Rooted Living Archives - Page 2 of 3 - follow your wild heart

Tiny House update – kitchen – bathroom – I’m finished!!

My tiny house project was hibernating for a while. But when I decided to put a deadline on finishing it, the motivation came back and rebooted everything! The big parts that were missing were the kitchen and the bathroom.

The kitchen

For the kitchen I wanted to have at least a small area where I could cut or otherwise temporarily place ingredients, etc. I had a few different ideas of accomplishing it, most of them needing a lot of building material and time and energy, because I would build most of the rack myself. While thinking about how to get the wood for building it and how this could actually be created, I had an idea that was so much easier. I didn’t have to build anything, just put an existing cupboard, an IKEA rack and some small trays together, and voilà. That’s how it looks now: read more

(almost) running water

To get myself some luxury in my tiny house, the next thing on my bucket list was to build a rack for the sink. The idea was to have some kind of canister for water storage connected to a tap, the sink, and a bucket below to catch the greywater. My goal was to produce a system that was as simple as possible while still serving all the needs I had.

This was the enamel sink I found on the internet months ago and fell in love right away. perfect size (38×40 cm), perfect weight, and most importantly: exactly the style that I was looking for. I didn’t want plastic because that’s just cheap, doesn’t look good and … well I don’t really have to list all the reasons why this just isn’t an option. Ceramic would have been okay, but it’s extremely heavy and didn’t fit into my tiny house stylistically. Metal wouldn’t have been perfect, but was the only other option I could live with, but luckily didn’t have to. The funny thing is, that the sink wasn’t only perfect for all the reasons I already mentionned, but it was also the cheapest option, because the guy selling it had a few of them and didn’t know what to do with it. read more

It’s all down the drain… or is it?

Outhouse - Photocredit: unsplash.com/Amy Reed (@amybethreed)

Since I’ve been asked some questions about the composting toilet I built, about how it works and what’s the goal of it, I decided to share some of the research I’ve been doing. Warning: I will not sugarcoat this topic, so if you don’t want to read about shit, just stop reading.

So what’s the difference between the good old outhouse and a composting toilet?

The outhouse was – as the name suggests – outside, so the problem of it being smelly didn’t really exist or at least wasn’t a focus. You just dug a hole, put a “house” over it and used it until it was full. In the early days they probably just dug a different hole at some other place. Later on it was emptied regularly. read more

Move your ass!

Even though I wrote before that I needed the toilet to be fully functioning for me to move in, the whole process of building my toilet overlapped with moving in, since I just couldn’t wait any longer. So the big question was: What do you really need to live?

Well, “need” is defined a little different by each person at each point in time. But since I experienced that being too radical or fast in certain steps of a transformation can turn me off the path completely, I did “allow” myself to stretch the meaning of “need”. read more

Shit

After sleeping in my new little house for two nights in a row, it became apparent pretty soon that the next thing before really moving in had to be the composting toilet. There is a house right next to my new home where I can use the toilet, but it’s winter, and I do want to have some luxury…

I found some leftover wood in the attic so I started to build my wooden box for the toilet. The separating toilet seat I had already ordered and received months ago from Separett .

So I started to build the box for the toilet. I’m sure that any carpenter would be horrified by the way I did it, but being pretty or doing it the “correct” way was not high on my list of priorities. I just wanted it to be stable and do the job. First, I built the frame. read more

Walk on wood

The walls are built, the roof was already there. The part that was missing up until now was the floor. I wanted to have a nice wooden parquet floor, but didn’t want to pay too much. So I turned to the internet once more and found small amounts of different types of parqet floors. Leftovers from flooring projects. I got a few squaremeters maple, walnut, and oak – all new – for €90 all in all (probably half or less of the original price). Still not cheap, but a price I can live with. read more

I’m … growing … a wall

after putting up a wall not so long ago, I decided that one of my inner walls should be cork. Even though technically the cork grew before and then I bought it, but I see it as a first step to growing a wall.

The cork – compared to the clay – was a rather easy job. First I tried out some cork tiles that were already used once and still had glue and plaster residue on them and on top were lacerated on some of the edges. To say the least, I wasn’t really happy with that.

But soon after putting up just a few of them as a test, I found someone selling new cork tiles for a good price from a sharing platform. The amount he sold was just right for the part of the wall I wanted to cover. Definitely a great gift. read more

I’m building a wall…

As I already wrote about in my previous post, the next step of re-doing my container is to put up a clay wall. Since pictures sometimes tell more than a thousand words, this one is going to be (mostly) a foto-story:

I had already bought the dry mixture for the clay. My decision in the bying process was random, because I can’t really tell the difference at the moment anyway. So first, I had to fix the soft fibre boards to the wall. The woman that had sold me the clay recommended I “stick” the boards on with clay. So I started mixing the sand-mixture with water – having no idea about the needed consistency, and started putting it on the soft fibre board (lying on the floor).

I started up with using little water, which led to a rather thick sheet of clay and also it was quite hard work to evenly put it on the board. Then I fixed it onto the existing wall with additional screws. With the soft fibre boards it is very important to be careful of how deep you drill it in, otherwise the screw drives through the board and does not fix anything. Also I wasn’t really sure about the jute mesh and if I also needed it for the “sticking on the wall” part. So I tried about half with the mesh, and half without.

When I was finished, it looked like that:

The clay between the soft fibre boards and the existing wall is not visible, but it’s about 2-4 mm thick. Next I tried to stuff the gaps between the boards with some rest of the wood fibre that was left over from cutting.

Then the first sheet of clay was applied directly onto the wall. There I was already using more water to have a more liquid consistency of the clay. Otherwise it would have been almost impossible to apply it onto the wall.

While the clay was still wet, I applied the jute mesh over it with a stapler gun

The next step was already to apply the outer layer of clay onto the jute mesh. This was much easier than the previous coat of clay, because it was held up by the mesh.

When I was finished with applying that outer layer of clay to the whole wall, it was still rather rough with a lot of lines from the tools (sorry for my finger).

With additional water, I tried to flatten the wall to give it a more homogenous surface.

Then it was time for the wall to dry out. Having the windows open for air circulation, it took about a week for the wall to be dry. Then I put some special stabilizing liquid onto the wall with a brush (that was also recommended by the people where I got the clay from). I’m not completely sure if this is actually necessary, so since the amount of liquid I bought was only good for a little more than half, this is yet another experiment ;-). I’ll observe, if the part of the wall that was left without it somehow starts crumbling and let you know after some time…

What else is still to be done?

parquett floor
cork wall/wallpaper for the other walls
composting toilet
walls for the “bathroom”
frame for the sink
kitchen
loft bed
???

What will be my next step? I haven’t finalized my decision, so it’ll be a surprise for all of us ;-).

My tiny house project is still running

Finally, some updates on my tiny house (container) project. It was a little quiet on that front, because first nothing much actually happened, and then a lot happened, but I just didn’t take the time to write down everything, because I wanted to DO. Since I’m now almost finished with the first step, this is going to change.

I decided a while back that I didn’t like to keep the walls of my container the way they were, because they look (and are) cheap and also don’t create a good interiour climate. Since the whole thing is a big experiment on tiny living, tiny experiments are always welcome. That is why I decided to try out putting up a clay wall inside my container. Just one wall for now, but if I like it – and also want to invest the money – a second wall might follow.

I got the idea from Wohnwagon, who had heard of a company building modular houses out of multiple shipping containers and then insulating them and using clay as finishing touch on the inside, and decided to use the same concept. It is basically soft-fibre boards out of wood with a jute mesh (or whaterver mesh for plastering you want to use) and the clay.

I was however not sure about the practical details of that construction, so I tried to research, especially on what to keep in mind in terms of possible side-effects. I was told that I need to be careful about mold, because the humidity in the air will react differently – especially with the container walls not “breathing” (allowing humidity exchange). I was told to calculate the whole insulation to find out where the dew point would be at u-wert.net (important for the humidity problem). I was told all kinds of things that were meant as help but just lead to a vicious circle in my head and ultimately in a complete standstill, because I was afraid to make a mistake. – This was the period where nothing really happened…

Luckily I got out of that limiting mind-game and realized that I just wanted to put up that f***-wall, and was ready to make mistakes along the way, as long as I would learn from them. My next post will be the story of how my clay wall came to be. So stay tuned…

Interior Design – first draft

It took me a while, but I finally finished the first draft of the interior design of my container tiny-house. Before I bought the container, I already had some ideas of how to organize everything on the inside, but the placement of the windows and the door limited my options greatly, so I had to re-plan the whole thing. I still haven’t figured out how to manage the windows on the short side, because the loft bed gets in the way of opening them completely. The height of the loft bed is kind of fixed, because with the container also came (among other furniture) two identical robust cupboards that I intend to use as base for the loft bed.

After having some pictures in your head of some idea, you often develop a tunnel vision that gets narrower each time you revisit the whole subject. The realization of that fact alone however does not help in the process of stepping out of the tunnel. And since I’m riding the wave of experimenting instead of planning everything to death, I’ll probably go through with that layout, if no great new ideas are thrown my way. I am however always open for suggestions 🙂

After due consideration I decided to use the tool “Sketch up” to do the interior design plans. It’s free, pretty easy to use – especially after watching a few of the tutorial videos – and more than enough for the amount of detail I was looking for. Be aware that some of the furniture is probably not going to be exactly like that, because I chose it from a list of pre-designed objects that are available for download in Sketch up. The kitchen counter for example will be a little smaller, and in turn the wardrobe in the right corner will be a little bigger. So… here it is! My first draft:

As already mentionned, comments, suggestions and hints are always welcome and greatly appreciated!