Still here! gypsy wagons

I finished my job with construction at my friends and well I have to make a living as best I can! So lately I have been working on making day planner, journal, covers and writing ebooks. My daughter in law figured out how to open my CD for gypsy wagons so I put that ebook on Amazon! check out some pictures of living tiny!!! I missed this CD LOL


https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073ZKVB53

Pictures of room I am working on for friend

I mentioned I have been helping with some construction/renovation at a friend's house. Did I say the room is approx. 12 ft by 23 ft?
Here are a few pics of inside and the view to the outside. It is really beautiful, that view, especially since our lake out here is fuller than I have ever seen it in my 17 yrs here!! Once, years ago, it was almost this full. But, for the most part the lake is a good 2-3 miles from this location, so seeing the lake out their room is awesome!!!!
This picture is rather blurry but you can see in the distance a flat portion of blue LOL. That is the lake.

So this picture shows the floor, ceiling and long wall with masonite. 

This other wall, with windows, will be sheetrocked. Well actually it is already done, along with the end wall in picture above. We put insulation in and then sheetrocked it all. All fresh and new looking now! By the way, the floor was just a porch floor so it was 2x6s with open space between each 2x6. 

More on tiny tiny house build

I mentioned I am going with a Victorian color scheme. Here is a pic of the fabric that seems to be the colors I am drawn to.

I think I also made mention of the little travel trailer oven/stove I hope to use in my real tiny house. Here is a pic of that. 

And then I thought I will make a rough sort of replica of that stove for the dollhouse tiny house! I am not going to spend days upon days doing detail work of the stove, LOL, so am settled on just a general look. Pretty fun I think!!!

I spent the day, the other day, really trying to get the kitchen area somewhat complete, along with the stairs and thin wall unit. Here is an overall pic of the kitchen. Where those upper cabinets are is where the ceiling will be for the upper loft. Not stairs off to the left, behind the thin shelving unit, which I decided upon since the floor above will need a corner support system as that floor will not run all the way across the tiny house to the other wall. The stairs cut into the flooring/ceiling. The stairs will only be a foot and half wide which I figure is good enough to handle considering we will only be going up there to sleep. OH and hubby and I are short so a 6 foot ceiling in this kitchen will be just fine! I have found, working in my coffee truck with a 6 ft ceiling, that it is perfectly comfortable for me! 

In this next picture you see the stove/oven and back door area. That narrow floor cabinet has shelves on the other side. It will serve as a barrier between couch and kitchen. 

This next picture shows you a bit of that shelving unit that will support ceiling/floor to loft. The bottom cabinet part will have access to under the stairs, maybe store potatoes and such? Also, the stairs will have drawers for storage underneath steps. The black parts you see represent under counter refrigerators.  

This picture shows you kitchen sink/window. I did the counters with strips of wood, filled and sanded and eurathaned to emulate the plan for having butcher block counter tops in the tiny house. I built most of the elements from popsicle sticks and foamboard. I am really itching to go to hobby lobby in Albuquerque to get other wood for building but that is 2 hrs away with a truck that needs work so that is not gonna happen! sad face!!!! 

Building Tiny Tiny House cont.

I was gonna get pictures the other day but no batteries were strong enough to power my camera!! Got some batteries today and some pics now.
First off, in planning to use less costly, and lighter, materials I am going with tin roofing at this point for siding. I would love vinyl wood look siding, or real cedar but that is not going to happen! My plan is also to go with Victorian colors and to ultimately add flatter trims that emulate a sort of Victorian feel so that the house will not look like a cargo container!!! ugh! I am not a modern or industrial kind of person in terms of decor, although I love metals.

So in terms of of miniature making I had seen this technique years ago and was waiting for an excuse to use it!! You take a cardboard box, and get one side wet. I found that the side with print, not the brown side, worked best for getting wet. After maybe 10 minutes begin to peel the outer layer of cardboard off, the flat surface, and underneath this is what you get!!!

Dollhouse miniature tin siding, or roofing! Just paint! I kept telling my teenage son "look!! look how cool that is!!" and he was just "you are weird....ok it is cool" LOL

OH A NOTE: If you try this? I painted a piece first to see if it was a good color and it warped. I would recommend gluing in place and THEN painting it!!!

