In East Europe wooden houses are everywhere. In the smaller villages almost every houses is a wooden house. Until recently these house were a little different from the house that we build:
round logs, not laminated no additional insulation a little air leak here and there is ok lots of beautiful decorations painted. And then finally: often without a serious foundation. Especially in Siberia houses are built with a minimal foundation on top of the permafrost.
We have been busy lately with preparing new projects and we had little time to place posts on our website. But now while cleaning a laptop we found some photos that we better place on our website right away and then later we will go search for the rest of the photos, because for sure we had some better ones.
This project we finished about six months ago.
Contrary to popular belief, wooden houses have a very high life expectancy. Of course wood should be protected from humidity, but if the owner takes care of his house it will last very long. When designing a wooden house we make sure that water can always escape from the house and that walls are ventilated. What would then be life expectancy of a wooden house?
We have several examples of old wooden houses in Europe.
Since our building sites are all over Europe, we travel a lot. And we meet people from all over Europe. English clients, French plumbers, Italian architects, Polish truck drivers and Russian émigrés in Spain. We love it that our generation was able to build this continent where we can travel freely in all directions.
Here we are waiting for a Manitou to unload a truck in France.
Contractors come in sizes and shapes. Big ones, small ones, contractors that build wooden houses, or masonry houses, contrators that do individual homes and contractors that build appartment blocks. Not every contractor is suitable for your project. An important aspect in your selection process is turn-key.
What is turn-key? There are different definitions of turn-key. Ours is that we:
include:
foundation roof and walls, outside fully finished, inside without stucco doors and windows, double or triple glass electrical installation, solar panels floor heating, heat pump, boiler waste water, fresh water, tapwater, and excluding:
We are builders and we are proud of our houses because of the techniques and materials that we use. Our houses are robust, sturdy, they have very high insulation values and the are build to withstand ages. But all that means nothing when it comes to aesthetics.
A nice design is just that, nice, and that is why we often cooperate with the architects from OxL.
Sometimes a picture is unexpectedly nice. We were inspecting a house and took a picture of the roof. In the top you can see 5 centimeters roof overhanging the wall, we must fix that.
When we later looked at the photo we liked it because of the contrails. Not very eco but nice nonetheless.
As our old website was too complex and difficult to maintain, we kicked it out. We prefer simple stuff. So we are now in the process of rebuilding our website, but as you can see it is all still quite half-baked. We decided to put it on the web anyways, at least you can see our contact details.
In 2017 we built a loghouse on an island in The Netherlands. Quite an operation: getting a permit to drive a 24-ton truck onto the dike, then unloading to a barge, and then unloading on the island. After returning from a project in the Alps this was a little different for our assembly crew, going to work every day with tug boat.
