Laying the foundation (so to speak)
I got the trailer back on April 22nd after having it towed back to the dealership and fixed. Arv at Trailer Boss was a real gem. Fixed things up good as new and even brought the trailer back to me himself on his day off. We still don’t know what went wrong on the first trip. So after a unfavorable start to the adventure we’re back on track. I was out of town last weekend so tiny home building is about a month behind “schedule”.
This was the first weekend of quality trailer time. The concrete pad where I am building my tiny home is at a bit of angle so I thought maybe I should level my “foundation” before doing anything else. My internet searches for examples of how to do this were a bit frustrating. Is this one of those things that people are just expected to know how to do? This post from the amazing and inspiring 2cycle2gether.com was probably the most helpful. I also looked at how RV’s and travel trailers are typically leveled and stabilized.
Saturday morning I bought 4 scissor-jacks. The instructions call for welding the jacks to the frame but my frame seems too narrow to to do this so I just looked for places in the corners where it seemed like I would have the most contact. Got pretty close to level on Saturday but needed a little more height for the downhill side so went back Sunday afternoon with some concrete blocks. A little more side-to-side then front-to-back tweaking and the trailer is now level and stable.
Scissor jack and some grippy padding
More tools of the trade
Every project needs an assistant as photogenic as Mothra!
Level side-to-side
and front-to-back
Does it matter which side is up on a level? I see now that in all of my pictures the level is what could be considered upside-down. Hmmm…
I’m gonna skip out of work for a little bit this afternoon so Matt the Mechanic can meet me to grind off the bar that sticks up on the front of the trailer. In one of Jay Shafer’s videos they take off the brackets on the side too but it doesn’t seem like those are going to be in the way so I think I’ll just leave em.
I’ll probably have to adjust the leveling again after I’ve got the floor framing on so if anyone has advice or is thinking OH MY GOD SHE’S DOING IT WRONG please feel free to speak up :) I’ll figure out how to enable comments shortly.
