technē and poiēsis

A couple weeks ago... The past couple weeks I have been working on insulating+paneling the interior, and this step is finally finished! I'm using 12mm pine plywood as a finish. I also routed out tongues-and-grooves on the panels so that they would always sit flush with one another. A big challenge of this phase was to make the curved parts of the roof. I had to make hundreds of saw cuts to be able to bend the panel to shape. I also added reinforcing ribs so that the curve would stay in place. Using a home-made compass to trace out the ribs Gluing the rib in place After that, there was the question of how to get the panel onto the ceiling! I had help, but one extra pair of hands wasn't enough to hold the panel in place and get it fastened. It was too heavy and was warping in all directions. I ended up making a kind of formwork that could hold the panel in place temporarily as I put the screws in.  Overall, I am pretty happy with how ...

I tried to look for building materials second-hand. And I found an ad for these mini windows. I think they were showroom examples before, because they had handles attached to the top. This was convenient as I went to pick them up using public transport and I had to haul them back on the bus and train! They are triple-glazed, tilt-and-turn wood+metal windows. A steal for 50 francs apiece! Here's my version of window installation: 1) get it level in the opening using shims. Peel back the rubber joint and screw through the wood frame into the structure. 2) Tape around the exterior frame using weatherproofing tape. 3) Add sheathing board around the edge (for extra insulation) 4) Stuff cracks with wool (I vowed that I wouldn't use spray foam on this project...meaning I spend time stuffing wool into gaps) Now it just needs some interior and exterior cladding!

Wool carding machine If you haven't already noticed, I am fascinated with the transformations that turn raw materials into architecture. I like to go back to the source of things- whether it's brick , plywood , or concrete . So I said yes straight away when the sales agent of Fiwo suggested I visit the factory to see how wool is turned into insulation batts. Fiwo is a Swiss not-for-profit company that was originally founded to re-insert people in social difficulty into the workforce. It also developed out of the realisation that wool is a waste product in Switzerland, and two-thirds of the wool production was being burned. The founder saw the opportunity to recover a valuable material that has many useful properties, as well as help out the sheep farmers by paying for a substance they would have had to pay to dispose of. The wool is first sorted by hand, to remove impurities and to sort by colour. Apparently, black wool fibres are coarser than white ones, which can be...

For now, everything has been going so smoothly. But I was stuck for a while working on the connections between the wood structure and the metal trailer. Most Tiny Houses use a version of bolt-and-plate connections: a metal plate on top of the floor structure, a metal plate on the bottom of the trailer structure, and bolts to hold them together. In fact, the importer who sold me the trailer offered to sell me these assemblies. But I didn't know if the dimensions were appropriate for my construction and I thought I could make my own. I tried first with pieces that had round holes- I found some brackets at the hardware store that had the correct sized holes and cut them apart to make plates. I put some threaded rod through the holes and a bolt on each end. But then I realised that a bolt on each end doesn't work, because trying to tighten one bolt loosens the other one. So I put a cap bolt (the bottom version in the picture below) on the top side. Since this looked a bit ...