design, build, learn. repeat.

Living Small Part 3: Oregon

This is Part 3 of a series based on my lecture last week at the Tulane School of Architecture. You can catch up with Part 1 and Part 2 here. The tiny house journey continues as we leave Washington for the state of Oregon. This leg of the trip featured a lot of camping and hiking, including a side trip to Crater Lake National Park, shown above. It was late May and the park, still partially snowed in, was beautiful. It was in Oregon that I began to visit tiny houses on wheels. Their popularity has taken off in the past few years via the Internet. …

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Living Small Part 2: Washington

This is Part 2 of a series based on my lecture last week at the Tulane School of Architecture. You can catch up with Part 1 here. Our journey begins in Seattle, Washington, where the first person I interviewed was Mike Podowski. Mike is the Land Use Policy Manager for the City of Seattle, a job he described to me as covering everything from helicopter safety to the number of goats that people can own. I wanted to talk to Mike about the Backyard Cottage program, which was launched as a pilot program in 2006 and expanded citywide in 2009. The City of Seattle had in fact …

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Living Small in the PNW: Part 1

This past Monday I had the opportunity to lecture at the Tulane School of Architecture about the research trip I took in May. Many thanks to Professor Errol Barron for the kind introduction, and to the School of Architecture and specifically the John William Lawrence Travel Research Fellowship for making the trip possible in the first place. Not quite two years ago, around December 2012, I bought an 18’-long flatbed utility trailer and decided to build a tiny house on wheels. Working in a driveway in Virginia, I framed the floor using pressure-treated 2×6 joists salvaged from the wooden trailer deck, and insulated it using 1″ and …

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Latest project: Truck rack

This project has been in the back of my mind for a long time. My truck has approximately a 6′ bed and therefore longer items (lumber, ladders, sheet goods) either lean up against the cab, which dents it, or protrude out the back. The solution was to build a rack that would create more options for loading. Until very recently I was planning to make a long ladder rack, the kind that cantilevers forward over the cab. But I realized that something simpler would meet my needs and require less steel, making it lighter as well. The design I eventually settled …

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Extremes

Week number 4 in Haiti, kay number 3, seems to be a week of at least two extremes. First, it’s hotter than it has been; we’re on an exposed ridge without any immediate tree cover, and the sun has been beating down. In the evenings, though, a brisk breeze begins to whip through and it cools down significantly. The second extreme is one of beauty; this kay is in the most spectacular setting of the ones I’ve built so far. The local road, a rugged dirt track, runs along the ridge and the house is right on the road. On …

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A typical work day

Work continues to go very well on the second house. The crew is working hard and we’ve improved on some of the details that were missed last week. The trusses and purlins are up, the front and back doors are installed, and we’re looking at a good chance of finishing up tomorrow, ahead of schedule. Work days here tend to follow a routine. People are up early, around 6-6:30. There’s no full breakfast, but the family serves bread with very sweet strong coffee and sometimes hot chocolate as well — all grown right here. We work until lunchtime, have a …

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Haiti: Week 3 Begins

I’m now in my third week in Haiti, and today was the second work day on the second of six kays (houses) I’ll be building. This will be an interesting week. It’s the only week for which I’ll have no American volunteers, just the Haitian crew. That’s fine, it’s just an extra challenge to have no recourse to English if a complicated issue comes up! On the other hand, I’m learning a lot, both language-wise and about the greater context in which I find myself. We took a long walk through the mountains after work today, and the homeowner proudly …

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Haiti Days 1-3

Saturday, April 13. Arrived at the Port-au-Prince airport and through a crowd of red-shirted porters found the folks who were there to pick me up. With a stop for groceries and a SIM card the drive through heavy traffic to Léogâne, our home base, took about two hours. The amount of action on the street is incredible: tap-taps and motos weave their way around each other in constant near-catastrophe; men and women, well-dressed and shabby alike, line the sides of the road; endless vendors sell mangos and lottery tickets; lines build up at the gas stations due to the current gas …

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Step 1: Installing side “bumpers”

  In order to attach my “mystery build” to the trailer, I have two main problems to solve. Most utility trailers are built to a maximum total width of 8′-6″. That’s the widest allowed dimension for road travel. And that’s measured to the outside of the wheel wells. Unless the trailer bed sits on top of the wheels (which mine does not), the actual trailer bed is smaller — typically 7′ or slightly less. To get the widest possible structure on the trailer, therefore, it needs to extend past the trailer frame on either side. But I didn’t want to …

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Mystery Build

Today I got the first piece of a new project. I’m calling it the “Mystery Build”, because what I will be building is a mystery to others (and also to me). However, the first piece is not a mystery. It’s a 7′ x 18′ flatbed utility trailer, with a double axle and a total weight rating of 12,000 lbs. More to come.

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