terve, today has been a good day. there have been only positive news. first off all: we are now official owner of the ground as money has been transferred. this means: we are now owning this “monster” we’ve created some days ago. it’s quite an amazing feeling.
i’ve been off at work as i’m now having vacation and so i got the chance to meet TEKTUS staff on construction site shortly before they left into their weekend. head of staff is called bruno. let’s give him the nickname bruno “the karu” … as he looks like he will solve every problem we might get. he looks that rock solid like the rocks inside the ground do. well… and here’s the problem: near the bearing wall bruno explored heavy rocks in about 1 meter from upper ground level. they will need a special hammer for that rock which arrives on monday. anyhow: i’m having absolute confidence bruno will convince those rocks to cooperate. you might have noticed the chips on street side. that has been dropped there to create a temporary stand for the crane which will arrive on monday.

here are our next neighbours. we’ll invite them for BBQ soon. *evilgrin*

last but not least i met with our roofer to negotiate offerings. more about this later. next has been meeting with jens of BAX kitchen. jens is our kitchen hero. he takes care of everything. as mentioned BAX is a local kitchen manufacturer which unique selling proposition mainly is that they can tweak and customize their kitchens in almost every detail without any huge cost uplifts. what is an issue we needed to work out is that jochen noticed that exhaust of kitchen will hit one of the static roof structure elements. this means in worst case that we won’t be able to put our NOVY exhaust on one level with interior roof finish. we would need a socket (might look uncool, wouldn’t it?). well… we tried to measure where roof structure elements have been but unfortunately plans we had didn’t show exact dimensions for this. *bummer* anyhow: jens will work that out.

pic below shows one of their kitchen models. looks cool, doesn’t it?

more about the surprise from finland tomorrow. be patient and stay tuned.

moi, here we go with some pictures giving you an impression how plusvilla might look at beautiful sunny weather once it’s finished.
the hole showing the tube for waste water has been closed again and we have tar on the sidewalk (hmm… wondering whether the telekomikers will have to open that in a few weeks once again). on the pictures you can also see four bigger holes which have been filled with steel grid. here we will put in concrete (probably tomorrow?) for the sockets which carry the steel beams (and later the house). you can also see between the muddy ground, that the ground under the surface is quite rocky. here folks of TEKTUS had a tough day getting that proper. from what it looked in late afternoon, things have worked out fine (which we didn’t yet know in the morning).

moi, foundation craftsmen have digged a grave for the concrete wall we’ll be using to support the house standing stable on the hill. the photo has been taken of the later balcony position at the entrance on left side.

hej, during night it started raining in oceans here. we could already hear it on the roof of our current house that massive has been the rain falling - and this should have been my birthday now? well … earlier this morning steffi noticed my very first birthday preset: it has been the dixi-toilet arriving on the site. unfortunately the rain didn’t allow any work as the earth was keeping inside dredge’s bucket like glew. anyhow: i did some more pictures in the evening before we departed to a short surprise party (where even our architect jochen checked in surprisingly). pics will follow as soon as i’ve worked out the technical problem why i can’t upload them.

We’ve also already started packing our iittala table ware … 

moi, today the humus has been taken off the site (@jani: please don’t cry). the dredge has done a great job. i was quite astonished by the size of earth which has been lying beside the plusvilla position. i haven’t done so many photos as been pretty cold on the site (we have wind from east coming from the street to the site!). luckily it wasn’t windy at all when standing at the plusvilla position.

moi. finally there has been a real dredge when we arrived on the site this evening. its job was too secure that we’ll have power when more heavy digging starts on monday. you can see that some trees have also already been cut by former ground owner.

PS: oh, and please carefully note i’ve washed my car. it looks great, doesn’t it?

moi, finally site has been setup. this photo shows site during afternoon.

as you can see jochen has arranged something special: he managed to find a stealth dredge. so please don’t be confused if you can’t see it that easy on the photo.

later jochen showed up on site. together with the local foundation construction staff and an official public surveyor they arranged exact positioning of plusvilla. the slope is too heavy to do that just by hand. so we need the help of thomas, who’s our surveyor. he’s a dead cool guy. i remember him some weeks ago, when we parked his Audi A4 on the street when suddenly you could hear his parking brake making weird noise. i looked at him speaking “ehm… did you use your parking brake?” and he answered: “i don’t know!” … when suddenly his car started to move slightly backwards. he still kept standing on the grass of the ground ignoring that completely (a minute later he ran up the hill and checked his parking brake as the noise repeated really scary!).

i hope tomorrow it finally makes sense to bring some latest pictures. finally i’ve spent most of my evening copying bills for bank. oh my god … this has been really time consuming. well… but now it’s all copied and ready boxed in a letter.

well… here are finally two pics showing where the plusvilla will be placed exactly …

finally we’ve started building phase. here you can see how things have proceeded during the day…

morning

evening

:-(

LESSON #3: “never rely on schedules!”

moi! tomorrow we’ll have T minus zero and we’ll finally start building plusvilla. i’ve just checked the site once again to see whether trees have already been cut. everything looks fine!

so before we start tomorrow with more technical details, let me explain you at this point why we decided for plusvilla and what our current experience has been since today.

as we’ve always been interested in modern bauhaus design similar to many austrian homes build from wood, we immediately noticed that there have been also finnish people doing something like that. stefanie, myself as well as my parents are all very finnland-affine and except for stefanie we’ve spent almost all our regular vacations since my childhood in scandinavia. so i was really interested when i noticed the two of our important criterias had already been linked by someone: “modern design” + “finnish wood” = plusvilla!

so we got in touch with german sales representatives. that has been in november 2008.

first we focussed on stock B182 model… however we would have needed to tweak that to make it fit to our german customer requirements. at this point german sales folks just had heard the first time about plusvillas, which explains a bid the lack of information. however: they’ve been always very helpful and managed to get answers to our questions.

one of our issues from the beginning has been the storage space which needed improvement. as we are german, german’s tend to have certain stuff organized. so germans love storage rooms (especially when they are well ordered). please imagine germans’ interior organisation completely different to what you might know from finnish gas stations offering fishing tools: where the german might interpretate the average finnish gas station fishing equipment area as pure chaos, in german everything is perfectly ordered at it’s place at anytime! well… within plusvilla and german layout sketches we noticed, this has been not enough for our requirements. we needed more storage space.

very quickly then we wrote jani lahti and email and introduced ourselves. i have to say i never expected an answer… so i was very surprised that jani wrote back within 24h responding to our mail. as i’m working in service i would call this an excellent SLA and great customer service.

piece by piece now we first tried to create our own layout by ourselves which ended up in great architecture mansions *lol*. well… i’ve been always great in drawing in school and i’m also more maths-affine… but designing it really smart, while affordable has been the real challenge. at this point we learned why our world needs architects for such “problems”!

LESSON #1: “don’t think it’s easy because it looks so simple! mostly the easy things are the hardest to invent!”

from this point jani supported us as a kind of “solution architect”, which has been very helpful. i always had the feeling that he was working on our ideas with the right amount of sex in his heart.

german sales representative finally arranged a company visit in finland as we bombed sales people with several questions they couldn’t answer in that deep detail.

so by the end of january we flew by ryanair to tampere and got picked up from mika and mikko. mika is the export manager of honkatalot. mikko, featuring very blue eyes almost like a husky, is the son of honkatalot founder and currently one of the owners. we spend almost one day watching all the houses honkatalot had built. we also came to the house you can see on most catalogue pictures. this is actually jani’s own house, we learned on that day. it was really amazing to see that house we already felt in love in reality on that day - especially stefanie was really excited. i was amazed (but also a bid disappointed in one point because of one only reason: the house looked smaller in reality as on pictures) to see that in reality.

mikko and mika drove us around tampere area showing us all the cool houses. there was even one where they didn’t know it’s location anymore. so we ended up somewhere in the forest which was very funny. mikko was talking to the company asking in finnish “where in hell did we built that house once?”.
finally we managed to see the house a belgium customer was currently raising. so we had a chance to inspect a plusvilla during construction phase - great !!!

what impressed us most has been the immediate trust mika and mikko made on us. we all had the feeling: those guys definitely now what they are talking about. those are not these regular b/s sales folks you usually meet (we all know the guys with ugly ties and bad hair cuts, don’t we?). funny offi-topic story: mikko accidentially always f***** up the engine several times while shifting and explained us, that he usually drives snowmobiles (we learned he is a pro driver and finnish champion).

LESSON #2: “finnish champions in snowmobiles drive cars excellent and very careful and sensitive! you can always drive with them!”

we also dismissed our earlier approach to built a low energy house to recuce overall TCO during house lifetime. low energy houses are very popular in germany because of high energy costs. however: most people forget that all this technical stuff costs money (a lot of money!) and increases overall “solution” complexity. it was also against our philosophy, as we like to keep things really easy… mikko and i chatted long on that day about all the pros and cons and finally he convinced me of traditional wood houses being better than state-of-the-art “whatever-has-been-used-to-produce-this-wall” houses regarding climate. as steffi and i are both mac’s (yes, we use apple!), we loved all the simple, but genious ideas. rule: don’t make it too complicate. make things easy, but cool!

after asking very detailed questions about construction of plusvilla, our day ended in a former honkatalot built house near ritola. on that day it was pretty cold i think minus 15 degrees. mika and mikko had taken care of us filling up the fridge with typical authentic finnish wood and collected many points, when my father and i noticed the big sausage. why is that so nice? well… because we - as germans - love that finnish sausage heated over fire!

