Setting The Homestead: How We Got 30,000 Pounds Up a Colorado Hillside

Some job sites make you work for it. The Horton Residence, up in the Ranch of the Rockies neighborhood outside Hartsel, is one of them — ten acres of high-country ground with the build site sitting right on top of a hill. Beautiful spot. Long views in every direction. Not exactly a forgiving place to deliver a house.

But that's the whole point of what we do. And this one was a first for us.

Our first two-section home

The Homestead is TinyMod's first two-section home — a real, IRC code-built home that leaves the factory finished, painted, roofed, and glazed, then gets set on site in a matter of hours instead of months. On a lot like this, where the building season is short and every trade has a long drive to get there, that head start is the difference between a home you live in this year and a foundation you stare at through the winter.

The two modules showed up dark and handsome — black board-and-batten, big windows, a covered porch — and about 90% of the way to done. The remaining 10% is where set day earns its reputation.

The problem: a hilltop and a very heavy house

Here's the math that made this one interesting. Each module runs well over 30,000 pounds. The set location was up a steep, winding gravel drive to the top of the hill. A standard delivery — back the trailer in, let the crane do the rest — was never going to happen. There simply wasn't a way to get a loaded rig up that approach and positioned where it needed to be.

That's where the house tug came in.

What's a house tug?

If you've never seen one, a house tug is a compact, tracked machine built for exactly one job: moving very heavy structures across ground that wheels can't handle. Ours — the orange beast in these photos — crawled each module up the hill on tracks, holding the load steady on the grade the whole way, and set it right where the crane could take over. No paved road, no gentle slope, no problem.

It's the unsung hero of the whole day. Watching a fully built home climb a mountain on a set of tracks is one of those things you have to see to believe, and it's the reason a site like this is even buildable with modular in the first place.

Set day, start to finish

Once each module was tugged into position, the crane crew rigged up with spreader bars and lifted the sections into place on the foundation — the kind of precision work that looks slow and calm right up until you realize there's a house floating over your head.

This home also called for a hinge-up roof. The upper roof section ships folded down to stay inside transport height, then gets raised and locked into its final pitch on site. Once the modules were mated and the roof was up, an exterior crew came in to dry the house in — buttoning up the ridge, flashing, and weather barrier so the structure is sealed and protected before finish work continues.

By the end of the day, what rolled in as two modules on trailers was standing on the hilltop as one home.

Who made it happen

A set like this is a team effort, and the roles matter. TinyMod is the modular seller and the builder/GC on the Horton Residence — we designed it, built it, and are seeing it through. Set Works served as our licensed installer on the set, handling the rigging, the lift, and the setting of both sections. Add the crane crew, the tug operator, and the dry-in crew, and you've got a lot of skilled hands making a hard site look easy.

More to come

This was set day, not the finish line. There's finish work ahead before The Homestead is truly done — and when it is, we'll share the full reveal, inside and out.

For now, we just wanted to show you the part most people never get to see: a two-section home, over 30,000 pounds of it, going up a Colorado hillside one track at a time.

Building your own hard-to-reach dream site? That's exactly the kind of project we're built for. Reach out to TinyMod and let's talk.