We’ve at last moved in. Taking our time to unpack and remember to look up at the amazing view….
View from the kitchen out over the lounge and garden and down the beach with the tide out:
View from the open plan bathroom of the main bedroom, out over the beach ….
I’m renewing the selfbuild insurance policy I have for the project. They wanted photos of the current situation / progress. So I thought I’d use the opportunity for a general update.
First a 3D reminder (SketchUP) of the plan !
ie a 3 story contemporary build with a garage under the garden at the front.
– The garage is a separate building. It’s block built with a beam and block roof. The house is a steel and wood frame with thick walls filled with sheep wool.
– Externally some of the building is timber clad and the rest will be render (not yet done).
The buildings (house + garage) are now secure, weather tight lockable structures.
Looking down onto the top of the garage (ie the front garden) from the top floor, you can see the front hasn’t yet been slate tiled and that the grass didn’t get very long to try and establish pre winter.
As soon as the weather improves the garage and walls to the neighbours will get rendered.
Walking up from the road at the front to the courtyard with the front door (plan of downstairs and the the courtyard):
The pipes are for the ground source heat system.
Inside downstairs is the plant room, empty stair well, kitchen area, dinning are & lounge. All of which are mostly areas for tools etc.
Ground Source Heat Pump on the left in the above photos. Plant room gear in the plant room photo below:
Kitchen area currently full of wood cladding for the soffits where first fix electrics has now been done.
More cladding in the dinning area:
Lounge area:
You can see that the first fix electrics and plumbing has started:
This next photo is looking down into the ground floor of the stairwell from the first floor:
(the stairs are ready, but the walls need plastering and painting before they’ll be put in).
Walking up the outside stairs from the courtyard by the front door to the rear and then looking towards the house:
Then the first floor. First the first floor, floor plan:
The rear most room has a temp sink and microwave.
A temp bathroom:
and the bedrooms:
The top floor is pretty empty:
But a spectacular view !
The under floor heating (UFH) pipes are going in. Surrounded by sand for thermal mass and conductivity, they are then covered with boards onto which the finished floors will be put.
On the top the slate is being laid out on the passage way and front top deck area:
Down in the road, the road is having the pipe work in to connect it to the village sewage etc. system (the old house was a soak away that doesn’t meet current building etc. standards).
The cladding is all in place, so the scaffolding has come down.
You can now walk down the side of the building without any limbo dancing !
Finished ground level will be about the top of the block 2 above Graham’s left hand.
Above is down the east side.
Below is down the west side.
and from behind:
The central steel I beam, the door steel I beam, the concrete cross beams & the blocks going in:
After the House of Commons was devastated by a German air raid in 1941, Winston Churchill reflected:
“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
A chunk more cladding has gone up, including some of the thinner horizontal cladding on the top box:
The vertical cladding on the middle box is wider with nice detailing around the windows.
The last door has been put in. The doors and windows are all in place, but not yet 100% fitted.
The garage floor has been poured and the last internal wall is going up:
Amazing to be calm and dry, inside, with outside having howling wind (I’d been kitesurfing earlier in the day), looking out at kitesurfers on the beach.
After what feels like months, the forecast is for 2 days without rain or strong winds, so, at last, the waterproof EPDM membrane for the “flat” roof system can go on.
Over the (checked for nail heads etc.) marine ply sheets is a protective layer (white below) and then the thick rubber EPDM (ethylene propylene diene monomer) rubber sheet.
The MVHR is due to start being installed tomorrow, so some of it’s ducting has arrived:
New 3D printing technology that can build a 2,500-square-foot house in less than one day is currently being tested at the University of Southern California.
http://www.technology4change.com/page.jsp?id=354
From: http://www.technology4change.com/page.jsp?id=312
Looking at the details in the PDF, a lot of the ideas are similar to those being used by ecofab for my project:
– see some screen grabs below.
From the article:
WikiHouse has released the design for a £50,000 printed house for the UK that could help tackle problems like urbanisation, climate change and inequality, say creators.
The design is the latest creation from the non-profit project that has been developed to help produce low-cost, high-performance houses that are suited to local needs.
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The project, called WikiHouse, is an open source construction system which makes it possible for anyone to design, share, download, adapt and ‘print’ houses.
Users of the system can ‘print’ house parts from a standard sheet material like plywood, and the main structure assembled in about a day without the need for conventional construction skills, say creators.
“The open secret is that in reality almost everything we today call architecture is actually design for the 1%,” said WikiHouse co-designer Alastair Parvin of London-based design studio 00.
“The challenge facing the next generation of architects is how, for the first time, we will make our client not the 1% but the 100% – to radically democratise the production of architecture.”
He added: “We are moving into a future where the factory can be everywhere – and increasingly the design team can be everyone.”
WikiHouse is currently under development, with a growing community of teams and is seeking collaborators and funders.
Wall panel layers:
Assembled wall panel:
