Week 13: A Construction Interlude
Sep. 20, 2022I know a lot of people are interested in the construction process being used for our house, so I thought I would share some more information about it. We are working with a company who builds semi-customised homes based on their standard floor plans. When we started working with them a few years ago, we told them what we wanted, they looked at our property and started coming up with options.
Unlike my past experience with American builders, our subdivision isn’t owned and managed by a single builder. The properties were bought and then each owner was responsible for finding their own builder. With our builder, we then had to find someone to build the foundation - regardless of whether we chose slab or basement.
We also went the non-standard route of going with a company that builds more energy efficient and ecological homes, rather than the standard solid brick homes that are so common to Europe. So technically our home is “wood frame” but nothing like you would think of when you think of American homes made from 2x8s and standard wood framing.
So we chose the builder Atrium, a company that has been making homes in Czech and Slovak Republics for the past 30 years. (https://atrium.cz) Given that I figured most people might not want to figure out how to use Google translate, I thought I would give a summary of the building structure of Atrium homes.
Atrium has 2 options for energy efficiency; we chose the lower model due strictly to price. The main difference in the two is that the other one is truly a passive home. Our home will have walls that are 336mm (13 inches) thick, ceiling (between home and attic) that is 467mm (18 inches) thick and the roof between attic and sky is 507mm (20 inches) thick. In the passive house, the amount of insulation is increased and so those values are 436mm, 487mm and 605mm respectively.
Below are the images from the Atrium website with english translations so you can understand the layers in the walls, ceiling and roof.
Our home is similar to a pre-fab home in the fact that the frame is actually built in a factory and then the walls and ceiling/roof are brought in on a truck and bolted together. Because of this, even though they will not start building the house on-site until 12 October, they are contracted to be finished within 4 months. This means the house should be done before 12 February.
If you are interested in seeing how the process works, you can see this video on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D26AvoBXhw0 which is from another home that they built last year. You can see the first day process which is pretty similar to how ours will go.
I hope you find this interesting and of course, as building continues, we’ll continuing sharing the progress!
Wall Structure:
