Results tagged “Construction” from Building the Villa Straylight

It's been an incredibly busy January, so it's been two weeks since we last visited the site.  In the mean time;
The septic has finally been finished. 
The radiant heat is still radiating gloriously.
The cork floor has been delivered (not installed).
The ikea kitchen has been delivered (not installed).
The first floor bathroom was just leveled and the floor tiled.
The basement has been sheet rocked.
The back-up heat system (a long story) has been installed and ventilation run around the basement perimeter (see photos below).

And at long last, the siding has been completed.  It looks great.  The vertical tongue-in-groove rough cedar planks were all stained in the basement and dried before going up on the house.

Andy and the crew tackled some interior work for the first week.  Framing out the walls in the basement, and tackling the light scoop interior. The only heat source currently in the house is the wood burning stove.


The pipes you see in the opening beside the foundation are our Geothermal temperature regulating system. It's sort of a homemade system that Walt recommended. The system consists of an intake and outflow pipes in the basement (second picture below). These openings feed a series of buried pvc pipes which condition the air by regulating it to the ground temperature, a very stable 50 - 60 degrees year-round. We'll post an update when we've had a chance to use it.

Episode 2
Straylight Short Film Series
TRT 6:44



Music: Mogwai "Ratts of the Capital" from the album Happy Songs for Happy People.

On Friday 4 December 2009, the Villa Straylight was delivered.  Not without a few hiccups (I'll elaborate later) but now a house exists.

Here's a raw time lapse video of the house being set, I'm choosing my favorite audio track, the rock mashup, I also made a Dub version and a Classical version for your enjoyment.




This time-lapse was shot on a Canon EOS Digital Rebel, using an intervalometer shooting one frame every 5 seconds. We started shooting at 8:30a - 4:45pm. The original material is 1936 x 1288. This was crunched to 726 x 483, using h264 codec out of FCP.

The house was on three trailers. 1 @ 14' x 36', 1 @ 12' x 36' and one with the light scoop and parapet walls to be finished on site. You can see the crane stack the trailers as each one is finshed.

----------

Also, here's a 150 still images, unedited, as a flickr slideshow.

It has been an unnecessarily long and drawn out year of trying to get this house built.  We've waded through countless bids and considered every route from stick built to various levels of prefabrication.  The gory details can wait until it is finished, but at long last it is moving forward - with a functional plan and people in place to get the job done. 

The final recipe is:

1. Architectural Design by Rapson Architects based on the Case Study House # 4
2. Factory and Prefab coordination and consulting by Walter Bestwick.
3. Prefab Foundation by Superior Walls.
4. Prefab house construction built in the Penn Lyon factory in Selinsgrove, PA
5. Site prep and on-site finishing by Hidden Valley Construction. (who have been fantastic!)