moi, finally steel arrived just in time. TEKTUS staff placed it carefully on the sockets. as you can see: it’s plussteel as someone has painted it black. this steel delivery took quite a while for unknown reasons. but in the end they made it exactly by the end of the time window. as good the weather has been the last two weeks, as bad it does look at the moment. cold and rainy. it should become better by monday. please also note the holes we’ve now in our load bearing wall. those are for all the supply tubes we’ll need (e. g. canalisation etc. …).

HONKATALOT construction staff are on their way arriving in a few hours. tomorrow we’ll expect plusvilla arriving early in the morning. here is a pic of what they will have for dinner this evening…

we also took some time to evaluate what kind of stones would be suitable to sit below plusvilla. here we are looking for a good value buy as simple stones can become sooo expensive. so what’s your opinion about those ones here?

terve. i’m a bid late with my daily entry. well, unfortunately steel didn’t arrive as originally scheduled for tuesday. until then bruno and his team filled the concrete walls with liquid concrete. the whole day was very cold, windy mixed with spray rain… so actually quite ugly weather to work. so i spent the time to enhance bathroom plannings. so this was yesterday. early this morning i also got a call of freight company: tomorrow plusvilla will arrive!

terve, as beautiful our sunday has been, as foggy the weather was for most of today.

pics from sunday morning:

the load bearing wall elements arrived early in the morning. a mobile crane (*ouch*… expensive!) was assisting the staff placing the elements proper. those are prefabricated concrete walls, which are kept by little steel staves. you just place those elements and fill them with concrete… and that’s it actually. sounds like LEGO. the interior of the socket will be filled with ground nearly to the top. as you can see andreas inside (the gu with the orange marine rescue cloth!) it’s still quite deep at the moment. the pic with the three guys show (from left to right): jochen (local architect), enrico (structural designer) and bruno “rock killer”.

pics from today:

terve, today we spent by doing some paper work. i needed to sort bills. we also plan to have a decision about what type of ceramic elements will make the race in our bathroom. i had also been at jochen’s office earlier this day as we needed to finalize concrete socket planning and water pipe system because that will be done by TEKTUS staff next on monday. we are also still a bid concerned where to put the two trucks of wood near the site, which arrive soon. but let’s see what we can do there. also chimney planning now comes to an end. in case you haven’t yet heard… our chimney is done by the guys who do the real fire.

Folks who do the real fire!

terve, today the poles had been finalized. when i arrived at the site our local structural designer has been on-site taking care that everything is done in the right dimensions. the sockets are quite impressive. we will put some earth near the highest pole later, so that the overall height impression become reduced. this has been jani’s idea. we agreed with him that a too high pole doesn’t look that cool. jochen wanted to make the poles even more slim, however the structural designer said that this is the minimum (keep in mind we’ll use 30 cm concrete which is not that much if you stand in front of them). on monday prefabricated elements for main concrete socket will arrive. also the first steel beams will arrive then.

please note the modern crane staff is using - it has a bluetooth remote control! the sign on dredge probably warns users that dredges will fit through doors only if man with big shoulders carry them. finally that flower must have a good parfum (at least for the wasps) or today they must have a special discount sale there.

terve, when i made myself breakfast i noticed the emporial new element on the next mountain: it was the crane TEKTUS staff placed on site earlier this morning.

here is how it looks from the other side …

and finally you can see the frames of the poles. in the background andreas is measuring the proper height, while bruno (outside of image) is fine tuning height by a special measurement tool.

tomorrow concrete will be put in.

hi folks, today has been an overcasted day with some spray rain. however, when i arrived at the site at around 10 o’clock there have been several TEKTUS staff people preparing the frames for the concrete…

… so i didn’t want to disturb and instead preferred having my breakfast.

later i’ve got the chance to make some pictures of the steel frame which will later be the load bearing wall at the upper end of the plusvilla.

during evening those already looked like this (featuring bruno “the rock killer” in the background)…

as you can see by yourself, the wall has been measured perfectly proper like it would have been done with a ruler.

here are the pole sockets …

you might noticed, that our load bearing wall does look a bid like big stairs similar to helsinki’s lutheran cathedral stairs. the reason behind that is, that this has been done with special pre-fabricated frames i have obviously never seen… ehm… jochen? what have they done there? well … the trick was to have this done by four smaller elements jointly hooked up becoming one load bearing wall. please also note TEKTUS staff andreas here on this picture. he is setting up the domino game for the end of the day. *kidding*

here we have a close-up picture of one of the pole sockets. those will be completely finished on friday from what i’ve been told.

here we’ll have the main house socket where TEKTUS staff edi yesterday commented: “at least your house will never move!”…. and kids… no, it’s NOT a overdimensioned marble run what you see here!!