next morning mika picked us up and we went to honkatalot company. harri, which is mikko’s brother, offered to give us a free company tour on that sunday. we learned many things here about how to build and produce a house. this starts with the tree being cut and ends when the final pieces get onto the trucks.

the entry in this blog would now be too long if i would explain everything today… but i can only HIGHLY RECOMMEND every possible customer to come to finland, spending the time to see the honkatalot company. once you’ve been there you see with what precision and expertise harri “the screw” vainionpaa is running the production there. he also showed off the cool german hundegger machine which actually had a demo preset in there making a beer glas out of wood. coool!

finally we went over to harri’s private house, which was actually almost a palace. harri has also spent much time on low energy topics and so we both had deep discussions about warmth-pumps etc. …

by the end of the day mika brought us back to tampere, where we stayed over night in the best hotel in town. we’ve been very surprised that mika booked rooms for us there.

in the end i have to say: i learned more useful things about wooden houses than ever during that weekend. i also have to say: we’ve been highly convinced from expertise and trust of honkatalot after that weekend w/o that any of the finnish folks every at any point pushed us. so to make one thing pretty clear: at no point this weekend ever had the flavour to be “the big sales show”. absolutely not. it was more a “just join us here for two days and we’ll show you all the details you are interested in at real objects and by afternoon we’ll drink a coffee”.

at this point we decided it should be a plusvilla, but we only need to find a “for us working layout”. so we came back to jani.

we asked him whether he would be willing to help us here. jani has been very supportive and after several weeks (and one more child *insider*) we finally got a genious layout from him. we dismissed the basement idea the german sales people suggested first, as this had been out of budget. parallel we always wanted to built a wooden house (and not 60% of house being made of concrete). this was really a challenge, especially because the site we had in our mind was having this hill situation.

finally by the end of april we got it all perfect.

now we needed to negotiate with honkatalot about last details. mika, who spends most of his time in central europe, visited us one evening here in our hometown detmold (i have to say my mini cooper S had been a bid afraid of his big audi Q7 SUV). i’ll also had my local architect here so that we could work out last details.

the collaboration between jani and my local architect jochen has been excellent. together they worked out a smart foundation idea, saving us money while keeping the actual plusvilla design flavour.

today we are convinced we’ve done it right. why? because we now have our dream house including all the small little, but important details jani took consequent care of. to be honest: we’ve also talked to certain local architects and those always had a very… hmm… ehhm… innovative kind of “improving” the plusvillas. to be honest there have been people i would claim to have missed the point completely.

so we are looking forward to what happens now. we are happy to work only with people who “think plusvilla!” and who have understood plusvilla concept.

here are a few our pictures of our trip to honkatalot factory:

departing from bremen …

arriving in tampere …

our private taxi with mikko and mika arrived …

jani’s summer house …

spotting inside …

“tststs … paper doesn’t belong into a chimney, jani!” …

mikko explaining the terrasse panels

a fashioned architect of honkatalot explaining us latest CAD technology …

my mum on the construction side of a plusvilla …

i made this picture for the german bauaufsicht. there are still some differences between EU laws …

here you can see what later becomes the living room (note the honkatalot craftman)…

well… it’s not made for my size …

the fridge …

the beloved finnish sausages …

our dinner on that evening …

arriving in ritola …

it’s sunday and the factory is empty …

harri showing off his custom tools …

explaining how things work (note the biggest toilet paper i’ve ever seen!)…

great demo …

honkatalot parts are done without any formaldehyd …

NOTE: hedgehogs with hangers are forbidden to drive within his machine area …

just a great picture …

our final dinner (note the sword! greeks would be jealous) …

moi. today we released honkatalot construction planning. i think the most happy man in life is now timo niemi, as my architect and i have probably been a pain in the last days behaving quite german. but we needed to ensure, that finish plusvilla foundations fits to german static requirements.

so we had to do some minor tweaking of normal foundation construction as we are here having the very first plusvilla in germany but also a heavy hill situation and a very heavy chimney. of course the most easy solution would have been another steel beam… but this blows up the budget. anyhow: why should we do it easy? don’t we all want to be hard? yes, we want! so this needed some careful inspections as otherwise chimney will do the “obstgarten” (which is not the objective). for all finnish readers who are now wondering what i am talking about and who is obstgarten… here’s some more information:

the obstgarten’s value proposition (and why all foundation designers should take care of it)!

honkatalot timo probably spend all the last week fine-tuning the plusvilla and its big chimney proper to the foundation. we also got jani involved. finally we worked out very smoothly a suitable workaround.

now we are very excited to see how foundation is being rised. tomorrow we will sign kitchen contract. we also got informed by our chimney guy mr. kaiser, that he managed to find a cool black powder coated chimney exhaust. this will surely look great, won’t it?

finally we need to spend some time on developing light design. steffi already sent out a mail to secto design but for some reason we are not cool enough to receive an answer. anyhow. we’re working on it - especially myself together with my father (who once learned as an electrician).