow hitch on our vehicle! I guess I have actually made the commitment to build something, either that or I need to be committed for taking on an insane project on the brink of winter. I am thinking I need a good project to keep me inspired and out of trouble this winter!

Drafting a Hybrid Concept - the Tiny House meets the Teardrop Trailer

Any free moment over the past month has been spent doing research, sketching ideas, and even using painters tape to tryout various floor plans in the garage to hone in on the ideal size of a custom camping trailer. The initial designs were boxy and not incredibly appealing, but functional.

The reality was that in order to be pulled by our current vehicle, a Volkswagen Passat, and fit in our garage, the trailer had to weigh under 2,000 pounds and max out at 6' 6" tall to fit in our garage with an entry height of 6' 8" and width of 7' 10". The other reality for our family is that the trailer needed to be four season compatible, which meant that the traditional outside kitchen on a traditional Teardrop Trailer was not ideal. So an indoor kitchen became a major focus. We also have two young daughters and if I was going to take the time and put the financial resources toward building a custom trailer, it had to comfortably sleep 4 which would also require bunk beds for the girls. I am 6' 1" and can't stand to sleep in tents or beds that are too short, nor would I want to spend time inside a camping trailer preparing food or prepping for the days adventure and not be able to stand up. All of these variables required that the trailer "pop up" to achieve the desired inside height and still fit in our garage, a challenging concept on many many levels.

It was at this point that I came across two very interesting designs that became sources of great inspiration. The first I came across was the Alto by Safari Condo out of Canada, the design is really quite remarkable and the innovation behind the pop top is hands down just brilliant. With a price tag of $25,000 - $30,000 and not truly being conducive to sleeping 4, it was a source of inspiration and a benchmark for finding a similar solution at a far lower price that would be accessible to the average family. The second inspiration I came across was the Cricket Trailer which was designed by a NASA architect with a story not that dissimilar to mine, 30-something dad wanting a better camping experience for his family without resorting to a white fiberglass box. While the Cricket is also a brilliant concept and incredibly well constructed, it is a bit tight inside and the hanging beds for kids would be fine for a few days, but would require constant "rigging" and a lot of accommodation for  younger campers and especially mid night pee breaks!

The beauty of both the Alto and the Cricket are that they provided just the right motivation to come up with what has proved to be the best design and most aesthetically appealing shape to date.

Not only did I come up with a variety of designs on paper, I felt the need to construct the indoor space out of paperboard to get a feel for how we might maneuver inside the trailer. This design finally felt like I had a great place to work from and even received a sort of approval from my wife, albeit a bit skeptical of whether or not I actually had any idea of what I was doing and if I would actually pull off building something that was road worthy, let alone something she would be willing to be associated with in public! With a design in hand, the next step was to price out and determine the potential weight of materials and availability of a trailer to get the project started. I spent a number of days at various lumber yards and hardware stores with a scale in my backpack weighing different pieces of lumber, plywood, and other hardware items and subsequently building a spreadsheet that allowed me to get the potential weight down to between 1900 and 2200 pounds depending on finishes and the size of water tanks...I am sure more than a few hardware store employees and customers thought I was just a wee bit crazy, and maybe I am, but I do my homework!

The Treehouse Idea Gets Wheels

It was the end of summer and I took my girls (4 and 6 years-old) to the Evergreen State Fair as we do every year when my wife is prepping her classroom for the start of the school year. Typically we seek out the bunnies, chickens, Ferris wheel, and an extra large corn dog, but this year something else caught our attention. We stumbled across the 5th wheels, RV's, and pop-up camping trailers. The girls were on cloud nine to say the least and even made me collect brochures from the reps on-site.
The spaces of course were intriguing and it was fun to explore more than a dozen different sizes and styles. Many were obscene in my mind, but a few offered very innovative use of space and just the right amount of space for our family of four and all of the gear we might want to take on a climbing or camping trip. Besides the price, most smaller styles that slept 4 comfortably ranged from $12,000 - $20,000, I quickly realized that none of them could be towed by our current vehicle and would require an upgrade...which was out of the question for many reasons.
My girls loved the idea of a camping trailer as much as they did the idea of a tree house, especially since we could take it with us anywhere we went!
So, explorations began to see if a camping trailer existed that met all of my criteria...
- made from local, healthy, sustainably produced products
- capable of being towed by a four or six cylinder vehicle that gets better than average gas mileage
- compact enough to fit in our tandem garage along with all of our gear and another vehicle
- room for our family of four and capable of allowing us to camp without access to water, power, or a toilet!
The research begins...

