Trailersteading: How to Find, Buy, Retrofit, and Live Large in a Mobile Home (Modern Simplicity Book 2) by Anna Hess

Author:Anna Hess [Hess, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wetknee Books
Published: 2012-12-18T23:00:00+00:00

Insulating trailer walls

We learned the basics of mainstream construction techniques when we built an eight-by-twenty-foot structure off the east side of our trailer. This photo shows a wall panel being built atop the floor.

Note how the width of the two-by-fours determines the depth of the wall cavity once the wall framing is stood up into place.

Trailers are built to be light enough to move easily, which means that the walls in many are framed using two-by-twos instead of two-by-four lumber. For those of you who haven't spent any time constructing or remodeling houses, this distinction simply refers to the dimensions of the wood used to frame up (provide the skeleton for) the structure. If you look at a piece of lumber from one end, a two-by-four is two inches on one side and four inches on the other, while a two-by-two is a square that measures two inches on each side. (Well, lumber suppliers actually skimp a bit and shave a quarter of an inch off each side, so a two-by-four really measures 1.75 inches by 3.75 inches. But I'm going to keep this description simple and ignore those fractional inches.)

When framing a house with two-by-fours, the lumber is arranged so that the four-inch width of the board forms the depth of the wall cavity. This cavity is where insulation goes, so a house framed with two-by-fours can accommodate 3.75-inch-thick, R13 insulation. (See the section "Adding a pitched roof to a mobile home" for more information on R-values, but for now, you just need to understand that bigger R-values mean more insulation, which means your house stays cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter.) R13 insulation just happens to be the recommended value for walls in most parts of the U.S., which is one of the reasons that many of us build our homes out of two-by-fours in the first place.

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