Between 2019 and 2022, Heidi and I worked on the design and construction of our future home. This section chronicles the build process, largely through video on the accompanying Big Tiny Adventure YouTube channel.
There are bricks sitting on my roof right now, holding it down. They’ve been there a while.
This is the story of how a forklift I never saw, driven by someone I’ve never met, before I ever owned this trailer, ended up dictating five years of my life.
When I bought this ex-refrigerated semi-trailer there was visible damage to the ceiling. I didn’t understand what I was looking at. What had happened was delamination — the outer fibreglass skin had been separated from the foam core, and once that bond is broken the panel can’t hold its span anymore. It sags. What looked like a cosmetic dent was a structural failure, and everything that followed came from it.
In this video I go through the whole saga honestly: the purchase, why delamination matters so much in a semi-trailer build, the $8,000 fix I couldn’t afford at the time and can no longer do at all now that the house is built up to the roof, the leaking skylight, the resin advice that made everything dramatically worse, the rebuild that finally worked, and where it all stands four and a half years later.
If you’re thinking about building in a semi-trailer, this is the single most important thing I can tell you: do not buy one with internal roof damage. And if you do, fix the roof before you build anything inside it!
If you follow my blog then you’ve seen most of our place before but for those who are new to my Tiny World, this is a short showcase of our place as a visual tour with no talking and a good jumping off point to dig deeper if you are interested how I did it.
I realised just recently that this video was intended on going out a couple of years ago but then Living Big In A Tiny House showed up and partly did the job for us! Of course, when you build a place and live in it, you want to showcase different stuff, so this is Mike the Builder’s look at our place. 😊
When you build your own tiny house, you mostly do it alone. Out in the weather, figuring it out as you go, quietly wondering if you’re the only one crazy enough to be doing this. I’ve been thinking about how it doesn’t have to be that way.
This video is an idea I can’t shake: what if tiny house builders had a shared, covered space to build alongside each other? Somewhere to pool tools, resources, and knowledge, and to actually connect with people doing the same thing, instead of going it alone. And what if that space could grow into something bigger, a proper tiny house village where people build, help each other out, and eventually settle in as a community.
It started while I was staying at Heidi’s parents’ old farm that’s been lived on and worked for over 90 years, and it got me thinking about how these kinds of places could be perfect for exactly this. I get into the covered build space idea, the shared storage, the community side of it, and even how something like this could one day be brought to a council as a model worth testing.
If you’re building tiny, thinking about it, or sitting on land that could be repurposed for something like this, I’d genuinely love to hear from you in the comments.
If you’ve watched our videos, you’ll know that there’s no traditional rubbish bin in our kitchen. In fact, there’s no bin anywhere in the house. And I haven’t done the usual “take out the trash” routine in over four years!
Instead, we built two little chutes into the kitchen counter — one for rubbish, one for recycling — that drop straight down into the wheelie bins underneath. Open the lid, in it goes, done. No smell, no wasted bench space, no bin to squeeze around in a small room.
In the new video I have a bit of fun showing you how they work, how we made them, and give an honest four-year verdict — including the bits I still haven’t finished off properly (there’s always something!). Full video below. 😃👇
If you’ve followed the build, you know the bed goes up into the ceiling. What you probably don’t know is the myriad of optimistic/terrible ideas I went through before landing on the one that actually worked.
Attempt one was basically a forklift. A full structural mechanism was desired, but there were too many load calculations for my brain to comprehend or even bother dealing with. This one was mostly chasing an aesthetic rather than a solution however. Then it occurred to me I could just put cables on each corner instead, and suddenly the engineering genius I thought I needed to be turned out to be unnecessary. A few more dead ends followed, hidden weight panels, a powered mechanism, roller tracks, before the cable and counterbalance system won by simply being the one that didn’t fall apart on paper.
The real problem was that our roof is foam filled vinyl and was never going to hold the 220 kilos this system needed. The fix came from some heavy duty poles I’d salvaged off the trailer’s old back doors, which happened to be exactly the right length to span the whole thing and let the load hang off the rigid frame instead of the roof. Very deceptive looking at it now. A genuinely absurd amount of planning went into something that just looks like a bed with cables at the corners.
