Constructed with SIPs panels

Here is a shot Ryan sent me during construction.  He wrapped it in Tyvek before delivering it to me.

Ryan, at Monarch Tiny Homes, built my tiny house shell very quickly.  I think I ordered it in mid-July and it was ready for delivery by the end of August.  It almost came too quickly.  My summer was crazy with finishing school, working part-time for the remodeling company and getting ready for my new job to start as a middle school teacher.  Ryan wasn't able to deliver the tiny house until Sept 21st, which gave me time to get settled in to my new job (well, I'm still not fully settled in--the first year of teaching is hard).  A good friend of mine offered to let me use his driveway to park the tiny house in while I did the exterior work (windows, doors, exterior trim and siding).  I thought I would only need his driveway for a month or two.  I was way off.  My friend Rob's house is an hour drive from where my school is, so I was only going up there to work on the tiny house on the weekends.  And, of course some Saturdays I had other commitments.  Sunday mornings I go to church.  So I would get as much done as possible on Saturdays, but it was a slow process.


When Ryan's delivery guy, Arturo, pulled up with the tiny house it was 8 pm.  He had driven virtually straight through from California, so he was ready to drop it off and get to his friend's house where he'd arranged to spend the night.  I paid him directly for the delivery, which was a significant added expense, but, I felt, worth it.

This is Ryan at work last August. I was always eager to see pictures of my tiny house under construction.

This was Ryan's second tiny house build.  When he decided to start a business building tiny houses he did a lot of research and felt like using SIP panels was the way to go.  What are SIP panels?  You can Google them, but they are basically 4x8 sheets of OSB sandwiched around rigid foam insulation.  They are very strong and have a ton of shear strength.  They are also extremely well insulated.  So, Ryan built his prototype out of SIPs and was very pleased with how it turned out.  I did my own research and found that not too many other people have used SIPs for tiny houses, but a few have.  One of the concerns you'll find is that people are concerned about off-gassing of the OSB.  After looking into it, it seems like it is an unfounded concern, and my SIP panels had quite a bit of time to off-gas during construction before I moved in (I have just recently started sleeping in my tiny house, 8 months after Ryan started building it, and the SIP panels were manufactured about a year prior to that).  If anyone has comments or questions about SIP panels, I would be interested to hear them.  In the end I've been very pleased with my decision to purchase a tiny house shell constructed of SIP panels. I will share one of the other big advantages of SIP panels in a future post.

Here is what my tiny house looked like on the inside when it arrived.  You can see the roughed in wiring and roughed in plumbing.  The bathroom will be at the front of the trailer, with the shower on the right, sink and toilet on the left.

So, when Monarch Tiny Homes shipped me my tiny house shell it came with the trailer, four insulated walls, an insulated roof, roughed in wiring and plumbing and two rough door openings.  The loft windows were also framed in because he did not use SIPs for the loft, he used regular stick framing.