I know I’ve said before that meetings are a complete waste of time – at least most of them are. Job site meetings … the ones that actually happen as you are walking around the site (instead of sitting in a trailer which happens to “be” on the job site (ergo “job site meetings”) … are not a waste of time. In fact, I think they are always worth way more than the time I spend in the office.
Maybe that’s why I like job site meetings as much as I do. Job site meetings are like being part of a non-secret secret club!
At the KHouse Modern, every Tuesday morning we meet at the job site – and by “we”, I mean the contractor, the site superintendent, me, and the owner. These are the base members of the meeting club. On occasion, we might bring in a guest speaker (re: “sub-contractor”) to give us an update, fill us in one the current and future activities, respond to any questions they might have, schedule future club meetings, and on occasion, we have to talk about fundraising.
We try to limit the amount of time we spend talking about “fundraising”. Nobody really likes fundraising talk (particularly the owner) but it does happen and I can tell you that it’s an easier topic to talk about when you are looking at the reasons why.
So all the pictures in today’s post are from last Tuesday’s club site meeting. We cover a lot of ground in these meetings but they are also the time that I take all my record photographs.
This is the front entryway – the front detached garage is to your left and the Master Bathroom is to your right. The spot in the middle will end up having a piece of art installed by a local artist (Brad Oldham) but I will wait a little longer before we start talking about all that.
Moving around the house – the high windows are in the Master Bathroom shower and closet, and at the Master Bedroom sitting area, the wall peels open with floor to ceiling glass.
I thought it would be interesting to see how the visualized renderings of the house looked in comparison to how the actual house is coming together. If you want a refresher on all the rendered images, you can check out this post from February 2014 (rendered images here)
I am very happy to say that things are still looking pretty similar. To help you visualize what is happening here, I took a little extra time and added in some shades to let you know what will be glass (hopefully, those areas are pretty obvious …). This is looking back towards the window wall – Master Bedroom is on the left-hand side, and then the living, dining and kitchen working left to right.
One of the features that we think is going to be terrific is the screened in porch. It will be completely visible (into and through) and there is enough room in here for a dining room table/chairs and a separate seating area. I have no doubt that many nights will be enjoyed sitting out here.
Don’t worry … I didn’t forget about the oculus! But you’ve already seen this view (the sun spot might be new …) but I actually spent a lot of time up on the roof so there are some views from above.
This is at the far end of the house and I am staring in the detached guest quarters looking back towards the main house.
This is the view from the guest quarters into the rear yard – despite all the evidence of construction, I can imagine how nice this view will be … and so can the owner. I think he said that he was thinking about moving his home office into this space.
The site falls away towards the back and as a result, there is a second “detached” garage off the rear alley. The quest quarters sits on top of this space (this is where the plywood is in the picture above.)
This is how I got up on to the roof during my visit. I know that they would have put together a more safety-first sort of access up to the roof if I had required it but my wanton disregard for personal safety told me that this was fine, just do it.
So I did … without incident.
We haven’t spent a lot of time talking about it but this house is on track to become LEED silver, possibly gold, and we aren’t doing a whole like of extra special things to make it happen. However, one of the things we are doing is keeping an eye on waste and recycling things as is appropriate and required. You can see that we have two separate dumpsters on site (there is about to be a third when we start installing gypsum sheathing) but the wood scrapes dumpster doesn’t fill up very quickly.
So in the picture above, my objective was to document a “plan” view (looking down) at the concrete formwork that was getting cleaned up. I typically go the to job site with a wide-angle lens equipped on my camera … can I tell you how disconcerting it is to look over the edge of a 25′ drop through a wide angle lens? I was convinced that I was going to fall off. The worst part wasn’t that I would be seriously injured (I would have been) it was that those construction workers would be there to see “the architect” fall off the building.
Ridiculous.
Like I would let them see something like that …
A look at the oculus from above …
We have a low-slope roof (1/4″ in 12″) and despite the relatively low height of the curb surrounding the oculus opening, we will still have 4″ of curb exposed once the roof is installed.
Again with the falling …
Someone asked me to show a picture of the framing for this oculus … can’t remember who that was but here you go. Pretty straightforward stuff – not at all complicated.
There is a large clerestory that is on two sides of the main living area … this is what it looks like from the roof. If you are curious, the red chalk lines indicated the “breaks” in the roof (where the slope changes angles).
We have 4′-0″ overhangs everywhere on this house and with cantilevers that size, our roof structure is pretty stout. Rather than have a single 14″ tall fascia board, we have this double 2×6 trim board that goes around the perimeter to help visually break that surface down into a smaller scale.
In the picture above, I am looking through the upper level clerestory at the interior side of the large glass wall that looks out into the rear yard. It’s a lot of glass (now you know why we have the 4′-0″ overhangs …)
I will probably focus on the chimney mass in its own post but since I was on the roof inspecting things, this qualified.
All that was left now was to go back down the way I came up …
It always looks a lot worse climbing down than when you decide to climb up. And guess who is aware that they are wearing inappropriate shoes on the job site? That’s right … I am. Feel free to ignore this in your comments.
Safety first,
