We've just reached a landmark - a progress payment for the builder for completing the frame. As such I thought I'd better get the blog up to date!
Mick the builder elected to use a combination of methods for the frame - the "normal" parts of the house were produced by a framing company using a computer-driven system. This is cheap and efficient. However the strawbale parts of the frame use much larger LVL framing timbers, which are significantly beyond the capabilities of the framing company. So those parts and some of the trickier joins were all done by hand. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.
It all started simply enough - a few hand-raised LVL timbers forming the end wall of our ensuite (the diagonal one is just a temporary brace).
But amazingly after the end of only the second
day it looked like this, with the thicker walls as above around the exterior but the computer-produced frames for the interior walls:
Here you can see the frame sitting on the boomerang-shaped slab (view from kitchen down bedroom wing):
It didn't take long for the kids to start wandering around our first defined spaces, searching for bedrooms to call their own:
Here's a close-up of the exterior bathroom wall clearly showing where the strawbales will fit snugly inside the timbers:
At the end of the first week it was all starting to look very house-like:
We certainly can't wait to live there and get views like this each day:
It wasn't much longer and the bedroom wing's "normal" roof trusses arrived and were rapidly piled on - these will be inside the attic and not visible when the house is completed:
The one part of the house that isn't a "boomerang" shape is the one upstairs loft/rumpus room. This sits across the
middle of the boomerang half way between the angles of the other wings. This makes for some interesting joins which the builder had to work out as he went: