Book: ‘From a Dream Home to a Ready-to-Move-In Home’: SUPPORTING THE CONSTRUCTION PROCESS (A Look at Chapter 8)

‘ONCE WE’VE GOT OUR PLOT, THE REST WILL FALL INTO PLACE.’

This will help you keep track of the steps involved and the progress you’re making as you bring your tiny house project to life.

At the very latest when you really get your project off the ground, you’ll realise just how large the circle of people involved is – even, or perhaps especially, when it comes to a tiny house. Although your house is small, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done regardless of the building’s size. The following specialists and trades should be involved in building your house:

• Architect
• Structural engineer
• Carpenter
• Specialist window and door fitter (if required)
• Electrician
• Plumber
• Roofing contractor (if required)
• Logistics company
• Crane hire company (if required)

It’s not without reason that there are specialists in each of these trades, who ideally have years of experience in their field. You should therefore be wary if your manufacturer is a very small business and claims to be able to carry out all the necessary tasks involved in building the house themselves. Particularly when building a tiny house, coordinating the various trades and ensuring they work together seamlessly is a challenging and demanding task. You should therefore find out, before deciding on a provider, whether they already have a network of subcontractors and specialists they can call upon – and, ideally, whether these have experience in building tiny houses. [...]

For the preparation or development of your plot, you should bear the following companies in mind and involve them during the relevant construction phase:

• Civil engineering contractors
• Electricity network operator (e.g. EON)
• Local electricity network operator (e.g. in our case, Bayernwerk, a regional subsidiary of E.ON responsible for ensuring the regional energy supply)
• Local electricity grid infrastructure partner (e.g. in our case, Omexom, which carries out construction work as an external service provider on behalf of the client)
• Local electrician
• Municipal utilities (water and wastewater)
• Telekom or telecommunications provider
• Local telecoms infrastructure partner (carries out construction work on behalf of the client)
• Local plumbing contractor

You may have already noticed that, in some cases, there is a responsible expert on the supplier’s side and a local counterpart at your plot location. Whether you need the local partner also depends on which house model you have chosen and the stage of development your plot is at by the time of delivery. As space is tighter on small-scale jobs than on conventional building sites, the tradespeople should have the necessary patience and, ideally, experience. Here and there, we had the feeling that the reliability of some contractors depended on whether they found our project exceptionally exciting or rather a nuisance.

As the house design and the necessary site development are directly interdependent, the coordination between the architect and the civil engineer – with us acting as intermediaries in a sort of ‘Chinese whispers’ scenario – proved very challenging. After all, we were laypeople and didn’t understand everything that needed to be discussed. Our architect therefore kindly offered at some point to take over direct contact with the local contractors. Nevertheless, we realised that the civil engineer probably couldn’t fully grasp the plans. The bathroom and kitchen connections seemed to deviate from the standard, which is why work simply continued in the way we’d seen on other building sites.

You may well remember the photo from Chapter 3, which shows the excavation work that was still required, even though the Tiny Loft had already been set on its point foundations. It’s therefore well worth ensuring that the various project partners are connected with one another at an early stage. Our project was essentially divided into two parallel sub-projects that we had to coordinate:

Construction of the Tiny Loft

• House design [architect] and consultation (structural engineer)
• Positive response to planning application (planning office)
• Detailed planning of interior fit-out (furniture maker/external kitchen fitter)
• Start of timber frame construction and installation of insulation (carpentry)
• Interior fit-out (window and door fitters/electricians/plumbers)
• Cladding of the façade (carpentry)
• Transport of 3 modules and final assembly on site (logistics)
• Installation of aluminium façade (roofers)

Preparation of the plot and connection of the house

• Opening up of public and private roads (civil engineers)
• Staking out the house location on the plot (civil engineers)
• Servicing of public roads to the house, water and sewerage (civil engineers)
• Backfilling of the plot for servicing (civil engineers)
• Connecting the tiny house to temporary site electricity (local electrician)
• Connecting drinking water (local plumbing contractor)
• Inspection and approval of water and sewerage connections (municipal utilities)
• Installation of electricity and internet (local infrastructure partners)
• Functional test of sewerage pipework (civil engineer)
• Paving of private road (civil engineer)

One challenge with our project – and many other tiny house projects – is the distance between the project partners and the building plot. You should therefore be prepared to travel back and forth between the supplier’s or architectural firm’s premises, your current place of residence, your plot and the tiny house manufacturer’s or joinery workshop’s premises. In our case, a distance of 268 kilometres separated our flat at the time from our tiny house plot, and we had to travel a full 439 kilometres to the joinery workshop that built a large part of our house. These distances can quickly become a challenge when it comes to coordination or site visits. Whilst it used to be completely normal for Chris’s parents to visit their own house-building site regularly – and even lend a hand here and there – the opposite is usually the case with tiny house projects. This naturally requires a great deal of trust in everyone involved and rarely offers the opportunity to have a direct say in the house’s construction process. To stay as up to date as possible nonetheless, we made the most of the odd visit Caro made home to pop round to the joinery workshop near Dresden and get a feel for how the build was progressing. As our building plot is not far from Chris’s parents’ house, he was also able to combine documentation appointments with a visit there. Looking back now, we recommend scheduling on-site visits at the very least at the following milestones.

[In the book, we share our top tips here on how to avoid challenges in advance or deal with them effectively.]

In Chapter 8 of 10, you’ll learn how to keep track of everyone involved in the project, incorporate your personal needs into the plan at an early stage, and monitor that it’s being carried out properly.

Click here for the book!