On a traditional house, installing drywall is the go-to option. It isn’t too difficult, it’s relatively easy to work with, and simple to patch any mistakes. Unfortunately drywall was not practical for this project as it would likely crack while transporting the tiny house, and it’s heavy. Why would any part of this project be easy?
This meant we would need to use plywood. Expensive plywood. Standard plywood has lots of imperfections and knots in the wood. This would mean a lot of patch-work that was likely to crack in transit just like the drywall. Not ideal. So I upgraded to 1/8″ Birch plywood. This stuff looks great, but was about $50 per 4′ by 8′ sheet. Definitely didn’t want to mess up the cuts on this, as every mistake would add up pretty quick.
Cutting each piece to fit was painstakingly slow as I needed to cut out all holes for the plumbing and electrical outlets prior to putting them in place to test fit. Seriously, soooooo slow.
Securing the interior walls was fairly uneventful. I started by securing them with screws however they were insetting too far into the wood so I switched to using a staple gun instead. This drastically sped up the process. I used metal plate wire protectors over all the places where a wire or pipe ran through the stud to prevent stapling through them.
I used a tongue and groove knotty pine paneling for the ceiling. This decision was based purely on the ease of the installation. Three years into this project, I didn’t need another task that was going to help me invent new cuss words. We made a template by tracing the LED lights I had purchased for the ceiling, and used it to cut the rounded holes needed to inset the lights into the panels.
The finished interior was beginning to look like an old RV or trailer with all the wood grain interior. This was not the sleek modern look I was after so I painted it white which really brightened up the interior and made it feel more spacious.
I will always remember the response I got from my Facebook friends when I painted that beautiful pine white. They hated it. “HOW COULD YOU?!” But I LOVE the white ceiling. It keeps the place so bright. No Regrats.
You can see a video of my build at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYe1dT-fNQk
