Before I started writing about what we have been up to the last couple of weeks, I of course had to mention the horrible events in our city this week. There is nothing I can say that hasn’t been said already, I can only express the sentiment of how deeply sorry we all feel. The lives that were taken we an absolute tragedy, and I cannot begin to put into words the sick sadness I felt when reading about the beautiful people that were in the mosque on Friday. I have been deliberating over what to say in this post, whether to post at all, whether to express things on social media, as I’m sure many others have. In the end, I decided not to post on mainstream media sites such as Facebook or Instagram, as, although there has been a lot of love and support, it was also the chosen platform of the offender, who I am trying to give as little of a voice to as possible. The fact that this happened a couple of streets away from us is absolutely surreal, and, although I do not personally know the victims, the impact it has had on our community has been huge. The main thing I am taking away from it is we are bigger than the hate; there has been nothing but an outpouring of love and support for the community as far as I am concerned. It is a horrible thing that has happened, but the extraordinary people of Christchurch will band together, as we have done before, and come through this hand in hand.
The other really sad thing that has happened in my life over the last couple of weeks is the passing of my wonderful Nan. This has been a really hard time, as she was very special to us. She was in England, which made things difficult, however due to technology, we managed to say goodbye to her. I know she would have been proud of whatever we were doing, and, although I didn’t get to tell her about the project before she passed away, I know she would have been supportive, as she always was.
So, during this time of sadness, the tiny house project has continued. It has been somewhat of a refuge to me, a distraction of sorts from everything else that is going on, and has given both of us something positive to focus on. We spent our first night staying in the caravan that Tom’s mum kindly provided for us, which was a cosy retreat after a hard day’s work. The food was a bit of a fail – we tried spaghetti, jam and cheese; I left the cheese in the fridge at home and both the jam and spaghetti had gone off! We ended up with rations of crisps and one square meals.
Tom has also been doing some work sorting out some facilities for us at the site. I am pleased to report that we now have a fully functioning shower and composting toilet! The gas califont and water pump Tom purchased work really well, and we have a good pressure, hot shower to use ar the end of the day – an absolute luxury! Our composting toilet is from Seperatt, we did not buy the entire unit, but instead bought a urine seperator, which is currently plumbed into the ground away from the site. We have started a compost for the back-end operations, which will be mixed with sawdust. For protection and privacy, we decided a couple of shower tents would be easiest.
Tom plumbed up the califont before we transported it to the site 
Privacy tents 
So – the actual progress! For the last couple of weeks, I have been working on refurbishing a couple of windows we got secondhand. The new windows we purchased from Colin at Eco Cottages are all white and shiny-new. The secondhand ones are from a yard, and were pretty filthy and not white when we attained them. I have been working towards cleaning them up and re-spraying them, hopefully will be able to share the finished product in a week or two (it is a slow process due to drying time). I used an excellent how-to video from the Bunnings website to do this, however I still made a couple of mistakes during the process. The first was pretty simple: don’t spray paint when it’s about to rain! One of the frames got rain spots on it, which I am still in the process of trying to strip and re-paint. The other silly thing I did was to paint the outside of one of the frames first. The inside is protected by the wood reveals, but the outside was exposed, so after I had painted this, it got laid down paint-side first and a couple of chips have appeared. Guess I’ll be doing some re-spraying next time. Lesson learnt: paint the insides first!
Link from Bunnings Warehouse: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GRpQlIuJFV0
We also got started on the construction work this weekend, along with a friend, Joe, who kindly offered his services for the day. Over the course of the weekend, we managed to get the floor joists bolted to the trailer – a big job which we were very glad to comleted in a couple of days. The first afternoon was spent measuring and cutting the timber to length, and the second day was lining up the joists on the trailer and bolting them down. They had to stick out exactly the same amount on each side, which was rather tricky, as the trailer isn’t the exact same width all the way down. This involved a LOT of measuring and re-measuring from the more perfectionist half of our team (Tom was getting a teeny bit frustrated and just wanting to bolt the things on by the end of it). We got there in the end though. The end of our day was spent popping down to see our neighbour’s yurt which they had erected and furnished that week. It looked AMAZING, and the fire in it was so cosy! Definitely a feel-good space!
Quick deployment of the emergency tarp when it started to rain 
Measuring the treated pine we are using for floor joists 
Tom finally got stuck into the power tools while the rest of us were relegated to rulers 
The finished product!
So Tom was very excited on the the way home on Sunday, and began to talk about “getting the walls on” next weekend. A phone call to his dad revealed otherwise. We have to move the end joists so they stick out over the trailer and will stop any water getting down onto it and rusting it in the long-term. We also have to put dwangs down the joists to support them, and extra supports into place for our second storey. The other job we have to do is coat the top of the trailer welds with rust protection – turns out the guy that built the trailer did the sides but not the top, which is already showing signs of rust. So, we have to un-bolt all the joists and put them back on again to scrape and treat the top of the welds (wish we had made this decision BEFORE we bolted on all the joists but you live and learn). So, bring on the next weekend!
The Tiny People 