ta da! my front porch!

After taking a break from The Lucky Penny for a few weeks because I was Doing Life, it felt good to get back to building this weekend. On Friday I helped Ben who has been building his tiny house at ADX. You can see his progress at Ben Builds a Tiny House. Ben is on the home stretch so he rallied a bunch of people – including Dee Williams, Angela Ramseyer, and Derin Williams – to help him out this weekend. I got to help with siding on the front of his house and finishing out his wheel well boxes. It’s coming along nicely and I’m so excited that Ben and I will be neighbors soon at our Tiny Cohousing Community, Simply Home!

On Saturday I worked on my front porch. As many of you know from my post Tiny Houses Turn Their Backs on the Street, I have been planning for years to build my little house so that the porch is over the tongue of the trailer. This way whenever I back my tiny house into a new driveway (and just about any other parking spot) my front door will greet the street. I also didn’t want a Shrinky-Dink Porch. It has to be substantial enough that I could actually use it.

It’s been awkward climbing into and out of my little house without a porch for the past couple months because I’ve had to clamber up over the tongue. It seemed high time to get my front porch built. Now that I have, I wish I’d done it sooner. But, as usual, there is an order of operations. I wanted to have My Arched Door in and my Siding on so I could arrange the details of attaching my porch since it will flip-up for transport.

I used a Getaround truck to pick up my supplies and got to work. My build buddy Laura was around this morning and she’s at a pause point on her own tiny house build so she helped me construct the frame for my porch with 2x2s. Then I laid out 1x4s and 1x6s over it, alternating them to create a little visual interest. I attached the decking to the frame with star drive decking screws. I added additional framing as necessary to strengthen the frame. It’s certainly not as beefy as it could be, but then again, I don’t really need it to be. I plan to sit on my porch plenty and I plan to put My Chiller: A Natural Refrigerator out there in the cool months, but I’ll probably host my dance parties just a few steps away in the great outdoors.

When I was done attaching the planks I had scraggle-toothed edge to my porch. And since this is The Lucky Penny and I’m obsessed with curves, I wasn’t done yet. So Laura helped me hold a piece of lath against the edge of the porch in a lovely arc. We marked this on the boards and I used a jigsaw to cut the ends of the boards. Then I added supports in both corners so that my porch is ready for the hoards of people who have registered for PAD’s Tiny House Mixer at Green Anchors on Thursday.

The porch isn’t quite done yet. I plan to add a fascia board around the edge to hide the hitch. I still need to stain the wood. And, of course, I need to add my hinges so that it will flip up for transport. But all-in-all, it was a good day’s work and it was fun to sit on my porch this evening to celebrate!