Tiny House Building Course with The Bower

This was the first the tiny house building course put on by The Upcyclist and The Bower. The Bower approached me to put a course together. Largely inspired by the idea a tiny house is probably one of the largest projects we could think of to be done with salvaged materials and it was a great opportunity to spread the knowledge and skills needed to get creative building tiny houses from recycled building materials. The finished tiny house was auctioned by The Bower as part of their annual fundraising auction.

We were really pushing a lot of boundaries with this course:

Can you build a tiny house to lock-up stage, with 16 students in just 6 days ? Turns out no, we couldn't, but with an extra weeks' work we had it all done.

Is it possible to build a no leak roof with second hand roofing iron? It sure is - with a little creativity, which we shared with all our students.

The front door
End wall frames are build on the ground then lifted onto the trailer.
Old skirting boards can be re-imagined as tiny house weatherboards
We found this nice vertical window fitted perfectly at the tow ball end of the house.
Road worthy tiny house in tow.
This is the first task the students can really get their hands into.
it is really satisfying to see that by the end of the course our students really begin to own the project. Julian took it upon himself to create this plan of attack.
Tiny house built by The Upcyclist and 16 students
Student group mid way through the tiny house wall raising.
The meeting of different recycled materials can really define a project.
A nice looking mix of weatherboards, old timber ship lap, and salvaged roofing iron.
Every angle of the house reveals a different collection of salvaged building materials.
Gable end detail really displaying the eclectic mix of materials we ended up with.

Just how much of the building materials used to build a tiny house can be second hand ? All the framing timber, all the windows, all the cladding, all of the roofing, 50% of the insulation (we opted for new fixings throughout.)