I did not have a great variety of bottles of acrylic paint to play with and kind of knew what I was going for, in terms of exterior and interior themes. In may many years of painting my walls I have always leaned towards an olive green and golden yellow. I mixed some interior house paint I had to other small amounts to come up with a subtle tan yellow and today I went to town (45 miles away) and went to hardware store first (to get trim) and found a fold out of exterior house colors. Then to walmart to match small acrylic bottle colors. Strangely enough, one of the colors I picked out matched what I had painted the siding already, the color I mixed!! But I put some golden yellow on and think I love that!! Fortunately I can live with in miniature and find if I really like the color!! Easy to change my mind in mini!!! Here is a close up of the siding with both colors

Here is my color scheme at this point. I will get a pic of the fabric I have in my kitchen right now, and show you inspirational how this palette came about. Oh another mixing coincidence? the background these paint chips are on is a piece of board I mixed paints to become a terracotta of sorts that seems to almost perfectly match the color chip on bottom right!!! 

And lastly, a picture of a very very rough kitchen!!! I always wonder why more tiny houses do not have kitchens at the end of the house. I do not want people walking through the kitchen all the time!!! I plan on having 18" or so cabinets/counters. I can use 2 small under counter refrigerators that are 18" deep and find a nice deep sink that will fit as well. I have an old travel trailer range/oven whose burners work but oven does not. If I can get that fixed somewhere that will be my oven and stove. It is a 3 burner and is about 20" by 20" so that counter, by kitchen door, will be a tad deeper. The back kitchen door, if I choose to go that way, is at the bottom middle of the picture, where there is no structure. To the left of that is a very narrow counter, shelf unit, that acts as a divider between living room and kitchen. Also that white stuff is foam board and is the couch at this point. Front door is top left corner, and those stairs will go to hubby's and my loft. 

Dollhouse Miniature model of my Tiny home design

I finally got some thin plywood to make my tiny house. Hubby got me the wrong kind...sigh, but I worked with it. And I did not have the right nails so a bit of a bother nailing together.
First though, let me show you the only picture I can find of one of my gypsy wagons, dollhoue (1:12th scale) gypsy wagons.

I have a CD I made with instructions on how to make these, but my computer will not open it so I can get more pictures. The point, however, is that I have envisioned, in one way or another, how to set up and live within a tiny space! Every time I made a gypsy wagon I really put myself in there thinking of where things should go and how I would live! LOL yep

So back to the model I am working on. 

First of all I searched online to see if I could understand wheel wells better and the options that come with building between wheel wells or on top of wheel wells. I have read that building inside wheel wells makes for a narrower house (not what I want). And building on top of wheel wells means less head room (don't want that either). I have read that you need to be careful when building down below wheel wells and then up onto wheel wells, which results in a sort of floor bulkhead in the trailer. There are issues with moisture and also the integrity of the metal that makes up those wheel wells. I will do more research before actually building but figured I can make it work. 

I also read about drop axles that can give you a few more inches of headroom in the house. AND I had to research what the measurements may be, in terms of where the wheel wells would be! The formula people seemed to discuss the most was a 60/40 thing, meaning that (in my case a double axle I think) that 60% of the trailer would be from between the front tires and 40% behind. I guess the point being you do not want the wheels/tires dead center of your trailer. There is also the 10% of the weight that will be on the tongue. I have yet to delve into that!

With this knowledge in hand I realized one potential plan, to build out the kitchen a bit onto the tongue, which would give me maybe 2 extra feet, utilizing that space for a sink, would not work! Ugh, liked that idea!!! The reason being that I could not put a back bedroom and bathroom because of wheel well. So my design is reversed. I now have my kitchen at the back of the trailer and bedroom/bathroom in the front by tongue. It will not matter front or back when I plant it down on some land, but for trailer building purposes it will! 

I am going to give you one picture for today and then do more next time. This is the view from the front door. I have just randomly placed windows, knowing that with wall studs etc they will need to be more accurately measured, but for now it is a general idea, helping me figure things out. This is a 1:12th scale mini mini home and if I finish it really nice it will likely find a spot in my tiny home!! Measurements are roughly 26 inches by 7 3/4 inches interior...and approx 11 1/2 inches tall. Kitchen will be on the left and bedroom bathroom on the right.....2 lofts

And, while I would love character roof lines, I know I do not have the skills for that and figure this design will provide me with the most space inside. I will "character" it up with window trims, etc. 

