We are back on our Lavish Meadow after a winter break and finally ready to reveal what our long-term project is actually going to be. We are building a tiny house! Specifically, it’s going to be a wood-framed tiny house on a foundation of screw piles rather than concrete. Therefore we are getting a massive delivery of timber as well as other materials for the build. Among them is a simple summer pavilion, which will serve us greatly as this summer will be a rainy one!
To start with the base, we decided to remove all the grass and the first layer of soil from the foundation site. This was a very laborious task done entirely by hand. We marked the four corners, dug grass and shifted it to another site while the neighbour's horses were watching us work away.
We moved all that soil we dug up over to the pond's banks to help reinforce them against erosion. It was heavy work with the wheelbarrow, but hopefully, it prevents the sides from collapsing. We love checking on the pond life; the frogs are selfishly our favourites because they eat the pesky mosquitoes.
We learned our first lesson quickly: estimation versus reality. We thought digging up the soil would take maybe a couple of hours. It took two days. We started late because of the rain, and moving that earth was harder work than we anticipated. But finishing that first step felt great, even if we were a little sore the next day.
It wasn't all digging, though. We took some time to check on the trees we planted in autumn last year. We were thrilled to see that the trees had survived and were thriving. We had planted narcissus flowers as well as garlic around them for companionship and nutrition, and seeing them bloom made us so happy.
Wood wasn't the only material we needed for the foundation. We had a delivery of all the miscellaneous things required for a foundation, including a weed barrier and, on a whim, a solar panel (because why not have side projects?).
We decided to use screw piles for the foundation of our tiny house—or "Sauna House" as we sometimes call the project. We needed to install 15 of them. Charles had a bit of a nerd moment setting up a special GPS antenna to determine the exact location of each pile down to centimeter accuracy. We marked the spots with chalk, squared everything up, and double-checked our measurements.
Then came the installation. We rented a torque reductor to drive the piles into the ground. We quickly realized that our regular screwdriver and especially a battery-powered one were not fit for the job. If we had anticipated how much torque was needed for the job, we would have rented or bought a different tool for the job.
However, there were very few resources online about how to actually install screw piles yourself, so we really learned on the way. It was a process of trial and error. We didn't have instructions, so we had to figure out how the torque reductor attached to the screwdriver and the piles. We quickly found out that we needed to pre-drill pilot holes with a large auger because the soil was full of clay and rocks.
The installation was tedious. The screw driver kept overheating and cutting out, so we were stuck in a rhythm of five seconds of screwing followed by ten seconds of waiting. We probably looked at the tool in frustration hundreds of times.
We hit massive rocks underground (maybe a bit of an over-statement) and had to dig the holes for some screw piles by hand to see if we can get the rocks out of the way or whether we needed to move the screw pile to a different location. Throughout the process we also realised a lot of improvements to the process of our outdoor kitchen - like putting down a weed barrier or pre-drilling the holes - but alas, the outdoor kitchen is finished and it served as a great learning project for us.
We worked until late in the evenings - luckily having daylight for a long time in May - and were a little bit worried that we would not be able to meet the deadline for our rental tools. One pile ended up slightly out of line because of a giant stone we couldn't move, but we made peace with it.
It took way more time than we calculated—sweat, frustration, but thankfully no tears. But in the end, we got all 15 piles in the ground.
We then used a laser level to ensure that the height of the screw piles was all the same. While we initially wanted the screw piles lower in the ground, we did not manage to due to time issues. But maybe it will be a blessing in disguise as the winters here can bring a lot of snow and so a significant threshold and distance to the ground might turn out better for our cladding after all.
It was a huge amount of work, but the foundation is down. We are exhausted, but we are one step closer to our dream.