Our first stop on Saturday was to Home Depot to get supplies. I had a 10% off coupon from moving, so I was eager to buy as much as possible in one go to take advantage of the discounts.
My dad and I started filling up a couple of carts, and quickly realized that there was no way we were going to fit everything we wanted to in the truck. We did manage to get the what we’d need for the subfloor of the tiny house - rigid insulation (basically foam board to insulate under the floor of the house), plywood, and nails and screws and glue to hold everything together. We also got a saw, and some lovely family friends are letting me use their nail gun.
The hardest part so far has been trying to match all of the domain-specific names for different things. Like 12D and 9D nails. Turns out, that’s a way to specify the length and diameter of the nails, referencing a “pennyweight”, somehow meaning “the cost of 1000 of these nails in old British currency.” Weird, right?
I ran across my first mistake in buying materials. The plans called for one 2” rigid insulation board and one 1-1/2” board stacked on top of each other. But, there’s only 3” of space. I had vaguely registered this, but assumed I must be missing something about how the insulation compacted or something. But nope, that second board just doesn’t fit, so we’ll have to return some of the insulation and get a 1” board instead, which is stalling the build.
I spent much of yesterday afternoon getting the first layer of insulation in! It was a lot of measuring and cutting, but wasn’t bad at all. Especially fun was karate chopping the boards in order to break off big pieces after using the utility knife to slice where they needed to break. (Sadly, I neglected to take pictures of this.)
I also had a rabbit visitor while I was working.
