We have finished laying the wooden floor on our tiny house trailer!

We have completed the wooden floor of our tiny house!

After weeks of working away in the hot Australian sun, we have finally completed our wooden floorboard project! Oh, what a feeling. And if I may say that: we are pretty proud of ourselves.

How long did it take us to lay the wooden floor?

All in all, it took us about one month to lay the floorboards onto our tiny house trailer. What? That long you might think? Due to day jobs, we can only dedicate three days per week to our tiny house build. So if you add those up it took us around two weeks.

This probably still sounds like a long time. I’m sure that the pros would have finished the project in a fraction of the time, especially since our trailer is not very big. But we are bloody rookies so we spent a lot of time figuring out how to do things and what the best method is. But eventually, we got there 🙂

Our method

I have described our floorboard laying method already in an earlier post so I won’t go into too much detail here.

In the early stages, we went from bolting down floorboards one by one to three floorboards at the same time. This proofed to be quite efficient until we wanted to speed up the whole process and tried squeezing four and even five floorboards together. We find that this method is a lot more efficient and it’s also more precise when it comes to avoiding gaps in the floor.

What we would have done differently

Although we’re very happy with the outcome and the look of our wooden floor, there are a few things we would have done differently in hindsight.

Rent a shed or a building workshop.
We should have rented a building workshop or something with a roof where we can build our tiny house in until it’s waterproof. Instead, we’re building out in the open and are exposed to the elements. During our tiny house build we were hit by heavy rains and storms more than once which caused some damage to our wooden floor like water damage on the wood, surface mould and gaps between the floorboards. Bugger! (However, at this stage we’re still able to rescue our wooden floor.)

Try to lay the floorboards along a straight line.
We did not do that but instead aligned the floorboards to the trailer trusting that the frame would be straight. When we finally checked if the floorboards were aligned along a straight line it was too late and we had to improvise. How can you create a straight line alongside the trailer? Simply run a string with a heavyweight along the full length of the trailer from one end to the other. In the end, our result is still pretty good. No one would be able to tell that we didn’t align the floorboards properly but we did have to cut them to size once we reached the full width of the trailer.

Squeeze four or five floorboards together rather than just two or three.
When laying and squeezing the floorboards so they’re really tight use three or four floorboards right away. We sort of eased our way into it by starting with bolting down one floorboard after the other. But that’s really not efficient nor is it accurate. Once we started squeezing four or five boards together there were hardly any gaps between the floorboards anymore. So this method proofed to be faster and tighter.

We just installed freaking floorboards on our tiny house trailer!

But hey, live and learn for next time, right?! We’re still pretty stoked with the result and love our cypress wood floorboards. For rookies, we’ve done a great job. I still can believe that we’ve done that all by ourselves. That really shows what we can achieve if we try!