At this moment we build manly in The Netherlands. One month ago we started with the assembly of a loghouse in Overijssel, in the East. Beautiful countryside, untouched since the seventeenth century.
On the farm there is a traditional masonry house from 1950, but it has almost no insulation and with current gas prices it is impossible to heat such a house.
The owner will soon demolish that house, but first we will build a new one.
There are many different kinds of insulation materials to insulate your house. Polyurethane, glass wool, rock wool, old newspapers, wood fiber, sheep wool and the list goes on and on.
In this video we compare three common types:
polyurethane glass wool wood fiber. One remark about cost. In the video we say that wood fiber is “almost cheap”, i.e. it is slightly more expensive than the other materials. But this video is from 2015 and since 2020 woodprices have gone through the roof, also prices for wood fiber.
We had some small outstanding works to be done with a client for whom we built a house about one year ago. Good opportunity to take some photos and put them on our website.
And we were lucky because this client had just built himself a wooden terrace. Originally this was a concrete terrace, but wood looks so much better. It sort of places the house on a pedestal.
When in the neighborhood sometimes we drop by older clients, just to say hello, or to regulate a window (which can be necessary in a log house from time to time).
So we dropped by this log house that we built some three years ago, and guess what: they turned a muddy plot into a little Valhalla.
For those that are familiar with Almere in The Netherlands: in the background is the famous flying saucer house.
Today we started with the assembly of a new log house. This log house is a bit like all the other log houses that we built, except for one thing: solid wood.
So far we used laminated logs, i.e. logs that have been cut into 40 millimeter planks, dried, and then glued together. Such “gluelam” logs have some technical advantages: they are physically more stable, they don’t warp or crack, and they can be made in any length.
The Eric & Flo is one of our most popular houses. A strikingly simple and timeless design, and also very powerful from every angle.
In 2017 a Dutch client wanted a copy. Now an exact copy was not possible because of the Dutch building regulations and we had to raise the roof by a few centimeters. Also this client installed underfloor heating with a heatpump whereas the original Eric & Flo has no heated floor, not even heat-pump, just a wood burner… But other than that the house is almost identical.
In 2020 we built a house in Denmark, close to Legoland. Appropriately our house was made from wooden logs that you stack together, not too dissimilar from plastic blocks that you stack together.
These photos are far from perfect. Made with a phone, we forgot to bring our camera, sorry about that.
This was nog a small house. We built it for a Dutch family that emigrated to Denmark some twenty years ago.
In the South of The Netherlands we built the Riethoven house. Designed by the owner himself, this house is both a log house and a panel house: the ground floor is a log house, and then the second floor is a panel house, but constructed in such a way that you can not see the difference. If you would not know any better, you would think it is all logs. The panel construction gave us just that little extra flexibility to meet the demands.
Log houses: round logs, laminated, corners, … A log house is a log house is a log house. Except, it is not. Log houses come in many variations. Here we discuss some of the main properties of log houses.
Laminated of massive wood One characteristic of a log is the wood lamination. Laminating is the process where we cut a log in long four centimeter strips, dry the strips, then glue them together.
With temperatures going down in Lithuania, and wind coming from the North-East, usually after a few days the Dutch go skating. And indeed, with Lithuanian temperatures going down to -25 Celcius, the ice started growing in The Netherlands and then the Dutch get into this frenzy where they all hope for the Great Event: the Elfstedentocht.
And with Covid-19 the Dutch government did not want to let that happen, twenty thousand people on the ice was not a good idea, but also, they were reluctant to call off an event for which the Dutch had been waiting more than twenty years.
