Build Tiny – a tiny house builder in New Zealand – is using a purpose-built tiny house trailer manufactured by Bay Engineering Solutions to offer their customers tiny houses that detach from their trailers.

The benefits are multiple:

• House is considered a load on a trailer – not a trailer itself, simplifying the registration and insurance because it would fit in the current norm.
• Trailer can be removed for aesthetics, inspection, or maintenance.
• House can be reversed to face away or toward the trailer tongue – useful for positioning a house in a tight space.
• The trailer and house are made from lightweight galvanized steel making them easy to tow with a wider range of vehicles.
• House could be more easily sited on a permanent foundation using the standard shipping container locks.
• The low profile wheels allow the house to have a flat bottom with no fender bump-outs in the floor and wall.

Photos and videos via Build Tiny. Pictured below are more photos of the trailer and The Boomer by Build Tiny.

Above: The trailer is rolled out from under the flat floor deck.

Below: House jacks are used to lift the house off the trailer.

Below: Standard shipping container locks are located at the 4 corners and secure the house to the trailer.

Below: The Boomer by Build Tiny.

The loft inside The Boomer.

Below: The living room and storage stairs in The Boomer.

Below: A fantastic kitchen.

Below: So lightweight the house can be towed by smaller vehicles.

Learn more about Build Tiny.

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RE/MAX has built a tiny house in collaboration with Students in the Henry Ford College’s Building Science Department. They call it the Tiny Home for Tiny Tots.

Students were given practical work experience in this semester-long tiny home project. Students participated in every stage of the process including design, structure, and systems. The Henry Ford College (HFC) is located in Dearborn, Michigan.

The goal was to raise money for longtime RE/MAX charitable partner Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals (CMN Hospitals), which provides care for more than 10 million children treated at 170-member hospitals across the U.S. and Canada.

The house is 24-feet long, 8′ 5″ wide, and 13′ 3″ tall. The walls were built with 2×4 wood framing and the roof uses 2×6 rafters. It’s insulated using spray foam insulation and has a standing seam metal roof.

The exterior is pine and cedar with PVC trim.  The interior is sheathed in sanded birch plywood panels and white pine trim. There floor is covered in bamboo flooring. It’s fully wired for a 50-Amp service, and has a residential style toilet.

I think the students at the Henry Ford College did an outstanding job building this tiny house. It looks like a high-quality professionally built tiny home.

It’s also great to see more schools using tiny houses as learning opportunities. Tiny Homes give students an opportunity to experience every aspect of the construction process from concept to completion while ending-up with something someone can actually call home.

Learn more about the tiny house auction on the RE/MAX website. The bidding begins July 26, 2018 and runs through July 28, 2018.

Kudos to RE/MAX and the Henry Ford College for collaborating on this Tiny Home for Tiny Tots. Photos by RE/MAX.

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I had this idea for a tiny house design in my head, threw it into my bullet journal, and took it all the way into SketchUp. I thought I’d share the process with you – and start a new blog post series at the same time. I hope you like it.

I began just sketching a quick outline of the size house I wanted. Then added some approximate locations for all the stuff I wanted in the house, which was:

• Space to sleep a family of four
• A lower level bedroom that doubles as a living room
• The bedroom needed to have a closing door, but open wide when used as a living room
• A dedicated and private home office
• A large bathroom with a soaking tub
• A flexible yet simple table for work, crafts, home schooling, and meals
• An ample kitchen
• A fair amount of storage
• A porch
• Plenty of windows for views and light
• Aerodynamic tongue side of the house for easier transport
• A tall shed roof or shed dormers to open the space up to the maximum height
• 32-foot triple axle bumper-pull trailer.

Here’s the initial sketch. It’s very rough because I only intended it for me to see – and I was just trying to place all the required stuff. I did several iterations. I don’t think I’ll use a fat Sharpie in the bullet journal again – it bleeds through the paper (but not through multiple pages luckily!).

The next step was to work out the details in more detail – to see if everything fit. Since I’ve got stencils, I used those to roughly block everything in. Again I wasn’t worries about how it would look because I didn’t intend to show it to anyone.

I’m showing you now because I think it’s good to see that any rough idea is worthy of putting on paper – even it you think you can’t draw. Don’t worry, your drawings can be just for you… so let the ideas flow!

The advantage of this bullet journal is that it gives you guidelines to quickly draw a tiny house on wheels to scale, with or without stencils.

I was digging the design a lot, so I threw it into SketchUp. The advantage of using software like SketchUp is that you can continue to iterate… but for getting the basic idea started I prefer putting it down on paper. Starting with paper also helps to make the SketchUp work go much faster.

Above is the floor plan of the lower level.

Below is the living room with the U-shaped sofa bed. These sections would slide around and reorganize into a bed without much effort.

The kitchen and large table are in the center of the house with the tallest ceiling. The table has two sections that fold down so you can choose how much of it to have open at once.

The bathroom is large enough to move around easily, get dressed, and would feel like a normal bathroom. The tub is 4-foot long.

