Hello!
Hope you had a good past 3 weeks. I know we definitely have had an eventful time. There were ups and downs, but there was definitely tonnes of learning. This is what happens when you take a bunch of engineering and 1 architecture students out of the classrooms and tell them to build a house.
Progress:
First, we had nothing but the bare trailer bed and a stack of building materials.
After we make sure the trailer is nice and leveled, we put in the XPS insulation into the trailer bed so we don’t lose heat through the highly conductive metal trailer. (don’t worry, we are going to spray form the floor too, the XPS isn’t the only insulator)
With Professor Bucking’s big thumbs up approval, we framed the floors and put them in.
After the floors, comes the walls. We framed the walls on the ground first.
Then not so magically, we persuaded the walls into place. and made some not so minor adjustments which might or might not have been changing the placement of the door and windows, and forgetting to account the thickness of sheeting and/or stud.
After we all decided that “this is good enough for my house.”, we started to make the rafters for the roof which took way too much math and too many tries to make them right using basic grade 10 trigonometry math.
Conclusion:
So far, what have we learned?
- Don’t find to measure 245/256 inch on the tape.
- Measure twice, doubt your measurement, measure once more, cut, then measure again for good luck.
- Always plan ahead, check your plan, reference it to the house, check it with another team member, execute it with confidence, and be prepared to adjust it because it’s not matching up
- and finally be proud of what you have done but be humble because we have so much more to learn
We will be back soon to update you guys on the project so stay tuned, and follow us on our new Instagram @northern.nomad for almost daily updates on your friendly neighborhood nomads.
Cheers,
Eric