Housebuilding in Finland

[Lord Revan]

no it's not common at all, actually I don't know anyone who has their dishwasher that way.

[His Divine Shadow]

My parents have it the same way in their kitchen when they renovated it in the mid 2000s and it's a very useful change from having it on the floor, everything is just at a more comfortable level. Plus you get an extra cabinet underneath it. One of the people at the house building company said we where the first to have requested a raised dishwasher.

We customized the kitchen a lot, the hot plates and oven where together in one package in the original, we moved the oven to the other side and put an integrated microwave in there as well, we left only the hot plates at the standard location (induction plates), more cabinets where added, three extra window lights and LED spotlights in the ceiling in addition to the regular lighting at these locations:


In the "empty" corner next to the door I will put a kitchen island on wheels.

[fnord]

Wow, that's coming together to make a really nice house.

Are you actually building a Passive House, or is that just a result of Finnish building codes and your own preferences?

[His Divine Shadow]

Nah this won't meet passive house standards, close but not enough for that. This is kinda what modern buildings here have to live up to or people wouldn't buy them.

Electricity and all other fuels have the common property of only getting more expensive all the time, so even upfront investments like drilling a 130-200m deep borehole will probably pay for itself inside 10 years. Even large buildings like the place I rent various building equipment are run on these systems now, they just use multiple boreholes. They ran the whole thing with a Nibe heatpump of an older model than ours and it's a gigantic hangar/workshop.

I believe the prognosis for the houses electricity consumption is around 5-6000kWh per year like this, would be 10-13,000kWh per year otherwise.

In other news all the interior walls are up now, except near the electricity central, but that was only so we could connect the three empty pipes coming up out of the floor to the central. We've got three 40mm pipes going underground all the way to the road, the third ends in the middle of the yard. They are meant for future expansion, if we ever want to pull in some additional cable, or pull some out, we have it in place.

In fact we're already gonna pull in TV and phone cables there, and probably fiber optic cable for internet too. Malax municipality where we're building has a very well developed fiber optic infrastructure, it being a joint project with many other rural coastal municipalities in western Finland. There is a fiber optic central just at the corner of the yard across the road, so hardly any work to connect it.

I have some more photos though they don't show anything radically new. Will upload some later when I have time.

EDIT: Oh yeah found some before photos of the lot:

[His Divine Shadow]

Stuff that's happened.

We got a door to the laundry room now:


Drains are ready and just need to be hooked up, we'll connect them to the pipes which will lead rain water straight into the underground drainage system rather than let it fall right on the ground:


Some indoor pictures, living room and kitchen seen from the main entrance:





Heat pump got moved into place:


Today it was hooked up, electricity earlier this week. Now all we need is to install the water meter and it's ready to start heating the house.


Work has started on the garage too, ready to put up panelling, windows installed, two doors have been installed as well (not shown):

[His Divine Shadow]

Garage construction is proceeding quickly:




Got a de-humidifier:




The heat pump is keeping the house at a steady 20C now, I think the warmth in the floor is making the moisture leave it faster since it feels more humid inside. The de-humidifier took 4-5 liters of water out of the air over the last 20 hours.

[madd0ct0r]

there'll be a lot of water coming out of that slab for a while yet.

I'm mildly concerned by the unevenness of the snow on your roof - have you got a patch with a leak in the insulation?

[His Divine Shadow]

No it's just we're having temperature swings up and below freezing and occasional snow. Everything is melting now and snow slides of the roof unevenly. The parts more melted are facing southwest and get more sun too. You can see the same pattern on both roofs. There is also an air went on the top of the roof near where there is more melting going on, but at this point in time I am ascribing it to natural weather phenomenons/patterns.

[His Divine Shadow]

Garage exterior is done now, with the exception of the metal siding for the windows and doors.





This weekend I was working on putting up insulation on the inside:




Fucking glass wool, everything itches. At least I had a mask, but the protective glasses where useless due to fogging over, so my eyes where itchy all evening. Next up is putting up the moisture barrier, already started in the picture.

edit: forgot to put img tags on two pics.

[Elheru Aran]

Gonna landscape a little, I expect? Unless you like the rockery look

In all seriousness though, this is rather neat, seeing how the process goes somewhere that's not the US

[His Divine Shadow]

Landscaping is about the final thing we'll do here. Do have plans for the yard though, we're in a hill and there's maybe a 2 meter height difference between the north east and south west corner. I plan to use all the big rocks we got from blasting to make a support wall that will segment off the south west portion at a lower plane. Then a smaller wall will segment of the front lawn and house against the driveway, so the yard will have three levels to it.

