Building a play house

Finally, the play house project is taking shape. We bought a kit in late May, and began by surveying the location. We used concrete tiles as foundations, and it is very important to get all tiles exactly to the correct height, or otherwise the log construction will be skewed. We also put down a large sheet of geotextile to prevent vegetation from growing under the house.

The next step was to put down five foundation beams of wood, and the first layer of logs on top of that. Here, again, it is very important to have everything level, and to be absolutely sure that both diagonals are of the same length, or otherwise the house will not have right angles and things like window and door won't fit properly. So it takes ages to do all the preparations, but after that it's great fun to see the house grow — a process that we have filmed with our GoPro Hero 2 camera at one image per 5 seconds.

Have a look at the resulting time-lapse film, which is just over a minute long. Enjoy!

The final photo above shows what it looks like now. The cargo lashings inside are needed, because despite all accuracy with getting everything aligned just right, wood is a natural material and everything was slightly off direction and needed careful nudging into the right place.

Day 70: Painting Our House

This summer we have finally began to paint Our House. The weather this summer has been very variable, and bad weather and weekends seem to be highly correlated. Thus the progress is slow, but it's still looking good after only three days on the job.

On Day 68, the vertical columns and the horizontal beam under the roof were primed, and parts of the railing got their first coat of paint.

Almost at the end of Day 69, large parts of the western face of the house had received the first coat of red paint. Finally the final look became apparent: the classic combination of dark red paint for the walls, and white for the window frames.

The factory name of the colour scheme we chose for our house reflects just how traditional these colours are: "Mummola" ("granny's house"). The colours are Tikkurila 526X (red) and 603X (white).

Today (Day 70), we painted the lower part of the south face of the house, which turned out to be a somewhat tedious job, since there are three narrow sections with horizontal panels between windows, door, and at the corner.

We had a GoPro Hero 2 taking photos every 10 seconds during painting and made a short time-lapse film of it. The above image is a composite of the first and last images of the time-lapse sequence.

Finally, here's a photo of what it looks like now while writing this blog post. The gable as well as all wooden panels under the roof overhangs will have to wait until we have rented a cherry picker in order to work safely and efficiently.

Day 65: Secret Ditches

It's been a while since we updated the construction blog of Our House. But today, 23rd October, the digger arrived again! We are late in the year to do this job, everything got late after various timetable issues throughout the summer and especially in September, when certain events just suddenly made all time for this evaporate.

Before the winter can set in fully, we need two more things doing to Our House. First, a special drainage pipe is installed all around the house, which prevents too much water from creeping under the foundations. In Finnish, this pipe is called "salaoja" or "secret ditch", which refers to its being invisible under ground. This is achieved by a special plastic pipe, which has lots of holes to let water in. The ring of these pipes around the house decent to one low point, and from there away from Our House. The first photo shows the trench being dug.

On the next photo you can see how the trench with the pipe is filled again with a special type of gravel. This gravel allows water to flow easily to the pipe, and once it enters the pipe, the easiest way out for the water is to follow the gradient along it to where we want the water to exit. The device on the tripod in the background is a laser, which provides a reference level in order to make sure the pipe has the correct gradient everywhere.

The first set of these pipes were put into the already frozen ground today. These pipes easily click into each other, a process in progress in the photo above.

Tomorrow the work will continue. After that, a layer of sand will be spread across everything, and then it'll be time for FinnFoam again, a layer of insulation preventing the ground under Our House from freezing. So there'll be more on the blog as we go along.

Photos: Thomas Ulich.

Journeys to the Dump

After the constructions of Our House, we were left with a huge pile of rubbish. In order to minimise cost of getting rid of it, the whole lot had to be sorted into various categories, since many types of rubbish can be brought to the local dump for free, but unsorted rubbish is expensive.

The first trip was for cardboard, the 2nd trip for plastic, the 3rd trip for "treated wood", i.e. painted or stained wood or MDF. Then there was a 4th trip for plastic, followed by so far three trips for branches and tree roots. The first photo shows one of these loads, obviously before it being secured. The second photo is of the same load after being secured for the journey of some 15 km. With careful planning, we managed to get rid of all rubbish without any cost at all. At least three more journeys for wood are expected before the snow comes in October.

Photos: Thomas Ulich.

Wheelbarrow "Spring Over"

Besides having that red heavy-duty wheelbarrow, we decided it was time to buy a normal one for smaller jobs around Our House. Yeah, ok, it doesn't have a winch – but it's yellow! Anyway, the instructions clearly said to mount the axle (indicated by the yellow arrow, click to enlarge) on top of the frame. However, when lifting the wheel barrow on the handle bars, the arch in front of the wheel went so low, that it rammed into any minor obstacle and thereby made moving around on anything but a flat path impossible.

The problem reminded me of an improvement some off-road people do to their 4x4s, which is called "Spring Over Axle" conversion. The idea is that instead of hanging the leaf springs under the axle, they are mounted on top of it, thus giving a lot more ground clearance. Here a "Frame Over" conversion was called for.

The implementation of this on something as basic as a wheel barrow is shown in the photo montage above, which shows both before and after. The axle is at the same location in both photos (arrow), but it has been changed from mounted above to mounted below the frame, thereby lifting the front arch by some 7 cm or so, but at the same time lowering the handle bars and tilting the whole thing backwards. The result: it works! Much better than before!

Photos: Thomas Ulich.

Tree Recycling

When the digger came to make room for Our House, quite a few trees had to be felled, and these were scattered all over the place. In mid-May, when the snow was gone, the land had dried, but the mozzies hadn't arrived, my neighbour Eero and his friend Risto dropped by "to get some exercise." The result of which was that they had chopped all trees up in small logs some 30-40 cm long. Then Eero dropped by again, and together we used a special wood splitting machine to break the logs in suitably thin pieces for the fireplace. In the photo above there's Eero's quad bike and behind it the machine to split wood. Extremely handy that thing! Also here on the internet, a big Thank You to Eero and Risto for their help!

Afterward all these logs needed collecting and piling up neatly. The tool of choice is a wheel barrow, which in my case isn't powered by one man, but instead by the 90 horses of its 3.6 litre 6-cylinder engine! While our wheel barrow was rapidly approaching its 33rd birthday at the time, there was no stopping it from moving some logs around – the best gardening tool ever!

Photos: Thomas Ulich.

Day 64: Ladders on the Roof

Not much has happened over the summer, and the few things that went on will be reported on in due time. When the previous blog post on Our House went out, we were already moving house, and subsequently it's been a very busy time catching up with all the things that had to stay behind due to the construction. The photo above shows the final stage of the work on the chimney. It is a legal requirement in Finland to have ladders going up to the chimney, which are easily accessible from the outside. These were installed on Day 64, i.e. on Monday, 22nd April 2013. Yes, it took me a while to put that on the blog, and the photo was taken in July, in case you are wondering where all the snow's gone. Stay tuned, there'll be more.

Photo: Thomas Ulich.

Welcome to Iceland!

No worries, we haven't abandoned Our House and moved to Iceland. Already for a while we've been wondering if it's worth the effort to maintain a server computer for e-mail and web pages, and when our domain ulich.org was due for renewal this summer, we decided to outsource this service to OrangeWebsite in Reykjavík, Iceland.

There are two key reasons for choosing Iceland: first, the services of OrangeWebsite are running on 100% green energy, i.e. their servers are powered by geothermal energy, which is in abundance on volcanic Iceland. The photo above is of the volcano Hengill, which is one of the sources of Reykjavík's energy, and also the namesake of the server our services are running on now. Secondly, and equally importantly, Iceland has some of the world most rigorous laws on data protection and privacy. While this blog is still hosted by Google, we are investigating if we can transfer it to Iceland, too. The difficulty lies in the need to port it from Blogger to WordPress.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons (source).

Late for work because of what? Reindeer?

Summer in Lapland, warm, blue skies, and wildlife. What about this as an excuse for being late for work: I got held up by a group of reindeer blocking the road. Well, this is completely normal in Lapland, though very rare on the road between the village of Sodankylä and the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory. Have a nice summer everyone! Film: Thomas Ulich, SGO.

Day 63: Chimney Wrapped Up

The waterproofing of the roof after construction of the chimney remained incomplete, but immediately the following day (17th April, Day 63), the entire chimney was clad in metal.

The photo above shows the base of the chimney in more detail. The sheets overlap with the surround on the outside such that water flows from the walls onto the roof without any chance to penetrate.

The whole installation is completed by a little roof on top of the chimney, preventing rain and snow to enter into the chimney and flood the sitting room. Note also that the edge around the chimney pipe is folded up so that water accumulating around it cannot flow into it. Smartly done, and it looks smart, too. The only thing missing now is a permanent access ladder and platform for cleaning and inspection.