Hey guys, I'm back at the tiny digs hotel in Portland, Oregon.
I interviewed the husband and wife team that designed and built all of the tiny
houses you see here at the hotel and they decided to share their 10 best tips
and tricks for designing and building your own tiny house.
This week's video is brought to you by Humless
solar power on the go.
Hi, I'm Pam Westrea and we're here at tiny digs hotel with our builder.
Extraordinary. My husband Bruce, we're two thirds of our team.
She's the artistic and I'm the builder and then our son Kevin is artistic and a
builder, so he's an integral part of the team also,
my dad was a builder and contractor and so I kind of grew up in the trades and
then I went to school to become a chiropractor and I was a chiropractor for 25
years and then we retired and we traveled around for seven years on the road
trying to figure out what we were going to do when we grew up, so to speak.
That's kind of when the tiny house movement really got wheels under it,
so to speak.
Tiny digs came about through our love for the tiny house movement.
So we've built nine houses here at tiny digs hotel.
We wanted to showcase different roof lines and different styles so that if
somebody came here to stay and said, Hey,
I'm thinking about building a tiny house,
they would have a lot of different ones to look at and see what really felt
right aesthetically to them. And it's been really fun doing the themes.
Everybody loves a theme,
something they don't want to go somewhere that has the same old like a
Marriott or Hilton, you know, they're looking for a different adventure.
It is challenging as a builder having to do a new one off every time,
but it's kind of an opportunity to showcase my own talents too
yes, I could build a functional simple house.
We could also build a fancy more technical,
different roof lines that the average person may want to try,
but at least it would give them an idea of what was possible.
So now that we've been doing this for awhile,
we thought it would be fun to share some tips and tricks for people that are
contemplating building something on their own.
So these are just things that have either happened to us as a result of a
mistake or things that we figured out that, Hey, that works. You know,
maybe somebody else can benefit it.
So we're going to go through like 10 well maybe even a bonus one at the end.
Tips and tricks of building a tiny house.
Number one,
when you're done doing all your plumbing and electrical in the house,
make sure before you put your wall sheeting and insulation on to go through your
whole house and videotape that you really want to know where those plumbing
lines are, where the electrical lines are,
so that you can not put a nail through one of those once it's all sheeted.
Number two,
remember to put the shower stall in the house before all the walls are closed in
the shower stall is bigger than any door,
and I know it was from personal experience when we built the yellow caboose.
which was actually our eighth house,
so you would think that I would know this.
We had the walls up the doors in and no shower.
Fortunately we didn't have the roof on,
so to fix the situation we had to lift the shower stall over the roofs and back
down onto the floor. Great fun.
Number three has to be a structural link between the house itself and the
trailer or what we call the foundation of a tiny house.
If you don't do that at the correct stage,
which is generally right after you put the floor on,
then it makes it much more difficult later.
There is another thing that I wanted to mention that's kind of tiny house
specific,
how a person could tie the walls as well as the sub floor into the trailer frame
and that is by taking threaded rod completely from the top plate of the wall all
the way through the wall,
down through the bottom plate and down through the trailer.
And so I always think in my mind what if I actually took the house,
the whole house and turned it upside down and hung it from the trailer?
Would it stayed together?
And that's the kind of mindset I think is a safe way to think about tying your
house together. Number four, tip, use Ram board on your floors.
That's kind of a new product for me. I didn't know it existed.
We used to put the red rosin paper down on our finished floors to try and
protect it from the carpenters dropping tools on it and the Ram board has really
saved us so look for that in your stores. Okay. Number five.
Do you want ladders in your tiny house in both your lofts or your single loft or
do you want stairs?
I really like stairs but you do have to have extra room to put stairs in the
beach house, which we're in today. Has the ladder.
The design didn't work out for us to put a whole set of stairs in so we needed
to save some space and use the ladder. It's a large ladder
though.
The steps are really wide and we did that for safety and it's totally fixed to
the loft. It's not a movable ladder,
so a fixed ladder to me as much safer if you have to go ladder on all our other
houses though we have stairs,
we feel they're much safer for people and you have so much storage under them.
