Instant house
Comments: 2
There’s a lot of construction going on around our place at the moment. The block opposite us was empty for a long time before being subdivided and sold to eager young home-buyers. Now two houses are being built there simultaneously, each in a different style.
The house on the left is going to be made of concrete. Wooden frames are being constructed so as to describe the negative space of the walls. Then concrete will be poured in, the wooden frames removed (I’m guessing), and the negative will become the positive. Just getting the wooden frames up seems to be taking weeks.
The house on the right is a wood-framed thing. Yesterday there was no frame at all. The concrete footings had been poured and a scaffold erected to serve as an idea of protection to the poor neighbour against whose yard this new house will immediately sit.
Today, there is a frame, and it is nearly complete. This was a day’s work. This morning, a truck backed up with a load of timber. Well, it looked like a load of timber but actually it was a house frame, pre-cut and numbered to fit exactly together with itself. The various pieces had been loaded onto the truck in the reverse order in which they would be required, top of the house on the truck first, bottom of the house on last. As pieces were unloaded from the truck, they were assembled. I don’t think any particular bundle of pieces sat idle for any length of time. It was just remarkable to watch: hoist a bundle off the truck, set it down, unbundle it and assemble the pieces. As this was happening the crane would swing around for the next bundle, and by the time this was ready to be set down, the previous one had been bolted together.
I should have set up the web camera to take a time lapse movie of the day … but there just wasn’t time. Before I’d remembered that this was something I could do, the house had pretty much been built.
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Posted to General Rants • 2005.02.14 (Mon) • 23:45
Comments
Posted by TheRich 2005.02.15, 01:28
I'm curious to see the final outcome though. Post a snap regardless!
Posted by jh 2005.02.17, 20:37
Alas, I went to take a picture the next morning and the protection scaffolding had been extended right around the frame and up, higher then the frame itself.
I'll try to get what pictures I can. You'll definitely get to see the finished houses (I say this with a little trepidation).
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