The Joy of Framing

I have to admit one of my favorite parts of construction is the framing. In a matter of only a few weeks the whole house starts to takes shape. This is an exciting period when each visit to the site brings some new surprise as the house comes into being. This is also the first time that you really start to get a feel for the spaces and also for the views. Because of this, it is also a good time to recheck the design. Framing can be one of the easiest and most inexpensive things to change during the construction process and it is always best to make any adjustments earlier rather than later. One such example for us was with a window in the master bathroom area. It's position on the house is set back along the side of the neighbouring house so the possibility of view was slight. I wanted to keep it in though just in case. As it turned out my original fear was correct so we eliminated the window deciding instead to add a skylight for natural light.

 Below are some photos of the house as it took shape over a period of six to eight weeks.

Concrete and Steel

They are stripping the concrete wall and installing the steel now. The concrete turned out good but we had a couple of issues of shifting formwork. No worries though, we will be able to deal with these in the framing.

With the design of the structure of the house I decided to use a steel beam to support the major span of the house. This allowed me to avoid a large dropped beam and possible columns in the main living space of the house (the living room and kitchen area). Many times in my practice when ever the mention of steel has come up the first thing everyone says is "oh steel you don't want to use that, it's too expensive". Well yes it is more expensive then a wood structure but you need to look at all aspects that are required. The beam that we used cost us a little over $2000. If I compare this to the cost of the wood beam plus the columns that would have been required to support teh wood beam and subtract that from the steel beam the extra cost begins to drop quite a bit. For that bit of extra cost I was able to open up the space much more and I also get a nice steel beam that can become an integral part of the architecture.

Here is the beam installed to the face plate on the new wall. Looks pretty good!

About designing your own Modern Dream Home

We should take some time to talk about the design of the house. As an architect, trying to design your own home as compared to one for a client always has its extra stress. You inevitably want to try exploring some different ideas and materials and of course you want it to be a bit of a show piece for future clients. And while you want to make sure you take time to explore these different ideas you also want to make sure that like any other project, you keep it rolling along. Inevitably in the end, designing your own home always takes a bit more time.

Our first big design discussions related to location of private versus public spaces (private being the bedroom area, and public being the dining room, living room and kitchen). The house would be a one story with a walkout basement which meant that you would enter the house on the upper floor but would have access to the yard from the lower floor. We wanted to have a close connection to the yard from the public spaces so naturally those went to the lower floor while the bedrooms were located in the upper or main floor.

I have posted the plans to the side of the BLOG so that you can see the layout.

Construction Has Started! Let the new home rise from the ground….

Having been around concrete all my life I am naturally interested in exploring using it any way that I can and with any chance I have. My wife is less excited with this prospect but keeps an open mind. At one point in the design of the house we had talked about incorporating rammed earth as a material that would be expressed as a theme for the interior and exterior of the house. When it got down to it though, it was too expensive and too complicated to use. And so the idea of using exposed concrete became the natural second option.

The one main wall where this is to occur is the end wall of the living room (on the North side). It’s probably the most focal point of the house and will be seen by anyone who comes to visit. The pressure was on. I wanted to capture the same sort of feel as a rammed earth wall which tends to look striated from the various levels of earth that are compacted in layer after layer to make up the height of the wall. So I decided to go to an older method of forming the wall known as board form.

Rather than building the wall forms out of large sheets of smooth plywood, you form using long planks of wood that are rough sawn. I also decided to play with the colour of the concrete and add an admixture. For all you concrete geeks out there the concrete mix was as follows:

30 mpa with 3/8” aggregate and ½ of 1% Glenium 3030NS.

For the colour admixture we used 1 bag BL-3212R Silver Diamond from Interstar for every cubic meter.

So this Friday with big snowflakes falling out of the sky the concrete arrived.