The Floor Plans

OK, so now we have talked to no end about the kitchen, living room, bathroom, the stairs and so on, but I imagine that it is not very easy to visualize what we are trying to say. So here are the floor plans, slightly spiced up from the construction drawings, in order to make them a little more clear (or so I like to think, anyway).

First we have the ground floor.



And this is the second floor. The lines indicates where the ceiling "folds", and where it reaches full height. It is a one-and-a-half story house, with a 45 degree roof slope - because that is what is prescribed by the local building regulations.

This means that most of the second floor is well below full ceiling height. Near the outer walls it is only 90 cm high (ca 35 inches).



The three bedrooms on the second floor are supposed to be identical. One of the two larger roof windows can be opened up to form a small one-person balcony.

The Beams in the Living Room

We have known for a long time that we wanted a living room that was opened up to the second floor. Exactly how the opening was to be constructed was a different matter, and was not decided until much later.

The first design was that there should be no beams (using a special kind of roof truss), giving us several meters of free space up to the ceiling.

But after we got the initial construction drawings, it became obvious that this would look good from the living room, but not looking down from the second floor railing. The ceiling height there would be much too low!

So, we instead opted for wooden beams in the living room, which raised the living room ceiling up to the same height as the rest of the second floor ceiling, creating a better whole.

But we have been unsure on what the wooden beams would actually look like. So is it nice to finally be able to actually see all of this for real.

Here's two pictures that shows them in more detail.


The first one is looking into the living room, and you can see all four wooden beams. (The metal beams will be hidden later on.)





This is a close up to better see the structure and spacing of the beams.

I am not sure what the ceiling height will end up being in the living room, but more than 5 meters (16 feet) anyway, because each floor is 2,5 meters high.

Indoors

Yesterday, most of the roof frame had been erected. This is what it looks like from the outside, and the rest of the photos are from indoors.

Some of these photos are Beatrice's. Here Jeka is standing where the stairs will be.

This is looking at the laundry room (the room in the corner) from "the stairs".

Here Jeka is standing in the kitchen, and Beatrice is taking the photo from "the stairs"

This is a view from the laundry room down across towards the bathroom. The metal beam marks the edge of the corridor leading from the living room/kitchen area to the front door/bedroom/bathroom area.

The Roof Frame

Now work has begun constructing the roof. This view is from the neighbours driveway. (I've masked out some of our neighbours stuff that appeared on the original image).


Here we can see that some interior walls have also been put up. Since the builders where working when I took the pictures, I didn't want to enter the house.

Here we can see a few pictures of the roof frame that has been constructed over the living room.

This is the view from the grocery store across our neighbour's lawn. Dan the Builder told us that absolutely everybody shopping at the store pause for good look at the construction.

This is a view of the lot from some distance away. I'm standing near the train station looking westwards. In the far distance one can barely make out the Öresund strait which separates Sweden from Denmark. One can also see Denmark, faintly.

In true CSI-style, I used a few "zoom" and "enhance" image manipulation tools on a section of the above picture, making Denmark more visible. (Just to make sure that the country is still there, it is a very small country, after all).

The Ground Floor with Gables

Here's a view of the living room, and a I-beam which will end up hidden. The living room will have 4 visible wooden beams where it is open up to the second floor.
Here's a view from the garden.

This is from inside the house looking at the north western side of the house, towards the second floor. The smaller window to the left is a bathroom, and the larger one is one of three identical bedrooms on the second floor.

Here we have turned around facing south east, and we can see the other two bedrooms on the second floor. And also Dan the Builder.

This is the same wall, viewed from the garden instead.

The Ground Floor

Today it's saturday, so no work is being done at the house. We took a few photos of the walls and scaffolding that now extend all the way around the ground floor.

Here is a view from the kitchen looking at the living room.

This is the view from the living room, overlooking the garden. Now it looks more like a field that's been plowed, but we hope it will become green. Eveeeentually.

This is looking at the kitchen area from the living room. The big hole to the left is for the front door and the side light (basically a window beside the door in the same design and color as the door).

The horizontal window will end up in the kitchen, and the nearly square one is in the laundry room.

This is looking from the "master bedroom" (named after me, obviously :-) ) looking down the hallway towards the kitchen and living room area.

I'm pretty sure the small square window was supposed to end up circular!? We'll just have to wait and see, I guess.

Did you see Bastian in the picture above?

Almost all the way around

Since Beatrice and Bastian was home ill yesterday, we had time to take a walk to see what was going on at the lot. They had almost finished putting up walls all around the ground floor. This is a view from the street near the grocery store, over our neigbours lawn.

