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Children’s playground for winter

A place for our Children to play outside despite harsh wind

Our new planted food forest needs a few years to grow before it will give any protection against the harsh winds we have here, so we needed to do something so our children can play outside protected against the worst of the wind.

So we have decided to turn this pile of straw into a sort of protective fencing.

We chose a spot direct beside the playtent of the children and beside the caravan. This spot is also already some what protected by a large stone building, so we only needed to close 3 sides with the straw bales.

We used the Tractor with front end loader to put the straw bales in place.

After closing two sides we brought a few tractor buckets of sand to make a hill in the middle. Our children love to play with sand.

After that we closed the last side leaving a small hole where we can walk trough.

We finished this project just in time, because that night we had a snow storm. The branches standing up are “trees” our oldest planted. He makes his own “food forest”.

Our Tiny House. Part 3. Moving

Lifting the Tiny House by crane

As already mentioned we where not sure where to put the Tiny House when we started building it. We have made the construction so that we could lift it with a crane. As you might have noticed in previous pictures we have already moved the Tiny House once before, but not by crane. We used our Tractor with front end loader and our Telehandler to lift the Tiny House straight up and moved a trailer under neat it on which we sat it down gently. We moved it by trailer to a different spot where it was not in the way so much. After that we repeated the process with the Tractor and Telehandler and sat it down again. This method only allows the Tiny House to be lifted straight up and is not useful to put it on its foundation, so we used a 70 Ton crane this time.

**This is where the Tiny House will go**

On the final location we made a simple foundation for the Tiny House out of concrete and a stone slab. This foundation is more then enough since the Tiny House only needs a level service to sit on. The foundation is located on the old stable foundation which was leveled out with gravel.

In order to lift the Tiny House we put 2 Boat straps underneath the Tiny House. Those straps where then connected to lifting slings which where connected to chains. The chains where spread to minimize pressure on the Tiny House. We also put some temporary beams along the edge of the roof to help spread the pressure over the total roof construction.

Then we where ready to lift the Tiny House up. We did not lift the Tiny House very high and we moved it over very slowly. We let the pictures speak for themselves.

**Proof that a wooden structure is strong enough to be lifted**

We positioned the Tiny House above the foundation and arranged some asphalt paper between the stone slap and the beams to prevent moisture coming up from the foundation. After that we gently sat the Tiny House down.

Mission accomplished, so we removed the straps and everything from the crane could be packed away again. The hole operation only took 1,5 Hours and went very well.

Fun fact the crane weighted the Tiny House at 7 Tons. We expected it to be around 3.5 Tons, so we where very surprised. You must know that we could only lift around 4 Tons in total with the Tractor and the Telehandler.

Next thing to do is to start working on the interior.

We have moved

But we did not move far

The first picture is were we want to go to. It is between a larger stone building and the play tent of our children. We break the wind blowing on the tent, so it is also by bad wetter a place where the children can play.

We want to move our caravan. The caravan will have less wind where we want to move it to then where it is now, so it will not cool down so quickly.

To the right is where we are standing now. To the left is where we want to go to.

We used our pick-up to move our caravan.

Our move did not take much time.

We don’t want to have all the sand in the caravan. We already have enough with 4 dogs and 3 children running in and out. So we have made a wood chips patch along the caravan.