It took over a year to settle down and do, but the addition of the stainless steel stair railing makes the daily/nightly trips up and down to the loft feel a lot safer.
In the yard at dusk.
We added a temporary guest bedroom! Thanks the transformation of the sofa, and an addition of a blackout curtain.
Trailer Park Space is becoming more limited…
A good synopsis of current zoning/code discussions…
<p>Today’s upkeep/chores: Sweeping all the leaf gunk off the roof, and out from the crevices under the roof peak. And trimming branches that were starting to droop and touch the roof. Living under a pecan - especially during storms - makes things interesting.</p>
A look back….
Now that we’ve been living in the house for 3 months–we’ve learned a few things. Below is a quick summary (which may grow as time goes on).
The good:
Love the Airhead Compost Toilet. We empty the liquids twice a week (into a toilet offsite), solids get disposed of every two months or so. It doesn’t smell, and feels pretty low maintenance and fool proof. The liquids container did overflow early on, but now we know how to avoid that.
Also love the Friedrich in wall heater/AC unit. Keeps the house comfortable all year long–through the winter and summer. The only maintenance with it is cleaning the intake filter about every week or so.
Love the GE Spacemaker under counter fridge. The freezer is a tad on the small side, but other than than that, we can store a decent amount of food. And it was affordable compared to some fancier stainless models.
Appreciate the Whisper fan we installed up at the peak of the roof–clears out cooking odors, shower steam, and keeps the air moving. And it is quiet.
We’re thankful for all the storage we squeezed in. This added a lot of time to the build, but we have no regrets. The window seat has storage under and behind it, and then two shelves above it (on shallow for books, and one deeper for baskets/boxes etc), and then a super sneaky bit of storage behind the head of the bed for seasonal things we don’t need to access regularly.
Having a full height closet is great too–gives plenty of room for hanging clothes, and stashing a tall broom out of the way, and leaving room for 3 hampers at the bottom of the closet (our clothes washing routine is decently complex–hence the 3 hampers).
It’s nice having a utility closet in back for the water heater, power cord, transfer pimp, etc.and the occasional tool we don’t have room for inside.
Things that we had a harder time with—
Getting our Ecco Temp on demand water heater dialed in correctly was tough. (UPDATE: we eventually replaced the Ecco Temp with a much nicer Rinnai units, and our water heater situation greatly improved!) We had hoped to employ a Bricor low flow showered (1 GPM) - but this resulted in us getting scalded quite a bit as it backed up the flow, and then let out a blast of over heated water. Now we have a 2 GPM head, which seems to work fine. The only drawback–we fill up the grey water tank faster. For two people showering all week, a 26 gallon holding tank (shower water only) isn’t quite big enough. We hope to purchase a bigger tank soon, so we only need to pump it out once a week.
Another thing that helped us get the water heater to deliver more consistently was burying the water line below grade. Therefore the water wasn’t getting boiled in the sun, or frozen as much in the cold.
I wish I’d installed three kitchen shelves instead of just 2. I still may come back and install one between the top and bottom ones. I wish the stove wasn’t above the under counter fridge–if two people are cooking in the kitchen at once, it is a congested area.
Current exterior photos.
Some new interior photos…
Tiny house video panorama.
Night time entry porch view.
New knife and (home made) pot holder, and a new iron griddle that fits over our two burner Ramblewood Green stove (Ramblewoodgreen.com) Love the size and efficiency of the stove! One of the knobs is a little off making it hard to light-but other than it works well.
Small weekend projects