Tiny House 8: Door and Window

The door showed up yesterday, so I spent much of today installing it.

Doors take a lot of fiddly work. The rough opening is always, um, rough, so you have to put shims around the door to wedge it tightly in place. Instead of buying shim wedges at the hardware store, I custom-made each one on the chop saw by cutting slices off the end of a 2x4. Also, because I was working alone, I used various jigs to hold the door so it wouldn’t move or fall out of the opening while I was screwing it into place. You can see three of these jigs on the outside of the door in this picture; I had similar jigs inside the door:

You can’t see it in the picture, but there is a strip of flashing membrane tape between the bottom of the door and the floor. I decided to use the membrane instead of the three beads of caulking that the door instructions recommended, because that would seem to provide more complete protection for the floor.

The next step is to spray-foam the gaps around the door. On the inside of the door, those gaps will be hidden by trim boards. On the outside, siding will cover the gaps.

Way back in January, I ordered the first of four windows, and it sat around all winter waiting for me to finish the house enough to install it. I didn’t order the other three windows then, because I wanted to be really sure they would work. This is the kind of uncertainty I’ve been dealing with, assembling all the materials myself instead of having FirstDay Cottage deliver them to me. Anyway, I installed the window on the north gable end of the house, and it does work:

The rough opening was slightly out of level, so I put a little shim under the right side of the window before installing the roofing nails through the flange holes.

You can see the strip of flashing membrane tape that I put under the bottom flange. Eventually I’ll put membrane tape over the side flanges, and then over the top flange. But my experience with building the Vermont house told me to wait until just before putting up the siding to do this. Otherwise, the tape is likely to come loose because it’s not very sticky against rough wood.

So I ordered the rest of the windows and am waiting for them to show up. I’ll probably wait until after the roofing is done to install them. I felt it was safe to install the first window on the north gable end because I won’t be doing much ladder work there for the roof job.