Built my coffee truck part 2

The coffee truck, Solid Ground Coffee, went through some little changes. I mixed paint to get a darker color brown on the outside, and made the orange trip more red. My daughter in law painted one of the signs for me, the fancier one by the large walk up window, and I painted the others. All painted on old fence boards and screwed into place.
In the interior I put up corner support hurricane brace type things to ensure solidity.
I embarked on this coffee truck business the first week of October in 2016. It was a hit (at first) and I was going to the nearest town, 15 miles away, every day almost, usually taking off Sundays. After a couple weeks the trailer itself began breaking!!! welds coming apart and axle was breaking!! Ugh. My husband, also self employed, a jeweler, fortunately came home from a show with enough money we could buy a new flatbed. It was quite the challenge to get the old trailer parts off of the coffee truck and pulley the coffee truck onto the new flatbed!!! We did some interesting attachments LOL. They were my idea. Then a friend of ours did some additional welding for us.

The coffee business has dwindled significantly because new things only seem romantic for a bit? But I still head out with this, at the least, every Saturday to the Gallup NM flea market where many people from around the country take pictures and post to the internet somewhere!! I can safely say, however that I have likely put over 7,000 miles on this coffee truck and not one thing is out of place or weakened in terms of my build!!! Things always go flying while I drive it down the road but that is another issue!!
Oh there was a few times when that door you see came flying open, to the point we made a plywood one facing the other direction as the trailer door hinges busted! And, the trailer has maintained its integrity despite me not checking to make sure husband actually latched the hitch (3-4 times?), resulting in trailer coming off hitch and dragging on the highway! Once the coupler broke!! Still my build is intact! And Yes, this build was all me. The only time I asked for help was lifting roof up, holding a wall to be screwed in, or otherwise holding things. Ok occasionally I could not seem to get a screw in or a hole drilled through metal so hubby used his strength LOL.

Built my own Coffee truck!!! (been busy with construction sorry)

I have a very very dear friend whose husband is getting to the age he is unable to do a lot anymore. He is 82 and has spent his life doing construction, even teaching it. When I first moved out here to NM my brother was helping build my sister a house on my property here and it was this man, Martin, who designed it and supervised. I did quite a bit of working on that house as well. His work shop is getting redone to a smaller area and then it is becoming my friend's studio. It is a beautiful space (will get pics) that is approx 12 ft by 23 ft (I get to play with that space in my head with tiny house plans!!)
Anyways I am being hired to do a lot as they are both not able to do that much. Today we finished up laying down masonite for flooring (not a fan LOL!!!!).
So on to the coffee truck.
I had this little home made flat bed trailer from my brother and kept looking at it, for a couple years, thinking "hmmm coffee truck?" I threw the idea around with family and no one seemed really interested in the notion, or not interested enough to be motivated.
I am self employed and have been, in various positions, for over 20 yrs. My eldest child is developmentally disabled so I cannot really have a real job outside the home that is not really flexible. So I always have new ideas to make money. I decided, last year, to just go for it!
Here is the trailer before I did anything....it measured approx 3 1/2ft by 8 ft.

I took off those center rails things and other metal parts on the interior (it was hard!!). I thought about building onto the wheel wells but was unsure of my skills so decided not to do that. In retrospect I should have. Then I had to lay out 2x4 frames for the left and right of the trailer, as that center part is raised and is just plywood!! I laid a plywood floor onto that. 

I guess I do not have pics of the process after this, not sure why! I made side walls that bolted through the metal sides/lips of the trailer. Each wall was made of 2x4s I ripped down to be 2x2s. I used old tin roofing from the property to make the siding, and reclaimed insulation. I took a door off an old travel trailer for the door, and used plexiglass pieces for windows, sandwiching them between 1x2s. I had an old reclaimed skylight that is in the coffee truck. Unfortunately no matter what I did the roof leaked!!! so, being I am in NM where a lot of construction things are allowed/ignored (LOL) I duct taped a tarp up there and it has held all winter!!! 

Will continue the story next time but here are some pics of the coffee truck, inside and out.

These last 2 pics are kind of in progress, then counters painted and trim in.