The home office below is really a must for most people these days. I’ve been working from home for over a decade and really appreciate the door sometimes. Most tiny houses don’t have a dedicated space for work. This one is super small, but I could see making it work.

The little room to the left is an exterior accessed utility closet for the water heater, solar electric gear, and similar stuff you typically want out of the living space.

Below is a peek inside from the living room.

Below is a look from the bathroom toward the living room. Notice the cabinet above the sink doubles as a drain rack.

I decided to use a hip roof on both ends with two shed dormers in the center. The hip roof provides a lot of aerodynamics on the tongue side and looks more nicely balanced if it’s on both ends.

The shed dormers give you the most volume in a tiny house. The pitch on the dormers is 3/12, the hip gable roof is 10/12. The transom windows at the top should be operable for ventilation.

There are two lofts, one under each hip roof. The loft over the living room is deeper and could actually handle a queen size bed. The other loft is better sized for a twin.

The house would be built on a bumper-pulled 32-foot triple axle trailer.

A fold-down porch connects the two doors. The door on the right is the office. I continued the slope of the hip roof down the roof over the bump-out. This should be a fairly slippery design rolling down the highway – and it’s looks like it belongs too.

I think I might add this design to the Steel Tiny House Kits I offer and the Wood Framed Tiny House Plans. What do you think… is it worthy?

You can pickup the The Tiny House Bullet Journal and Tiny House Design Stencils here too. The bullet journals are on Amazon right now and the Stencils are currently on Kickstarter.

I’ll continue this series if people like it. I’ve got tons of tiny house designs in my head that often never get this far. Now that I have a place to jot them down, and a blog to share them, I think it might be a great way to share.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

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10 benefits to consider when choosing to build your tiny home using steel framing.

1. Higher R.O.I. — Your return on investment is better because with wood framing most of the cost is in the labor. This is either carpentry work you pay someone else to do or work you do yourself. Wood might be more inexpensive to buy, but it requires a lot more work to build than steel framed kits. With steel tiny house kits, 80% of your investment stays in the quality permanent materials, not lost as a labor cost.

2. Lightweight & Strong — Steel’s strength-to-weight ratio is 25-times higher than wood. A steel tiny house frame is 40-60% lighter than wood and 10-times the strength of a comparable wood frame. So it’s half the weight and exponentially stronger.

3. Quick Assembly — At the factory the steel framing is all pre-assembled into wall and roof panels. Once delivered to your job site you can assemble the panels in a day or two with the help of friends.

4. No Special Skills Needed — The pre-assembled steel frame tiny house kits don’t require an experienced framing crew. Since the kits are made directly from precise CAD (computer aided design) drawings, the panels are designed & built to simply screw together. All the screw holes line up perfectly square every time, there’s nothing to cut or measure. All you do is fastening panels together at square angles and attach it to your foundation.

5. Pest/Rot/Rust Resistant — Galvanized steel comes with a barrier to moisture and rust and makes an incompatible environment (or meal) for pests like termites.

6. Thermal Bridging Defeated — Modern sheathing options like ZIP Systems provides the thermal break, structural sheer strength, vapor and air barrier all in one application. Thermal bridging is a thing of the past – even for steel frames. Read more about thermal bridging.

7. Stonger Than Your Average Steel — The structural quality 20-22 gauge sheet steel in our kits is rolled through a series of dies and formed into c-sections. It’s ‘cold-rolled’ so no heat is required to form the shapes. As the steel is rolled, each c-section is cut to length, punched, dimpled, crimped and labeled. You can feel confident the structural elements will be sound and not be subject to fragile fold points.

8. ICC Complaint — The cold-rolled steel process used to produce these steel tiny house kits is ICC-compliant and IRC-compliant. This means you have verified proof that the technology producing your home’s steel frame is proven and produces the highest quality product. Read this ESR-2361 PDF for more information about the FRAMECAD technology.

9. Highest Quality — An engineered frame means you can sail past the design phase and avoid the risks for cost increases and delays. With the design done and the frame erected, it is easier to get a fixed budget, whether you are doing the work or bidding to subcontractors. Independently certified by the world’s most recognized quality assurance systems and organizations, our roll forming technology and manufacturing processes can be used for building throughout the United States.

10. Experienced Designer & Manufacturer — Michael Janzen has been designing tiny houses since 2008. He’s well known in the tiny house movement for advocating smart & frugal choices for tiny house living. That explains why Michael has chosen to work with the best manufacturer in the tiny house movement to product these Steel Tiny House Kits. Volstrukt uses the industry leading cold-rolled steel framing technology to produce tiny house frames and have been recognized by people all around the tiny house community as the leader in this space.

Photo by Volstrukt.

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Steel framing typically reduces the R-value of the in-cavity insulation by as much as 50%. Wood framing reduces R-value too… but only by about 10%. This is because wood transfers heat slower than metal, but neither are good insulators.

So all framed houses, wood & steel, are subject to thermal bridging – which is heat moving through the framing, around the in-cavity insulation, and transferring to the exterior of the home. Wood framing and sheathing (plywood and OSB) slow the thermal bridging because they have a tiny bit of R-value, but heat transfer is not effectively stopped unless there’s some kind of insulating layer applied to the exterior of the house.

