A Windy Week

New Zealand is a fairly windy place. In Canterbury, we seem to cop the wind rather often, the large, flat plains encouraging its unrestrained howling through. This week, we experienced the first major windstorm since beginning our tiny house project. The wind came through with abandon, leading to a 3am fretting session, while Tom, of course, slept soundly beside me. The next day was a continuation of said worrying, with the unrelenting gales wobbling the power poles in the carpark at work, and shaking even the thoroughly concreted structure of the building. My phone emitted a “pop” – a message from Karyn, the owner of the land our (almost) house is situated on. There was good news and bad. The good news, she reported, was that our building paper had stayed on. The bad was that the back end of the trailer had collapsed. She sent through a couple of photos; it didn’t look too bad. Yet, from the outside, it was impossible to tell if the axles on the trailer had snapped. If they had, we were in rather big trouble. We debated heading straight up there; I had an astronomy class after work. We decided we would monitor the wind while I attended my lecture and determine whether we needed to make the hour long drive that night. Mercifully, the wind died off around 6pm. There was to be a day’s grace, according to the forecast, before an equally determined rainstorm set in.

The next day, we headed out to the site, armed with a jack and reinforcing equipment. Tom had also received a text from Lawrence (a builder), who is very kindly helping us out, telling us that the roofing iron is ready for collection. First, though, we had to assess the damage the wind had done. Tom jacked up the large trailer the house is on, while I cleared out our smaller trailer, which had our plywood cladding still strapped on from the week before. The news from Tom was a relief: the structure of the trailer was fine. The trailer manufacturer had welded some “feet” on for the house to stand on while the wheels were off. In the force of the wind, the welds had completely snapped. The strength of the wind was apparent when we surveyed the position of the trailer: it had moved a huge distance laterally, away from the scaffolding on the North Wall. On the South Wall, the house had crashed into the scaffolding, sending it tearing through the building paper in places. However, compared to the damage that could have been done, this was fairly minor. I gave silent thanks for the many capable hands that helped us to build such a sturdy frame. I am sure that, had it not been so thoroughly engineered, the entire frame would have toppled over. After our battening and taping session last week, the building paper had even stayed intact, apart from the places the scaffold had breached. In place of the feet, we blocked up the trailer using fence posts by the axles, and pallets on the end that had collapsed. By utilizing the suspension of the trailer more, by letting the axles take most of the weight, we hope the house will simply “rock through” storms or earthquakes, both of which Canterbury gets its fair share.

Our next job was to put “tie downs” into place, to discourage the house from going anywhere should we get another gale. Tom’s workmate had very kindly donated some Waratahs to our cause: big steel posts that basically act as giant tent pegs. Tom set to work banging these into the ground, and we affixed them using ratchet straps. These were attached to the side of the house, just below where we put the beams in, using bolts with an eye through which to thread the hook of the ratchet strap. After we had finished this, we reassessed how level the house was after its battering. When placing the level on the floor and windowsills, we were pleasantly surprised to find that, after a re-jacking, the place was still perfectly level! This is good news for our proposed plan of simply pushing through this weekend and getting the roof into place. In preparation for this, we removed the strip brace tensioners, which Lawrence had pointed out last week were upside down. We re-affixed this the right way up, however, the braces themselves are now rather loose, as the timber shrinks in the colder weather. The resolution here is to affix the bracing with screws rather than nails, so that after a couple of weeks, you can take the bracing off and re-tighten it. However, once we have our roof on, this will keep the building together, and we will not have to worry about these again.

After completing these jobs, we headed back into town, to pick up the roofing iron, and, hopefully get it into place before the end of the weekend! This weekend in New Zealand is a public holiday for Queen’s Birthday, but, as is traditionally the case for such events, some fairly torrential rain has been promised. However, we may get a couple of days’ grace, in which we can, fingers crossed, get it finished. We are feeling pretty lucky at the moment, that no major damage was sustained in the wind (not even our toilet and shower tents blew away, amazingly!), although we are also grateful we weren’t inside the house when the back end collapsed. We learnt some lessons about affixing the house firmly, and ensuring we have sufficient propping underneath to keep the trailer from collapsing. During the Christchurch earthquakes, it struck me that, no matter the endeavours of humankind to ensure a structure is “stable”, Mother Earth can wipe it away in a matter of moments. Those times caused endless stress and anxiety for many people, as their homes and livelihoods were displaced, and their previously taken-for-granted notions in the solidity of the ground they inhabited, shattered. Some of this is ongoing, 9 years after the original 2010 quake, and 8 after the devastating Christchurch city earthquake that extinguished many lives of our fellow Cantabrians. As a city used to standing together and showing resiliance through this kind of tragedy, it kind of bewilders me that there is still a resistance to tiny house living, to downsizing, making life simpler, and embracing all things that matter most. Although tiny house living does come with certain risk, for us, at least, the positives still outweigh the negatives. In fact, I feel it can almost be an advantage; if you are more in touch with the power and intensity of nature, and less attached to a building or the “things” within, I feel it gives one the potential to be less shocked and affected by the destructiveness nature can sometimes wield. Certainly, it gives one time to focus on the things that matter most to them; whether this is from time freed by not having to work to pay off a mortgage on a large home, or simply not spending hours each week cleaning said space.