Our living pod has literally appeared before our eyes overnight. Yahoooooo!
48 hours ago, all we had was piles and blockwork. Then the steel arrived and sub floor went down – then the advantage of building with SIPs became obvious, within hours the front half of the pod was erected from with our Formance SIP panels that had been waiting in storage. Walls and ceiling. If we weren’t still waiting for the rest of the steel to finish the back half of the pod, the whole structure would’ve been up within three days.
Our SIPs panels for the living pod arriving on site.
A bit of man handling needed to make space for everything.
Dan reviewing the panel layout plans before getting stuck into it.
Great thinking pose.
Dan putting down the glue along the bottom plate in preparation for the first panel to be put into place. You can also see the foam that goes down too, to make the joins perfectly airtight.
And then like a giant set of lego, the front half of our living pod appeared in a matter of hours.
Foam goes between the poly and timber connections too.
The large window along the front face of the pod starts to appear. She’s nice and level eh Dan?
And voila. So cool to be able to stand in our living pod for the first time, walk around inside it and look out the windows. The dream feels tantalisingly close now!
Hi Ben,
We’re looking to build with SIPs in the near future. I remembered you guys had and came to find the site.
Why did you choose the Formance panels or any alternatives?
(also, we do the Mary’s Market with Kylie – I’ve said g’day to you in passing, but didn’t think to ask about this)
Cheers,
Marcus
Hey Marcus. Awesome. After living in the house for 18 months now, I highly recommend SIPs. In short, we started looking into prefabrication and SIPs to speed the build up, save on construction costs and be light on our site. But in the end we realised the real benefits lie in the thermal insulation, a dry/healthy home and the bracing role they play to allow for very large, open spans. Here’s a good summary that I wrote about http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11327097
You’ll also see at the bottom of this post, a decent thread about our experiences living in the house. http://www.ourdreamhome.co.nz/uncategorized/building-our-house-in-a-day/
Hope that helps, happy to answer any more questions you have.
Cheers
Ben
Thanks Ben.
I’m 99% decided to use SIPs. I was wondering why you chose Formance ones as opposed to any others?
Cheers,
Marcus
Ah, got you! At the time, we were only able to find a few SIP/panel options in NZ – up in Northland and down in Queenstown. It’s cool as there now seem to be a lot more options. We knew we wanted to clad the house in cedar so didn’t want a pre finished solution. We also wanted full design freedom and the Formance panels provided us with that – from the actual architecture through to flexibility on site if we wanted more plugs/switches in extra places. Then during our scoping stage the guys were great to deal with and we just gelled which I think is really important. Once we signed off on everything their follow through was equally impressive and efficient. Wouldn’t hesitate in recommending Formance to anyone and would use them again for future projects.
Cheers
Ben