The best solution is to wrap the building with exterior rigid insulation that cuts off the thermal bridging, provides shear strength, and protection from air & moisture penetration. When you reduce/eliminate thermal bridging you not only save energy but you also reduce the possibility of condensation, mold, and rot.

Insulation is normally placed between framing members because there’s an cavity to fill… but it’s not the best place for insulation. The best place is outside the framing, like wrapping the house in an insulated shell.

Joe Lstiburek of Building Science Corporation calls this the “perfect wall”, where all of the insulation is on the exterior. But the perfect wall would be super thick, which would not work well for tiny houses.

Luckily this isn’t a new problem, so there are many products that help defeat thermal bridging that double as sheathing.

ZIP System® R-Sheathing is an excellent choice. It combines structural sheathing, a vapor barrier, an air barrier, and insulation to defeat thermal bridging and seal up the house all in one system. While it might be a bit more expensive than plywood, it’s a one-stop-shop solution for enclosing the house. It’s also nailable so you can put your siding of choice over it without needing to nail through to the framing underneath.

ZIP System® R-Sheathing comes in different thicknesses which provide more insulation as the thickness increases. Select the thicker variety for the harsher climates.

Another option is the ultralight R3 Thermasheath SI Walls. It’s much lighter and still provides the structural sealing, a vapor barrier, air barrier, and thermal break – but it isn’t nailable so you would need to nail through to the framing underneath to attach siding.

Another option would be to use built-up layers of plywood, foam board insulation, and house wrap. This would be more labor intensive and thicker – so for tiny house construction the small savings you might see over the engineered all-in-one products is probably not worth it since we’ve not talking about that much material anyway.

If I were building a steel framed house that I planned to tow a lot, I’d choose the ultralight Thermasheath SI Wall system. If weight wasn’t a top priority I would definitely choose the ZIP System.

Photo by Volstrukt.

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I first learned about the benefits of steel framed tiny houses about 10 years ago from a friend who used to build them in Sonoma County, California. They are lighter and stronger than wood, which is perfect for creating tiny houses better suited for travel. The main challenge with steel back then was that it wasn’t as owner-builder friendly as wood since special skills and tools were needed. That has changed.

A commercial building technology has emerged that’s made this leap forward possible. It’s a CAD powered steel framing machine made by FRAMECAD, that literally prints, cuts, and punches steel framing that easily screws together. I’ve written about it before, and I’m now very happy to be able to offer steel kits for any of my designs.

Steel Shortcut

The steel frame kit offers a shortcut for a comparable price. I’m working with the folks at Volstrukt to manufacture all my designs. You can order a steel kit version of any of my wood framed tiny house designs, but I can also work with you on designing a house based on any of the tiny houses in my books, Tiny House Floor Plans or 101 Tiny House Designs.

The kits arrive at your build site mostly pre-assembled. Each wall, roof, and floor section is already complete. With a small group of friends you tilt them into place and screw them together. The assembly process requires no special skills and minimal tools – just a couple fo drills to drive screws. Since the frames are precision pre-drilled for assembly screws, the house goes together with very little effort or room for error.

Wood vs Steel

Both has its place. Steel is lighter and stronger so it’s ideal for tiny houses intended for travel. It’s also easy to assemble because these kits come mostly pre-assembled. In a day or weekend with a few friends you can put one together. Steel is the perfect option for the owner-builder that wants to jump start their tiny house and get started working sooner on a completed shell.

Wood framing has a lower materials cost but a higher labor cost and physical effort. Framing a tiny house can also be a daunting project and requires learning some carpentry skills. Many tiny owner-builders learn these skills on the job and they are not unattainable – but framing a house does require a lot of work.

Wood framing is more flexible for making changes on the fly. Steel panels really aren’t editable. Wood can be easily cut and walls modified. Remodels can be done later using your building and carpentry skills. So for example if you choose to add large skylights, bay windows, or larger doors someday in your house – and travel is not on the agenda – wood may be a better option.

Both can be insulated similarly and both can create cozy wood trimmed homes that hide their interior structure if desired. But if you’re looking to save weight and travel in your tiny home, steel is really the best option.

Cost

As I’ve already hinted… steel is more expensive as a material, but since the manufacturer pre-assembles the kit into wall panels, it significantly reduces the labor cost, effort, and time to build. When you factor these costs in, the final cost is usually about he same. See my Steel Tiny House Kit page for more details on price.

Custom Design

I can also help you design your tiny house. You might see one of my wood framed house designs, or a design in one of my books that you like – but have some changes in mind. I’m happy to work with you. Depending on the work needed, the cost ranges between free to a few hundred dollars depending on the work effort.

You might also have your own design that you’d like turned into a kit. I can help you turn those napkin sketches into a 3D drawing that can be turned into a steel tiny house kit.

Lets Talk

If you’d like to know more about ordering a tiny house kit, contact me at email hidden; JavaScript is required to schedule a call or ask questions by email.

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