The toughest stretch of this tiny house basement build is standing the walls up, and Homestead Dream handles it with good preparation. Fifteen completed frame sections were assembled flat on the ground, then lifted onto the foundation curb with an assistant and secured upright. Raising all fifteen took one hour and ten minutes. That pace suggests well planned teamwork to me.
The timber starts as pine logs, hauled with an Ursus tractor and sawn into rectangular stock on a bandsaw mill. Working from technical paper drawings, the maker cut a stack of 84 studs to the specified lengths and fastened the sections together with a pneumatic framing nailer and a hammer.
Several choices stand out. Real wooden board diagonals sit inside the frame for structural strength, notched into place with a circular saw, a chainsaw and hand tools. Strips of reclaimed bituminous roofing membrane act as a moisture barrier between the concrete and the wood plates. The sandwich itself puts a drywall plate on the outside, with a ZIP sheet or OSB inside the frame, and the whole house gets covered with Tyvek soon after framing.
The open question is whether that drywall layer belongs outside at all. Critics call the assembly a mold sandwich and argue drywall is neither moisture resistant nor structural. The maker answers that Nordic countries and Baltic states build this way, even for multistory buildings, and that rain is no problem if Tyvek goes on the same or next day. Whether that holds in a temperate cooling climate remains debated.
Project by Homestead Dream. Watch it on their YouTube channel: