With no rain today, Maya and I were able to complete the installation of the subfloor, sill plate, and tongue extension platform (key to making our tiny bathroom more spacious). 

Maya and Jeanine have been invited to the wedding of a friend’s son. He is marrying a woman from India in a ceremony in the tradition of that country.  This evening they attended the groom’s party dressed in the outfits they obtained while in India for Maya’s Coming of Age adventure.

Work on the tiny house began in earnest today with the arrival of our trailer. Despite constant rain, we completed insulating the floor (6″ of foam core – R30) and partitioning the porch from the house foundation.

Kyle and cousins Rory and Mario are visiting Nicolai in Colorado for a camping adventure.  Radio silence was broken today when we received this proof of life photo from the road.  We are looking forward to learning more about the reunion when Kyle returns.

From a yoga retreat near Katahdin Mountain in Maine Jeanine sent these photos.  She is enjoying a week of healthy eating, exercise, and meditation.  I can’t imagine a more tranquil and stress-free environment.  Looking forward to hearing all about the experience and to additional photos, perhaps a headstand on the edge of a cliff.

Maya is on Nantucket visiting Sarinnagh, Kyle is in Colorado visiting Nicolai, Jeanine is at a yoga retreat in Maine, and John moved out and into his new apartment today.  I worked on the pocket door that will separate the bathroom from the kitchen in Maya’s tiny house. We are using linear motion bearings on a rail to minimize the width of the pocket wall.  With a fixed-size trailer base, it pays significant dividends to save a few inches everywhere you can.

Maya left for Cape Cod this afternoon to join Sarinnagh for the 4th of July but not before cutting to size all of the plywood needed for the bedroom loft and bathroom wall.  She is cutting two sheets at a time using a circular saw with a home-built guide to follow a straight-edge clamp. She also cut and pocket-hole drilled all of the internal ribbing that will be used to give the loft its strength. 

The deer that frequently dine in the field behind our house generally do so at a great distance.  Apparently, they have now determined the precise extent of Nala’s electric containment fence. She goes apoplectic when they come right up to the edge of the yard and they just keep on eating as if without a care in the world. If I did not think it would undermine her respect for the invisible fence line, I would love to take her collar off, just once, to see how that affects the deer’s calculations.

Because a tiny house is built on a trailer you have to assume that it will be driven on the road at some point.  Assuming a maximum speed of 75mph into a 20mph headwind we are designing for a 100 mph wind load.  That is the equivalent of a category 2 hurricane. For this reason, we are gluing and screwing all framing members rather than using traditional nails.  Today we built the double plates (sits atop the wall studs) and window headers (sits atop the window openings).  As shown above, we used our very straight ridge beam to help straighten out one of the double plates during glue-up.

The ridge beam (runs the length of the roof (supporting the roof rafters)  needed for Maya’s tiny house is ~27 feet long.  We fabricated it from two 16-foot-long 2x6s using a 4-foot-long lap joint which Maya is shown above cutting by hand. She also shortened (due to trailer adjustments) and painted (3 coats) the bathroom pocket door.

Maya began construction of her tiny house today. Her goal is to complete and sell it by the end of the summer (less than 2 months).  It is an ambitious project and aggressive schedule.  Profit from the sale will be her summer earnings in lieu of a traditional job. I am acting in a design consulting and advisory capacity. I am also teaching her the proper and safe use of the various tools she will be using and serving as her assistant. Today she cut all the rafters for the roof (18 @ 40 degrees and 14 @ 18 degrees).  Each set requires three precisely mitered cuts and each rafter must be identical.

To regular followers of this blog, I would like to apologize in advance for the number of future tiny house related posts you will find here.house-related

Seven weeks ago I ordered a custom trailer for Maya’s tiny house project. Lead time was quoted as 5-6 weeks and it was to have been delivered while we were traveling in Ecuador.  Today I learned that the lead time has been pushed out to an “estimated” 10 weeks.  Such a delay would make completion of the project this summer entirely impossible.  I spent the day searching the country for an unsold, already-built trailer.  Eventually, I found one in Connecticut.  It is 4 feet longer, sits 4 inches higher and costs $1000 more than our original choice but it can be here by the end of next week. With no other viable options, we canceled the order for the initial trailer (helping the vendor see the wisdom of returning our non-refundable deposit) and began modification to the house plans.  The extra length was relatively easy to compensate for.  The loss of 4 inches of build height required a fairly massive redesign.

Our three-week adventure in Ecuador has come to an end with a fairly uneventful return to the USA. I was able to get one last shot of the Andes on our climb out of Quito and some nice shots of Panama City and ships queuing up for the Panama Canal as we landed there for our connecting flight to Boston.

Maya has been a terrific traveling partner and I will never forget this time spent with her, our first true father-daughter travel adventure. On a completely different level this trip has afforded me an opportunity to really see and understand the land of my mother’s birth and to better connect with my own heritage.

The TelefériQo Cruz Loma, is a gondola lift running from the edge of Quito’s city centre up the east side of Pichincha Volcano to the Cruz Loma lookout. It is one of the highest aerial lifts in the world, rising from 10,226 ft. to 12,943 ft. From the top you can see all of Quito spread out on one side and fertile farmlands on the other. It was our first stop on the way to the equator.

One of only two inhabited calderas in the world, the Pululahua Crater is home to about forty families. They are mainly farmers who grow corn and quinoa and raise cattle. It has been 2000 years since the volcano was last active so no one considers the residents to be at risk. In 1970 it was declared a botanical reserve by the Ecuadorian government in part to protect the wide variety of rare species that live on the mountain slopes.

The Ciudad Mitad del Mundo (“Middle of the World City”) is located 26km north of the center of Quito. The grounds contain the Monument to the Equator, which, at the time of its construction, was believed to be located exactly upon its namesake. The 30-meter-tall monument is made of iron and concrete and covered with cut and polished andesite stone. Modern GPS readings based on the World Geodetic System (WGS84), indicate that the equator actually lies about 240 meters to the north, a fact that is simply never mentioned while visiting the otherwise quaint attraction.

Adjacent to the Mitad del Mundo is the newly constructed UNASUR headquarters building which is where the Union of South American Nations holds its annual congress.

The Intiñan Solar Museum lays claim to being located exactly on the equator. While there we conducted several experiments designed to prove we were on the equator, some of them loosely founded in science.  It was entertaining none the less and I left with an egg balancing master certificate.  My own GPS watch and Google maps confirm that this site is not located exactly on the equator either. 

Cotopaxi is an active stratovolcano located about 30 miles south of Quito. It is the second-highest summit in Ecuador, reaching a height of 19,347 feet, and one of the world’s highest volcanoes. Since 1738, Cotopaxi has erupted more than 50 times, resulting in the creation of numerous valleys formed by mudflows around the volcano. The last eruption lasted from August 2015 to January 2016 and the summit has been off-limit to climbers since then. Not so the the Refugio José Rivas, located at 15,953 feet which can be reached on foot from a parking area some 1300 feet below. Maya and I enjoyed a hot chocolate there after the rigorous climb through thin air.