Tip number six would be bumped outs.
A bump out is a structural feature that is an addition to the main four walls.
It's like a added on small closet on the front or back end of your trailer.
You can't put one on the side really because there goes your travel restrictions
of eight and a half feet wide that bump out.
is the perfect space to put a sink in it or even a toilet.
Number seven is space saving tables or desktops.
In this house we have a really cute one that we didn't have to build,
so that was even a time saver. We bought it from Ikea,
so this is a nice table that has drawers so it has storage in it and it has two
leafs so you can use one leaf independent of the other.
That really worked for this design cause it's folds up so small in the barn we
have the table that folds up against the wall.
It looks like a picture on the wall. It goes up, has a frame around it.
When you bring it down as the table, there's even another picture behind it.
And then in the bamboo house we have a table that folds up from the wall and
it's a real nice spot for two people.
Tip number eight,
how is your roof going to help you use your space or use your design to its
utmost?
do you have a more modern design? You might want to go with a shed roof.
It suits the modern style.
If you want to have the biggest loft size,
you might want to consider a barn roof.
building a more traditional style tiny house.
You might want to use cable roofs,
maybe two different size cables are two different slopes,
so using your roof style to maximize your design and your space and also you
would want to consider your roof design based on your skill level.
A shed roof is relatively easy with minimal instruction.
That person I think could be a shed roof, but a Gable roof,
especially if you have a terrible slope,
is a little bit more degree of difficulty.
Tip number nine,
consider your roofing materials with your end goal for your house in mind.
If you want to consider just budget, then you could go with a corrugated roof.
If you have a middle of a line budget,
you could go with asphalt or traditional shingles.
If you have more of a budget,
you could go with metal standing rib roof.
Standing rib is the most durable of all the roofs,
so if you're planing on keeping your house a long time and you have the extra
money, go with the standing roof as it beginning builder.
I would probably recommend corrugated metal for the roofing material simply
because it's so easy to work with. It's inexpensive.
You could wreck a whole piece and it wouldn't be the end of the world.
Tip number 10
this tip has to do with the placement of your entry doors.
Is it going to be over the wheel well or the fender of the trailer or is it
going to be in the front wall or the sidewall?
Because there are kind of distinct advantages and disadvantages of each of those
placements. If it's on your sidewall,
then the tip would be to put it on the passenger side of the tow vehicle because
that means that when you pull up into along the street or in a parking lot,
your access door is easy to get to and if it goes over your fender,
you have to bear in mind you're going to have a step down into the house.
And a lot of people don't like that idea because if you forget there's a step
right near your entry door, then it can be kind of a jarring experience.
But we have the beach and the bamboo and the modern have the doors over the
fenders. They work out fine.
And the office we bypassed putting it over the wheel well.
We have the door all the way down to one end of the trailer so that we could
have a French door and those are always fun to do.
The third door option is on the ends of your house and that could be a very
pleasant feature because when your house is all set up and you can put a porch
over your trailer tongue,
then your doors right there automatically on your porch.
So my tip on the whole thing,
I guess is to be aware of the end result that you want concerning where you have
your entry door.
So we said we'd do 10 tips and tricks for building your tiny house.
But for me as the helpful designer of the build team,
my 11th tip for you is have fun with it.
Go through Pinterest and get lots of ideas.
Do you want to design it like a caboose,
like we did one of ours or do you want a Victorian style house?
One of the most fun things that I've found with the houses is going out and
picking out really cool lighting. It's like the icing on the cake for me.
Some of my lights are built out of things that you wouldn't even think was a
light in the bamboo. For instance,
they're all lanterns that were in the garden center and I electrified all those
on the caboose. I took an old kerosene lamp and electrified that,
so have fun with it. And as the builder, I have a bonus tip. Also,
when you consider building a tiny house,
pick out where you're going to build it with care. Have that in mind.
The second part of that tip is where are you going to put it when you're done?
So try to have in mind where are you going to build it and where are you going
to put it?
I hope you guys learned a few things about how to design and build your own tiny
house. I'll be back soon with another video for you with tiny house or travel
adventures. See you later.