Framing Photos, at Long Last

The tiny house grew up in a big way recently! This month, about a dozen of my incredibly helpful friends and family came together to help me raise the walls on Borealis House! And pretty much ever since it's been a break-neck race to get this bad boy's exterior done. As is the way with an awful lot of projects, life keeps intervening and everything takes so much longer than expected, or needs to be postponed for various work and personal issues, and the moral of the story is that even when you give yourself a very generous timeframe, fate will likely laugh in your face.

That being said, I still have faith I can get my lovely wee house dried in before Christmas. I'll post later about my process past framing, but right now I'll focus on simply building and raising the walls.

After I finished my subfloor (and rejoiced that I was finally done drilling into my trailer), I set to work cutting the sill and top plates to size and drilling holes for the threaded rods.

After that, I cut all my studs to size...

...put my headers together...

...and (dorkily as possible) got all ready and excited to build my walls.

National Grid had other plans, however, and took that opportunity to shut off my power.

I'd had a ton of trouble with my electrical inspection and the communication between my electrician and National Grid had been an absolute joke all summer. So all of a sudden I had no way to power my saw or air compressor. That's what we in the biz call a grinding halt.

After some brainstorming and some cuddles with my furry nephew...

...I decided to move down the road to the closest source of electricity. The land I'm building on has several outbuildings, one of which is a old machine shop, with plenty of electricity and mercifully flat concrete floors. Yet another nice thing about building a tiny house is that your wall frames are small enough as to fit in a garage bay. Well, just barely.

Front wall!

Back wall!

And with juuuuust enough room to swing a hammer (or a nail gun, though I don't recommend swinging those), a side wall!

Bribed with the loveliness of beer, pizza, and nature, my kickass horde assembled, and rain be damned, raised the walls!

All in all, I'm shocked by how easily this frame came together. There were, of course, mishaps (I may have redone the wheel well framing, thinking I'd reversed it, only to realize I was right the first time, and had to redo it again. Sigh.)

Stuff like this happened:

And this happened a fair amount, too:

I nearly gunned a nail through my finger (and have a sweet little scar to show for it), almost dropped a bit of framing on my best friend, and countless other such adventures! But I went from a flat surface to an actual structure in a matter of days, and that felt pretty great.

The finishing touches on the frame were to add long, rectangular pieces along the sides, that extend out over the porch, and frame out the porch loft. Which, when finished, looked a little something like this:

Woohoo! It's getting more and more houselike every day, and I can't wait to share more of the process so far! Spoilers: this was DEFINITELY the easy part.

Til next update!