Recent Progress

First, I should note that I'm still in school and so have to study a fair amount. Doing that at the build space means that when I need a break I can do some work on the cottage. But it has the down side of occasionally distracting me from my school work. :-)



Arlene has done most of the work of putting the floor framing together. In the photo below you can see that we used treated wood around areas that will be more likely to be exposed to water. There a few more photos of the floor framing here.



Originally we intended to build the floor frame next to the trailer on the shop floor. That is, in fact, how the plans suggest you do it. However, the dimensions of our trailer are different than the plans expect. So if we built the floor frame exactly as the plans suggest we'd be disappointed when we put it on the trailer and found it didn't fit. Measuring and setting up the frame on the trailer made more sense. We could adjust as we went. So the tip here, if you building one of these, is to measure measure measure.

Now, we still have to work out some issues around leveling, but more on that later.



And finally, here I am sanding out the inside of the wine barrel.

Are you wondering what we have a wine barrel for? Me too.

At The Source

When you buy a set of plans from Tumbleweed Houses you get three hours of consultation time with Jay. Today, we went up and spent an hour with Jay. We came prepared with a list of questions. Jay happily answered each one. It felt more like a mellow conversation than a consultation. It was also fortuitous that Jay and company are currently building a Fencl, so we got to climb around it and take a look at how they are building one.



It turns out that there are a great many details that you don't notice when just looking over the plans. For example, the wheel wells are situated such that water could creep in between them and the inner wall. So when building, we'll need to account for this and develop some sort of protection for it. Further, the plans don't come with a framing plan for the roof. Fortunately, there are a number of sets of build pictures we are drawing on. These help - a picture is worth a 1000 words. But seeing the in-progress Fencl filled in a few more details.

So we're getting it all together and should have a trailer soon. Then we can really start!