Tiny House 10: Roof, Floor, Trim

Progress has been slow, due to numerous trips to the Bay Area for family duty, and the fact that I keep running out of materials and have to wait for orders to arrive. But this week I was finally able to get to a big milestone: the house is finished, except for the shiplap siding, which has been on backorder for 2.5 months. I will now have to call the supplier, get my money back, and find another source for the shiplap.

The hard job was getting the roofing panels installed. This involved a lot of climbing up and down a ladder set against the roof at a 45 degree angle:

In the middle of the day, the house has no shade, and the temperatures here have been in the low 90s, so I did this work in the early morning and late afternoon/early evening.

In Vermont, we called these roof panels “agricultural roofing”. They have exposed fasteners: metal screws with built-in neoprene washers. This is a cheaper option than standing seam roofing, which has no exposed fasteners, but which is usually installed by specialty contractors.

Supposedly roofing screws will self-drill through the panels, but my experience in Vermont was that this was a very optimistic and time-wasting idea. So as we did in Vermont, I pre-drilled the holes in the panels while they were on the ground, using a story stick to mark the hole locations.

After the roof panels were up, it was time to install the rake flashing pieces, which are the drip edges on the gable ends. Each of these had to be custom-cut with metal shears. The cut edges were sharp and dangerous, so I folded them over with pliers.

Then the two pieces of ridge cap had to be installed, the second one being custom-cut again. This involved lots more roof ladder climbing, which made my old creaky knees a bit painful. This picture of the west roof and north gable end is a better view of the flashing and ridge cap:

Then it was time to sand the floor and apply a polyurethane finish. I did the rough sanding with a random orbital sander, and did the fine sanding with a hand-held sanding block. Then I put down several coats of polyurethane. I prefer doing this to using floor paint, because you can see the wood grain and patterns.

Finally I spray-foamed the gaps around the windows and door, and installed some custom-cut trim over the gaps. The trim is very simple and rustic, but the simplicity fits the design of the house. Here’s a not-so-great picture of three of the windows and the floor on the north end, where the bed will go:

Now it’s off to the Bay Area yet again. Maybe next month I’ll be able to install the siding and be finished with this project.