The other half of the counterbalance is a cabinet of secondhand gym weights, because apparently the structural integrity of my bedroom now rests on bargain-bin dumbbells someone was desperate to offload. I’m choosing to see that as resourceful rather than concerning!
Getting the height right was its own litany of challenges – and I still got it wrong. I built the cabinetry early, guessed at clearances, forgot to account for the pulleys, and then we upgraded the mattress a few years later just to make my past self look even more optimistic. Somehow it all still lines up, in both bed mode and the dining chair, boat seat, feature wall version of the room.
So how do I feel about it four years on? Genuinely good, mostly. It works exactly as a bed should, hasn’t dragged us into the ceiling in our sleep, and the storage box access underneath is pretty cool and handy. It’s not perfect though. Heidi has strong opinions about changing the sheets on it. It’s a bit noisy going up and down, easy to knock off balance, and slow enough to deploy that we often just don’t bother and treat it like a normal bed with junk shoved underneath.
What I’m actually proud of isn’t the carpentry, it’s that this was a physics problem wearing a carpentry costume, and it came in thousands $$ cheaper than anything commercial. Check out the full build, how it works for us and my verdict in all its glory on the video on YouTube.
If you’ve ever built anything with a counterbalance or a load-bearing mechanism, tell me your version of the story. Even if it involves secondhand gym equipment!
The final Build episode in our second semi-trailer project (P2) is a progressive update looking at the evolution of the guesthouse bedroom and bathroom. Mike does the final major edits to the industrial space to reveal a beautiful view and an attractive space for him and Heidi to offer guests some comfortable hospitality!
Follow along to see how Mike achieves some of his affordable and creative solutions that you can apply to your own projects! This episode features the final touches on the bedroom space including a DIY murphy bed, some funky ceiling and detail finishing and a major overhaul of windows in the bathroom. All in time for some visitors!
The third episode in our second semi-trailer project (P2) is a progressive update looking at the evolution of the guesthouse bedroom. Mike aims to craft a space that belies the dark and unfriendly nature of this industrial container into a cozy guest quarters.
Follow along to see how he achieves some of his ideas with affordable and creative solutions that you can apply to your own projects! This episode features the completion of the overall bedroom space, some funky ceiling finishing, easy-to-DIY cabinet-making, lighting tips and ensuite bathroom progress.
Progress of the transformation of our second semi-trailer has happened in fits and starts, but I’ve seen some real transformation with our bedroom and bathroom areas. Slowed by factors like economic issues, the silly season and focusing on other business ideas, things haven’t been chugging along as I’d like, but sometimes the foundational work appears to be slow. Slap a coat of paint on something, implement a final component and suddenly you can gain inspiration and motivation with where the project is going.
My second video instalment in the building update of this second semi-trailer attachment (P2) to our main home (P1) (whose build I covered in an extensive video series between 2019-2022) shows some significant aesthetic changes from the original tour video I did of P2 in which I had already jumped ahead with some of the work I had done to form the basis of this new phase of building. In that sense, this video series will be far less comprehensive than the original P1 series as I started this project with no interest in filming it and then of course regretted that when I decided it would be a cool idea. Lesson learned: just film some stuff anyway…you can always just ignore/delete it if you don’t need it.
Anyway, here’s Episode 2! Thanks for watching and being a part of the journey ☺️💚✌🏼
We recently squeaked into the 2023 line-up of tiny house featured on Bryce Langston’s Living Big In A Tiny House series and that now includes the Christmas round-up. There are some amazing homes this year and the video features a holiday messages from their owners. We are lucky to be included in this collection as there are some exceptional designs and stories from other tiny home builders. Have a look at this spirited video and have a fantastic Christmas season! 🎄🍾🥳 🎉
If you missed the original video tour of our tiny house, you can find it here…
the.semitrailer.project.P2 : : Build update – Dec 2023
A new chapter with a new semi-trailer project! This overview tour gives you a sneak peek at progress to date of the second half of our semi-trailer tiny home. Mike discusses what we’ve completed and future plans to come for this guest space, storage area and fancy bathtub room ☺️
With this new chapter, we hope that you find inspiration and creativity for your own project and minimalist vision. Enjoy and thanks for watching! 💚
