Looking out into the fern-covered hill and up at the tall standing trees, nothing but wind between the branches and the odd bird chirp to be heard. Every Saturday and Sunday we enjoy a slow morning to recover from the week before putting our thermal underwear and work pants on to get ready for the day (unless there is surf… more on that another time). Silas, my partner and the human swiss army knife of skills, is the visionary and workhorse behind most of the things that get done around here. He is a welder by trade but has the brain of every tradesman combined so he is in heaven at the property!

Photo by Emily Harris for CC

It has been just over a year of packing up every Friday and heading to our mud-pit in Jordan River for the weekend. It is soooo rainy and we don’t have a proper driveway yet so we sloosh around in mud most weekends, this is the rainforest after all. After 12 months of observing where the sun hits at different times of the year and enough time to accumulate lots of tools, equipment, vehicles and trailers… we have a vision and in this course, through this blog, I will dive into the steps required to build a timber frame tiny home.

Initially, we thought we would build a house, turns out it’s super expensive and we are not comfortable getting a construction loan (lots of rules and risk tied to that, read more on this here) and going into mass amounts of debt just to have a walk-in closet… so we turned to other options. My dream since I was a kid was to live in a shipping container home and it turns out there are more rules than I thought about that too. Tiny home living was introduced to us by a friend who has been living in his airstream trailer for over 15 years. You can go where you want, build what you want for a reasonable price and reuse lots of materials or use your own materials as building inspectors aren’t breathing down your neck making sure your lumber is to a certain standard. We are not worried about poor quality because as you will learn, Silas is a perfectionist, which is a good thing when building a house on wheels in case the odd 140km/h wind storm hits (like it did last week!).

The first step in the tiny home journey was buying a 26-foot gooseneck trailer and is now slowly filling up with lumber we are milling ourselves. Yes, we are making our own material, because we have it! There were already lots of trees fallen by the previous owner and we spaced some more trees to get more sunlight. We have planted 22 fruit trees around the property and have an in-progress terraced garden, so light is crucial, and we get lots of rain, so watering is taken care of!

Check-in weekly about the process, the research and the planning for this tiny home build.

More on milling next time…