the last picture has been taken shortly after 6 pm. two big concrete mixing trucks came towards me when i almost arrived on site. they drove back to bring another load of concrete to finish the bearing wall. bruno mentioned they will work until they are finished as they have to work until this step is finished now.

parallel i spent the day selecting tiling for bathroom. i have to say that the bathroom is the most difficult room regarding planning. and it’s not because of placing elements… no… it’s more because of the absolute industry overload portfolio which customers can selected from. i’ll go crazy if i don’t go crazy tonight! to give you an impression: we plan to have things pretty stripped down so that we also don’t break with overall plusvilla concept. so we reduce colours to a minimum fitting to overall plusvilla finish to dark grey and medium grey. when are also looking for large sized tiling (which i noticed being quite expensive). well… so on wall will be in dark grey… the rest will be done in a light grey colour so that the room doesn’t become looking too small. the dark colour would allow setting focus to toilet and shower and other elements. the shower will be on same level like the actual floor. we also plan to leave all the b/s away: so no doors for the shower.

LESSON #342: “If you feel you need doors for the shower, you bathroom is too small!”

;-)

moi, bruno and his folks had been a bid in hurry today: the main reason for that is that they plan to do some concrete work tomorrow afternoon. actually the plan is to do all the concrete work if i understood one of the staff members right. so it was necessary to dig the last graves for the concrete walls. when i arrived at the site during early afternoon, they were pretty hard fighting with one of the rocks inside the ground.

we also bought our SECTO DESIGN octo lamps today. in case you haven’t heard about SECTO DESIGN i strongly recommend you take a look to their website:

SECTO DESIGN website and dead cool lamps from Finland

lamps have been design by seppo koho. more about these lamps later.

moi, unfortunately it looks like the rocks onsite will increase our foundations costs dramatically *bummer*. local foundation staff (remember bruno “the bear”?) will now place prefabricated elements as the bearing wall, which will later be filled with concrete. this might happen hopefully before friday. those prefabricated elements had to be ordered today. bruno and his staff will focus now on pole sockets near terrasse, as those need to be finished as here we’ll have the highest load.

finally jochen and i gave the site a visit in late afternoon. please note: we have eliminated the picture, where he needed to reanimate me (after mentioning our cost increase). :-/

you can see the white rocks on the last picture (which also shows jochen) in the grave’s background.

i did also some phone calls earlier this day regarding interior doors. HONKATALOT staff has been very helpful here. together with sandra we’ve discussed how airscoop, bedroom and sauna door should look like. we decided to have the door to bedroom similar to all other doors like jani has them in the very first plusvilla. even thought this is a sliding door, we hope this works w/o any problems.

also the final plan for kitchen arrived… i need to study that now.

moi, i spent this saturday to finalize bathroom plannings for our plusvilla. but before i left i gave our site a brief visit, as we had really beautiful weather today.

what makes bathroom plannings a bid tricky is that we seem to have certain “special demandings”: we don’t want all the bells & whistles - we simply want a slim bath w/o “overengineered design features”. floor will become dark grey (fitting to plusvilla design), walls will features a grey tone. we have already decided for our bath tube. curious how that looks? well… yesterday i’ve ordered that one here:

shower challenge is, that we’ll make it without any gaps. we want to have it like a walk-in shower. let’s see what staff will work out there now. did i mention what really stresses everyones nerves? well, it’s those kind of stores which have those ads online with their opening times from x to y… and once you are there between x and y they have unmotivated staff there searching for the key to close the door as customers are coming. even better are those stores which have closed during their opening hours. this is something i really hate.

so we took a break … believe it or not, but in an ice cream palour which has also been built by HONKATALOT a few months ago. we visited this house during the construction phase (responsible POLARLIFEHAUS sales guy has been dieter becker).

last but not least we made a quick decision about this stupid water tank for rain water. we decided to have that below the surface those elements usually are not looking like apple’s products. however: sales people always tried to sell me the ultimate pools with which i could fill communities public bath. so we went there now, pointing to the right model we thought it would be suitable and forced the sales man nicely to give his last price… please now! as the shop recently opened they had 20,09% off the normal price. thanks to customer loyality cards we got 5% on top and so this was a good deal.

to all the foreign people reading this now…

LESSON #4: “Your win is in sourcing it right!”
LESSON #5: “The list price is never ever the real price!” … at least not in Germany

here’s now the surprise: as i’m 33 years old since a few days, jani and his staff send me a really nice birthday surprise.

it reminded me immediately to this blur brit rock video “coffee & tv”:

Blur - Coffee & TV … featuring the walking milk

thanx very much to everyone at plusarchitects for this nice present.