Tiny House 11: Siding, internet, nesting

The shiplap siding finally showed up two days ago, so I immediately started painting some of the boards. Then after they’d dried, I spent the next day and a half installing them on the house.

The boards are already primed, which saved me a lot of work. I’m painting the boards before installing them, which means a little more prep work, but much less work on the ladders. They really can’t be painted after they’re installed anyway, because it’s difficult to get a big brush into the very small spaces in the overlaps. The previous owner left behind some paint that was used on the cabin siding; I’m using that on the tiny house so that the two buildings will match. Here’s what it looks like as of this afternoon:

In my notes from the Vermont house build, I said that the siding was the most tedious part of the job. That is probably going to be the case here, too. As with the sheathing and strapping, every piece is custom-cut, but fitting the boards around the openings is the tricky part, involving both the miter saw and the table saw.

Since I don’t have a helper, I used a cheap jig to to hold the boards in place as I screwed them to the strapping. It’s just a scrap board pressed up against the bottom of the wall using Irwin clamps in “push mode”:

Another thing I got done yesterday was bringing internet to the tiny house. I use ethernet instead of wi-fi, so using some kind of long-range wi-fi thingie was not a solution. The distance between the cabin and the tiny house is about 200 feet, so ethernet would probably not work. I finally settled on using RG6 coax cable and a couple of Motorola MM1000 coax-to-ethernet adapters, one at each end of the cable. I’d never worked with coax before, but it wasn’t hard to strip the cable and install connectors at each end. The cable ended up being about 250 feet in total, and the link worked perfectly the first time. I also put in a router running DD-WRT in the tiny house in case I have visitors who can’t use ethernet. I don’t use the router myself, and just connect the laptop directly to the MM1000. Here’s what the setup looks like in the tiny house in “visitor” mode:

That orange cable is the end of the 250-foot link to the cabin’s router. The cable is supposed to be buried underground; right now it’s just sitting on the ground.

Before the siding showed up, I started some nesting in the tiny house. I put in a double bed, so I’ve been sleeping at night (and sometimes during the day for naps) in the tiny house for a couple of weeks. This is a lot nicer than the sleeping loft in the cabin, which is very hot and stuffy in the summer. The tiny house is really my bedroom now, since the cabin (which is only 320 square feet) doesn’t have one. I also installed a tiny built-in desk for the laptop (not shown in the picture).

I now have a sheer cotton curtain for that window on the end wall beyond the bed, which faces another nearby home. But the curtain is too long, so I’ll need to get the sewing machine out of the shed and hem the thing.