When you're building a tiny house, you must utilize every square inch possible. This is why, when building the foundational trailer, I had included a flat, 2'x8' section overtop the trailer tongue, just behind the hitch. This is where we had planned for storage sheds to be built: two larger ones on the outer edges (one for propane tanks, and the other one for the electrical panel and other storage), and a smaller one in between the two for solar panel batteries.
To keep the weight down, we opted to use 2x3s to frame the sheds. In typical "us" fashion, my Dad and I realized a little too late that we should have turned the back studs to lay flat against the house, as they would have been easier to bolt onto the house. Ah well, when have we done things the easy way?? We sheeted the walls and roofs with 3/8" plywood. Like a nerd, I was excited to use trigonometry again to calculate the angles for the top studs and roofs of the sheds. And it was fun to use the air nailer again!
For the middle shed, the roof will be the access point, so I bought a piano hinge (AKA continuous hinge) to have the top lift open. I was trying to find a special rubber gasket that could seal out water from this hinge, but I wasn't having much luck. Then my Dad chimed in with, "What about an inner tube from a bicycle?" Occam's Razor strikes again: "The simplest solution is almost always the best!" (And far cheaper than anything I was looking at! Thanks Dad!) We added to the top of the frame a small lip to prevent water seeping in from the sides.
Next we needed doors for the side sheds. My Uncle Bert offered up his old exterior door that he and my Dad then cut into two mini doors - repurposing at its finest! The most difficult part was installing new side and top plates for the cut edges of the doors, as we also had to chip out the insulation and build in wooden plates for the door handles to drill into. We used brad nails to tack the aluminum to the new plates, and we sanded down the sharp edges with a belt sander. My Dad used a hole saw to cut the holes for the door handle and latch. Look how cute these mini doors are!
Finally it was time to install the doors. Admittedly, I wasn't around when my Dad and Uncle did this, but I know it was a chore! Part of the sides of the frames had to be cut out, and the tops and bottoms had to be framed in and sheeted to fit the doors. You might notice that one of the doors is aligned closest to the bottom, while the other one is closer to the top; this was intentional (despite my love for symmetry!): the shed that will store propane has the door nearest the bottom so that I don't have to lift the propane tanks as high, and the shed with the electrical panel has the door near the top so that you don't have to duck down as far to access the panel. Besides, you'll never see these two doors at the same time, so the likelihood of anyone noticing that they don't match is quite slim (other than me just telling you all...haha!).
The next step will be to have Innovative Cork come back out to spray these sheds to match the rest of the house, then add metal roofing to finish it off. It's coming along!
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