Beatrice and Bastian looked at the crane carrying some concrete blocks. We did not enter the construction site because we did not want to be in the way, so they are standing on some building material deposited on the street outside the lot.

The rubble in the front is partly the wood, roots and stumps from the cut-down trees, some building material, and partly stuff left over when they dismantled the garage (which Jeka managed to sell on the internet). We had hoped the buyer would take away everything, but they left quite a mess with stuff they presumably thought was not re-usable, such as old insulation and for some reason also the garage door. Some of it we will have to transport to the dump ourselves.

The crane is pointing at the last few segments to be put up in order to complete all outer walls on the ground floor.

One can also see some of the scaffolding they have begun to set up.

Beatrice found a piece of the concrete for our walls. I imagine that the small air-bubbles in it give it good insulation properties. When walking around the house one can see lots of small pieces like this have fallen off, so they will obviously have to repair the dents in the walls somehow.

They're Building Walls Around Us

Today we managed to take some photos of the walls, in the dusk around 16:45.

A bit noisy, due to the old cameraphone and the low lighting, but a bit of digital retouching made them look not too bad.

(Edit: I noticed now that these pictures are clickable, opening up a much larger image, but the images on previous posts does not show a larger image, why I don't know.)
The first picture is looking towards the south from the parking space.

We where told by Dan the Builder that this was one of the most annoying houses he has had the pleasure of working with, because of the combination of the size of the wall elements, it was necessary to to saw off bits and pieces of almost every wall element to cut holes for our many windows and doors. Normally they'd be finished by now.




This next photo is taken from the opposite side of the house looking northwards, with the bathroom closest, and our bedroom next to it where Jeka is standing.


Here we can see Jeka looking into our living room.


And an unfocused image of the westwards view out of our living room. From the second floor we will probably have a nice view of the island of Ven.

The second floor is opened up above the living room, which will hopefully give it a sense of open space, instead of an echo chamber. ;-)

In the middle between the two large windows we will have a woodburning stove (with a chimney).


This is the view from the hall approximately, looking at our bedroom (with the long window) in the middle.

Almost every room looked ridicusly small, are they really large enough? We've been told it's a mind trick played on us by the garden gnomes. I hate garden gnomes.


This is a view from outside, where our patio (terrace?) is supposed to be later. I'm looking at the two smaller windows where our staircase to the second floor will be.



One of the smaller window will end up below the "platform" halfway up the stairs, where one turns around to ascend the second half of the stairs (I bet you get the picture :-) ?), and one above it.

So yesterday they started to put up our walls and I rushed home to take some pictures in the evening.

But, when I came home it was pitch black and taking photos was not to think of...

This is what I managed to take with my phone with the headlights on on the car.

Hopefully I will be more succesful soon!

Posts the Read to Order Right the

Since we published a boatload of posts tonight with lots of photos on the house lot and the general mayhem going on there, and the blog shows the newest posts first (and only a few at once), You might want to start reading the first one, in order to see everything done in the right order...

If you want to read this blog using your browser, that's fine, but I personally like reading blogs using a "newsreader". This will save you time because you do not have to visit the blog to see the same old posts again, if we have published anything since you last checked. This is because the newsreader shows an indication telling you if there are anything new posted here or not.

A good newsreader is built right in to Internet Explorer, and some tips on using it can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2006/02/02/523430.aspx.

(And it is most likely just as easy using Firefox or other browsers)

Cement

Cement!

We have a cement foundation, though it is hard to see as it was too cold (below zero C) and they had to cover it up for the cement to burn correctly. Bastian and I are investigating...

Do I need to say that it was blowing really hard and the covers where all over the place, instead of covering the foundation?
We did our best to get it back in place.
Our neighbours cat left her trademark all over our foundation and will be forever linked to our house!Kinda cute, don't ya think?
So, this is one of the last pictures we took this weekend.
Tomorrow the walls will arrive!!
I can't wait!!!

More gravel...

And then they poured even more gravel...

This is how our former garage looks now

Filling it up!

Then it was time for filling up with gravel so that our house could be put on a solid and horisontal (!) foundation.

We used up a bit more than 300 tons of gravel. That's a lot!

Beatrice and Bastian was intrigued!
But they were not brave enough to try out the digger...
That made Bastian a bit grumpy. He actually changed his mind about being a traktor driver when he grew up and instead wants to become a fireman.
Here is someone who dared!
Brave, huh?