A Bit of History: A Tiny House

Upon graduation,  I returned to the Seattle area after landing a job managing professional development programs for educators. This job literally required working in a different city five days a week. Forking out the monthly fee for an apartment to use a few nights a month seemed ridiculous. I convinced my grandparents to let me take over the dilapidated cottage on their property that had sat vacant for more than 30 years while collecting various family odds and ends. After spending the summer cleaning, painting, laying carpet over the downstairs concrete floor and making the space my own, I had a place to call home. The cottage, or "The Little House" as we called it, two stories and tiny measuring 10' x 20' with about a 300 usable square feet. Because of its vintage, it was still connected to a septic system which could not legally be used for sewage and the price tag for connecting to the sewer was far out of my means. I settled for a shower and sink, storage in lieu of a toilet, a tree in the backyard for # 1, and a walk to my grandparents for # 2! Somehow, I managed to call this home for five years while traveling for work, completing a Master's program and shacking up with a fun girl who now happens to be my wife.
Fast forward 15 years and this adventurous kid is now a husband and father of two very active and rather adventurous girls who love the idea of camping, but like to have things like running water, a way to charge the ipad, and toilet nearby. This is where our story begins...

A Bit of History: The Early Years

Growing up I always had a fascination with small spaces and spent a great deal of time building and enhancing these spaces. It started with a cardboard box fort after the purchase of the family's first 1980's big screen TV. The fascination then progressed to a clubhouse in the garage rafters, followed by an elaborate multi-story treehouse in the ravine near my childhood house, and then the conversion of my High School Ford Bronco into a highly functional Basecamp for the frequent back country adventures. The Bronco project took advantage of the removable backseat  and replced it with a fold down platform for a full size bed. Under the platform were drawers for climbing gear along with dedicated space for a cooler, camp stove, and cooking supplies, all rounded out with 12 volt lighting to aid in gearing up for early morning summit attempts or after dark dinner preparation. It was truly this teenage boy's dream machine and took young adventurers on many memorable trips. Throughout college my adventures continued and I spent many nights camped out deep in the backcountry in areas like Moab and Yosemite living simply and exploring widely.
Always in search of yet another adventure, I landed a grant and opportunity to spend 5 months on the island of Rarotonga in the South Pacific during my final year at the University of Oregon.  My job was to aid in efforts to control the invaisives species population wrecking havoc on the natural ecosystem and document my experience as a budding photojournalist. As a developing nation, the Cook Islands didnt provide all of the modern conveniences of home and I took this new way of living as a challenge. Water had to be boiled daily for drinking, power from a diesel generator was often shut down, laundry was done by hand, and it was typical for staples like flour and bread to run out until the next ship arrived from New Zealand. I was also very taken with the simplicity of the way of life led by many of the 'substistence' farmers on the island who harvested Taro, Papaya, and Mango for local consumption.

Opening the Flow of Inspiration

What intrigues me most about small spaces is the need to ask the question, "what is really important in life". In the era of most Americans living in homes with closet space in excess of the total living space in other countries, the idea of small spaces is somewhat of a novelty. Although, the emerging focus on more sustainable living has brought about an innovative spirit by exploring how much space we actually need to be healthy and happy. A trend in Seattle right now is the "Apodment" with its few hundred square feet and minimal amenities, it is designed for the on-the-go single person who just needs the bare essentials. IKEA even now has a display of everything you need for living in that small of a space. Somehow, these spaces can feel comfortable, cozy, and oddly spacious all at the same time.
With the prospect of a 300-400 square foot treehouse for a family of four that provides enough indoor space to visit year-round in the Pacific Northwest, playing with layouts became an exciting form of problem solving and creative expression.

Visions of a Tiny House in the Woods

For nearly 50 years, my family has owned property along Hood Canal, an off shoot of Puget Sound, looking out to the Olympic National Park. The idea of building another structure to compliment the 1930's cabin has been discussed for decades as a way to expand the opportunity for our extended family to use the property.

One day last April I was exploring the upland forest when my 6 year-old daughter and I started talking about tree forts and zip lines. With my work as a sustainability consultant, I immediately started thinking about how we could fulfill the desire to build another structure on the property and use the principles of Low Impact Development and net zero energy/water. The impact of putting in a road and foundation in the pristine upland area of the property would be significant, but carrying in materials and building a suspended structure would be both gentle on the natural environment and a thrilling challenge.

So explorations began. Over the next few months I investigated sites, drafted and redrafted plans, researched the basics of building a habitable treehouse, and got thoroughly inspired in the process. In June the majority of the family came out for a weekend at Hood Canal to do some annual maintenance and we collectively explored the idea. It was met with both interest and skepticism, mostly about the feasibility and how it might change the use and feel of what has remained virtually unchanged for 50 years. In my mind it is progress and helping to build our future legacy on the property in a responsible and environmentally sensitive manner.