A tour of Elizabeth Turnbull's new house, now under construction, doesn't take very long. But even with only 132 square feet on interior floor space, there's a lot to see.
As of this week, the walls and rafters are in place and the exterior plywood siding is on. A sleeping loft had been erected at one end of the 18-foot-long building.
A plywood roof, in tilted "shed" style, has been put on and will eventually be covered by an aluminum roof.
Turnbull, a 25-year-old Governor's Academy graduate, is building her own portable, eco-friendly house, which she's dubbed her Tiny House, on a flat-bed trailer on the school's Byfield campus.
She started the project in early June, in lieu of finding an apartment in New Haven, Conn., later this summer when she enrolls in the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She plans to live in the house for the two years she will be studying to earn a master's degree in environmental management.
She also works for a Beverly design-and-build company, O'Neil Fine Builders, as a sustainability coordinator researching energy-efficient and environmentally friendly construction methods and materials, so she's using those ingredients in her project.
She has held two work-and-party weekends for volunteers and has been pleased by the turnout. About a dozen people showed up for the first session on June 21 and 22.
While she expected friends and co-workers to lend a hand with the project, she was pleasantly surprised by the number of people she didn't know.
"Half were people from the community who'd heard about it," she said. "That was so wonderful."
The third work-and-party session is this weekend.
"It'll be particularly good for people who don't have a lot of construction skills, but who want to do something," she said. "We'll be doing a lot of painting."
And Turnbull is "excited" about the paint she'll be using. It's called AFM Safecoat, and she said it's "nontoxic and super durable."
"In all the research, this is the king," she said.
The Tiny House has all its electrical wiring, plugs and switches, and the solar panels that will provide the power arrived two days ago.
Turnbull's grad school classes begin in mid-August. She is still confident that, when the time comes, her little home will be ready to roll.
The making of Tiny House
This is the third in a series of stories on the Tiny House. The Daily News will be following the progress of Elizabeth Turnbull and her green house until August when she leaves for Yale with her new home.
Turnbull has also started a blog about the project — www.turnbulltinyhouse.blogspot.com — to let people know how it's going.
