With AI and ChatGPT being all the rage, we thought maybe we could quickly write some articles for our website. Just feed some keyword to the robot and bingo: a nice text.
So we fed the following into the robot: “the advantages of a damp-open wall construction”.
And yes, in three second we got the following paragraph:
Damp-open wall construction has some serious advantages. For one, it’s a great way to keep your walls looking fresh and fabulous.
Sometimes clients come to us with requests that are so non-standard (that is: non-standard for US) that we must say no. You want a house with a PVC outer facade? NO. You want just the materials and assemble yourself? NO. You want round logs? NO. We better focus on our core business, focus on what we know well and what we are good at.
But then, every now and then, there are projects that attract our interest, even though they are not the focus of our business.
The house that we are assembling in Overijssel gets a slightly non-standard facade: “potdeksel”. That is: non-standard for us, not for the locals here in Overijssel. Potdeksel is something you see here everywhere.
It is a very simple system for finishing a facade and we must say, it works very well. Also we do not use larch, instead on request of our client we use Douglas pine.
In Overijssel the works continue, so we place a a few more photos of the progress.
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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.
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 2016 we built a house in The Netherlands, but were too busy to put photographs on our website. Better late than never, so here are some photos of this house. Architects design (Edward van der Drift), 190 m2 footprint.
This is when we had just handed over the house. The weather was terrible that summer but with some snow everything looks better.
We placed bitumen on the roof, our client later added sedum for the green roof.
