I Insulated This Tiny House With Cans... Here's What Happened

Welcome back everyone we're here at the $3,000 tiny house today and in this series we are building a tiny house that is going to go to my property in Mountain Haven which is the tiny house community in the mountains of Virginia. So in the last video I let you know that I was going to be doing insulation in the next video and so we are going to do that and it actually showed up and what's amazing to me is that we usually use fiberglass bats for our tiny house builds with tiny house listings but lately it's almost doubled in price which was amazing to me and so I started looking at other ideas for this particular tiny house just to try it on because the stakes are kind of low it's only a $3,000 tiny house but I came across this stuff and I've been seeing it for a while but the cost has really come down and the idea behind it's come down and this is just one brand it's called AK Fix but it's a spray foam and you can choose the different sizes that you want. So this particular kit happens to do 480 square feet which is more than enough for this tiny house and underneath because there's no insulation underneath and I was amazed when I went to the store recently and found out that fiberglass bats have more than doubled in price in the last year. Couldn't believe it and so this ends up being less per square foot than the fiberglass bats and if you don't know anything about spray foam it actually adds rigidity to your home so you know a lot of times tiny homes are built so well it doesn't really matter. This one's a little bit if you can even see behind me there's two by fours for the rafters which I doubled up because I didn't want to have to deal with any issues and so that made it twice as strong but anyways what we're going to do in this video is kind of get into the spray foam stuff and show it in use and then show you what it looks like after. So I got every bit of this on Amazon and like I said it comes with everything you need there's multiple cans like this so what you'll do is every time one of these um is empty you'll literally just swap it out for the next one until you're done and it comes with the gun it's kind of like this if you've ever done gaps and cracks uh you'll notice but if you do a lot of it you probably purchased a gun there's a good chance you did these make it a lot easier the can literally just sits on top of that also comes with the suit that you want to wear I know some people probably see myself I used to think the same that the fact that you have to wear a suit means it's toxic but really only when it's airborne like as you're installing it is when it's toxic later on it dries and everything becomes okay and then lastly a well not lastly it comes with safety glasses and it's in here somewhere but oh yeah it also comes with a mask so this is your first video that you've seen in this series just to bring you up to speed we've done the you know the ruck and electrical we insulated this wall with typical fiberglass bats that we had left over before also this wall over here so the only cavities I guess you could say to remaining need to be this wall right here this wall sorry for spinning around and then the ceiling and then like I said underneath we're going to get under there because mountain haven because mountain haven is 3100 feet up and also you know if you own a tiny home there's a good chance it's going to go if it ever changes hands it could go to a totally different climate to have a tiny house like this where the floor underneath is not insulated is a no-go because sometimes it gets down to zero or sometimes even less at mountain haven in the dead of winter and um walking around on a tiny house like this on the floor the floors will be freezing so we definitely have to get under there and do that as well all right so now we'll start putting everything together and see how this all works out so this is what it looks like when you're about ready to go um there's two different nozzles ones for horizontal ones for vertical so if you're going vertical you'd put the obviously that on if you're going this way horizontal you'd put the other tip on and that screws onto the top and apparently after each can you run a little bit of this foam cleaner through and until it's clear and then you move on to the next can so there's 18 cans i don't think we'll be using all those today uh you're also supposed to shake each can for 30 seconds so a little bit involved but not too bad right piper i don't think they were thinking about tall people when they made this suit but that's okay we'll work through it all right let's see how this goes as you can see i'm trying to figure this out or get used to it but there's two cans already just two cans of stuff all right here's what it looks on the inside now all along the walls took about 30 minutes to do all this um i tried to spray it to the roof which is direct to metal now i know most people they're trying to homes won't have directly to metal it'll be to uh plywood but that's the way this tiny house was built and it did not apply really well directly to the metal so i think up there on top we're going to install fiberglass bats old school you can see here this one's almost fully cured well well on the way one thing i didn't like the way the wand was that it sprayed onto the studs it wasn't a lot of control with the way this was set up so i guess you have to know what you're doing but what we'll do is we'll come here with a multi-tool just chop that right off should be very simple but overall i'd say it's pretty good a couple flowers we'll go over that later and here's the number of cans that i used just for that there's quite a few left i would say three-eighths left if we use that for the floor underneath i think i would say is that this stuff's pretty messy like even when you prep i could have prepped a little bit better and put some gloves on which i did but very messy so whatever it gets on it's going to be a scrubbing to get it off so you can see i kind of fudged and i sprayed some of the two by fours that's probably a rookie mistake but most people who are watching this video decide to do this for themselves are probably going to be rookies as well so it's a little bit difficult to overcome that but i'll show you what i'm doing to get rid of that got a multi-tool here and that'll just cut right through it all right so it's the next thing i've done quite a bit of work since i last gave an update but i'm actually about to cut off for the day and end the video here it's another 100 degree day but i'll give you a quick update on what i have done to the tiny house okay so what are my final opinion about the spray foam insulation overall it works really well and it's quite effective however given the fact that you have to do a lot of prep work there's a overspray pretty much everything needs to be taped off because it flies everywhere depending on where you are in the build if you do it early on and it's nothing but there's no flooring there's no walls whatever no windows or whatever it's going to be a little bit easier but it flies everywhere and if it gets on your hands which you probably can't see it's all over my hands from the day before i did not wear gloves but that was on me however my opinion is i prefer the old tried and true fiberglass fiberglass bat insulation because you can put it in really quickly we know it works really well and it's roughly about the same price as the spray foam so i would probably say no to the spray foam stuff that's just me you might have a different opinion and another thing i want to say is when you look at this tiny house please don't look at through the lens of like a 50 60 70 thousand dollar tiny home or everything's absolutely perfect almost every bit of the things you see here with the exception of a couple hundred dollars of material is leftover stuff stuff that was pieced together and done with minimal you know uh effort so if you again are someone if you're someone who really wants a tiny house or your own shelter or you're finding that you're having issues like being house poor or having trouble affordable finding affordable housing something like this might be the way to go even if it's temporary uh so far i'm about thirty seven hundred dollars in completely with this house now i did get a good deal on the show through facebook marketplace but i did talk them down they were asking eight thousand i believe it was maybe nine thousand and kept on going back and forth and i eventually got it for three thousand dollars so the takeaway is doing something like this and we'll talk about it more in the next video at an affordable price maybe even under five thousand dollars is very possible you'll be giving up a lot of things you'll be giving up a lot of the niceties and all of the extra stuff that you see on the bells and whistles on some of the tours that you see on youtube and all that but it is a trade-off so anyways thanks for watching and we will see you on the next video