It's over one and a half years that we started getting interested in Tiny Houses. When we got sick in Indonesia, we spend some time in our hotel room on YouTube and watched many of the videos from Living Big in a Tiny House. Soon we started to put together the things we liked to make the best combination of furniture and place saving options. We really fell in love with this minimal style of living as we also lived like it while travelling by bike anyway. The idea of spending less for things and enjoying more quality time with people or with things you really like to do sounds amazing. At some point we realised that a Tiny House on Wheels is a pretty good summary of the things we learned in this journey so far.
The plans developed and it became clear that once we're back home, we would like to build a Tiny House on Wheels for ourselves. We looked up insulation and building materials and tried to figure out what's the best and ecological way to build such a house. There are so many ways though and we really have not a clue or any experience in this field. At some point we heard that there are Tiny House builders who offer to rent a building spot in their workshop. Which means that you get some help and support from their experts as well as that you can use their materials and machines. That sounded perfect for us. The one we contacted in Germany was booked out for the whole next year already though... Bummer. As we also only dreamed about a Tiny House but never really seen or been in one in real life, we were also looking for a place, maybe along our way back home, where we could visit somebody with a Tiny House. That's how we found the Tiny House builders in Romania, Eco Tiny House. We liked the styl of the houses and wanted to visit them. As one thing that we learned on this trip being to always at least ask the questions you have in mind, so we had to ask them if it would be also possible to build our house there. That would fit perfectly for us, we though, the builder in Germany is booked out, we would have to skip parts that we would cycle to have some time to build, but like this we could have a pretty good start with the house, working full time on it and as Turkey in summer sounded pretty hot, we wouldn't mind to skip that part. The first answer of the Romanian builders was that they normally don't do that, but explaining the concept, they said YES!! Woohoo! We wrote couple of mails, talked and eventually signed a contract to build the outside shell of our Tiny House for one month in their workshop!
We found an amazing WarmShowers host in Miercurea Ciuc, where we could stay. Emese, our host, lives at a lovely place with a cat and a dog - perfect for us. The first day in the workshop, we got to know the place, looked around and went in a Tiny House for the first time! We loved it. On the second days, we had a look at our plans that we had created so far. We changed a few things, as some distances or rooms where just to small and they had the experience to know that and give us some amazing, other ideas. Our new plan was definitely better then the one before and the next day, we already started. We were always told what's the next steps and then it was on us to build our own house :).
Watch the video to see the build, that's the best explanation. Just to get an overview how long everything takes, here you find what we did every day.
Day 1: preparing the two main beams and cutting and putting in the connecting cross beams
Day 2: attaching the aluminium bottom sheet and the aluminium corners and cutting the beams for the wooden frame
Day 3: turned the floor around, adding three threaded rods, putting in the rock wool insulation and convering the floor with plywood
Day 4: putting up the wodden frame and measuring the diagonales
Day 5: attaching vapor barrier and plywood to the inside of the short sides
Day 6: cutting out the windows, cutting and installing the horizontal roof beams and measuring the diagonales
If you have any more questions, you write us and we will help you as good as we can.
Cheers,
Joni, Droni and Vroni