Renovating my Tiny House, Project Managing & Hands On Building!
Something I haven’t talked about in my blog posts is the actual Tiny House Build itself, the construction stuff! Given I am currently doing renovations this is the perfect time to have a chat about it! I’ve mentioned before that I made so many mistakes when building my Tiny House…and in my third blog post “Time to Build! The Beginning of Your Tiny House Journey!” I mentioned that these steps were the hardest and most trying for me, particularly because I had little to no building knowledge at the time! I can not tell you the amount of times I have been in tears and left feeling completely lost and disillusioned by the whole experience of building my Tiny House!
When I first built my Tiny House three years ago I had plans drawn up of what I wanted built into my Tiny House but I completely left the construction side of things to different builders that were contracted to do the work, all qualified tradies, amongst them a builder and window installer, welder, tiler. These guys did not know how to handle a shipping container conversion home, it is a bespoke build, trust me when I say that it’s different from your normal house build and it needs to be tackled differently! Don’t let anyone tell you differently, qualified builder or not! Unusual builds need initiative, flexibility, common sense and patience! This post is definitely not being written to bag anybody or any tradesperson, but with the hopes I can show you all the mistakes that were made here and how I am putting it all back together with the benefit of historical hindsight!
Just as I began moving into my Tiny House three years ago I had some obvious construction issues around the windows that needed to be fixed. I was devastated about it then, my brand new build was just not done properly and the repairs delayed us moving in for a further couple of months!
So now here I am three years on with quite extensive water damage in my bathroom! This is all due to a cracked floor tile so nothing that anybody did! Once I started to pull down walls to check properly how far the water had leaked, the damage caused by the leak has shown itself to be a lot more extensive than first anticipated. More walls needed to come down, the kitchen needed to come out! So much mould was trapped behind cupboards and within the walls!
What I also realised by pulling down these extra walls is that the preparation work behind the kitchen walls, and around the windows…lets just say could have been done so much better! After so much consideration and second guessing I decided to take on the bulk of the repair work myself! I’ve got more building knowledge now than I did three years ago and I’ve got more confidence in myself to pull of the project!
So no dwelling on any negatives of past builds and only focusing on the positives of moving forward, my building renovation is moving ahead! And I am trying to do as much of the build myself as I can!
I packed up and moved out of my Tiny House at the beginning of September and I have been pulling down the interior and preparing it for construction ever since! Have I bitten off more than I can chew? Yes most definitely!!! Am I tired? You bet I am exhausted!!! Am I glad I’ve taken it on myself? Yeah I am!
Have I had any help? Yes I have, my daughter Emily and I have done a lot of the work together, we needed “muscle help” to pull down the bathroom tiles and walls and to get out the bulk of the kitchen and kitchen wall…I have to admit I just wasn’t strong enough to get that all out myself! And I got some help from friends Bronwyn, Mikaela and Sue with some clean up jobs and Bunnings shopping trips!
I have spent the weeks after demolition and after the mould being cleaned up preparing the empty container for the re build!
Tradie help…I had an electrician, Angelo Altamura, disconnect and make safe all of the electrical cables, I had a professional commercial cleaner, Susan Jamieson, come in to take care of all of the mould damage. I had a plumber, Rein Coetzer check over my plumbing and repair the damage to the shower drain. All of these guys I will be adding onto a tab on my blog with their contact details for my “recommended tradies”
Now I am currently a little ahead of a raw prepped container, I have the bathroom wall frame up, the bathroom walls and floor are screwed in and these jobs I also needed “muscle help” with! I have done all of the bathroom flushing myself and today I have builders / tilers here doing my bathroom tiling rebuild, they are screeding at this very moment!
But before I show you all of that I will post up a bit later tonight to tell you all about the prep work, how I have done it and the products I used!
Oh…the photo is the awesome view I’ve had on the sunny days while I’ve been working!
Heaps to come so keep watching!
Thanks for reading!
Jen 🏡