[His Divine Shadow]

Stuff's been happening in the bathrooms lately:






Also got a shipment from Turun Uunisepät, it's my fireplace, yay soon I can start burning stuff!

[His Divine Shadow]

Had to carry all the pieces of the heater into the house on monday night according to the assembly people, I guess I can understand why, the heater is 1250 kilos, or 1.25 metric tons, if I had to carry this inside I would not have any energy left over to build it. And we had to be two people to even move the heavier parts.

Stuff:


More stuff:


They've started on the chimney, it's a double chimney:



The other side of the wall is in the sauna, so the two heaters share the same chimney:



They built the rest of the heater last night:






What's left is insulating the chimney which they will do next week.

[His Divine Shadow]

I want to tile the area around the heater but had problems visualizing it so I drew a mockup in photoshop, despite its fakeness (just used some random laminate image) I think the concept looks nice:

[His Divine Shadow]

Been working hard lately, but not a lot to show for it, spackling and sanding drywall is slow and tedious work.



Also got the water meter so now I can start paying for municipial water, yay It was actually free until now.



Last night I also made my first fire in the house:

[Thanas]

Wow, this looks real good.

A question with regards to the materials used - what made you chose wood? Tradition (noticed a lot of wooden buildings in scandinavia when I travelled there) or was stone just not an option?

[His Divine Shadow]

Wood is plentiful and easy to work with as a material, and we have lots and lots of it. Stone houses tend to be more expensive as well. It was hardly ever a choice really, almost all house manufacturers we looked at made their houses from wood.

[Borgholio]

Wood is plentiful and easy to work with as a material, and we have lots and lots of it. Stone houses tend to be more expensive as well. It was hardly ever a choice really, almost all house manufacturers we looked at made their houses from wood.

Not that it matters in your part of the world, but here in California, wood is also very sturdy when confronted with earthquakes. The beams and joints flex, while masonry and stone tends to crumble.

[Broomstick]

That's also why historically Japan has made such extensive use of wood in their architecture - survives earthquakes better.

[Lord Revan]

that said Finland is at a fairly stable area geologically speaking so no earthquakes here, that said wood can withstand the local elements fairly well, where as something like sandstone or marble cannot (as the outside of the Finlandia building has shown) and granite (the most common of the local rocks) is quite hard to cut), so between our large forests and need for houses that don't need their walls replaced every 10 years or so wood seemed like the wisest element to build from (a traditional Finnish house is a log cabin)

[His Divine Shadow]

Still spackling and sanding, it's the most boring and dirty work I've ever done, almost finished now though!



Getting nice and straight corner was difficult until I learned of these metal corners that also reinforce the corner so it won't get damaged as if would if it was only plaster and someone knocked into it with something hard.


These corners where even worse though as there where no metal corners for the angle they where made in:


I was going crazy trying to get straight corners until I heard of this product:

It's called multiflex tape, allows you to get a straight and reinforced corner in every angle you might want.

And the electricians came by and installed some wiring in the garage, didn't even know about it until I noticed by chance:




We also got a fiber optic cable installed, so now it's just a matter of hooking everything up, we have CAT6 wire and ethernet ports in almost all rooms:

[His Divine Shadow]

I was so fed up with this kind of work that I tried my hand at carpentry on sunday. First I built a saw horse:


Then I decided I should try and build a wood shed:


The idea is to make a slant roof, I am thinking two big doors that open in the front later. Probably not gonna remain in that location and I will have to fix the foundation and tighten it up etc etc.

All in all it was a nice spring day, the evening sun on the house:


I also bought a splitting maul so I can start splitting wood:


Got an old double bit axe head I mean to restore and reshaft as well.

[madd0ct0r]

House has fire, bored of house now, make more fire!

[Borgholio]

We also got a fiber optic cable installed, so now it's just a matter of hooking everything up, we have CAT6 wire and ethernet ports in almost all rooms:

I hate you.

Still spackling and sanding, it's the most boring and dirty work I've ever done, almost finished now though!

Regarding drywall. If you are going to drywall the ceiling, then for the love of god use a drywall jack. I helped my dad drywall his ceiling without one once, forcing me to hold a sheet over my head while he nailed it in place. We did this to an entire full-size garage with a loft.

I still have not forgiven him for that.

[fnord]

Looks like it's coming together very nicely.

How come you're doing some of the stuff yourself? To save some coin? Keep things moving when other stuff stalls?