Hi Everyone,
I was introduced to this project through a Hackaday article. I live in the Olympic Peninsula Region of Washington State in the United States. I currently work at a small public school as a teacher. In my previous career, I worked in human factors and ergonomics and had/have a small consulting and prototyping business. Though it is paused now. I have a small shop about (175 m2) and a small amount of CNC and 3D printing tools. I grew up doing construction, electrical, and landscaping.
My family and I are in the very starting stages of planning for building our own house. I will be doing much of the work myself including the foundation, septic, wiring, and actual construction. I do have work experience with this and own most of the conventional equipment needed to do this, including heavy equipment. The only thing I am short on is a ‘fast’ CNC machine that can handle 4x8 stock.
I’m really interested in this project. I am sifting through documentation and I am thinking I want to make a 1:6 model on my laser cutter just to get a sense of this project. My general sense and hope would be to build a house that is about 16 m long, two stories, then have two one story sections on the bottom floor making a “U” shape for the first floor. This would allow one fence to make a small courtyard that would provide some protections from resident megafauna. It seems on the face this would also help strengthen the second floor. My back-of-napkin math says this would be roughly 200 - 230 m2. I am thinking 3 or 4 bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms.
A couple of things I am curious about:
Is it in the roadmap to have a set of blocks designed around material sizes in the US? A couple of examples to follow. OSB 3/4 tends to be about 18 to 18.5 in size which is somewhat within tolerances you have built in but on the large size of those. The wall heights for wall blocks do not map onto sizes of drywall (plasterboard). Common wall heights are 8 ft and 9 ft which map to 2.4384 m and 2.7432 m. This is not the end of the world, but having wall heights which match the common sizes will keep time and cost down.
I am thinking though gutters and eaves. Is there a plan to have eaves and interior walls? 18" (457.2 mm) to 24" (609.6 mm) is a common length in our region. Gutters generally hang inset by about 1.5" (35.7 mm) from the roof.
Are there plans for interior wall blocks, both structural and nonstructural? My mental model for a nonstructural interior wall would be thinner and have the inset on both sides. Rather than being 250 mm thick, they could probably be between 100 and 150 mm. Also, is there any thoughts on junctions where an exterior wall section has a mounting point for an interior wall?
I apologize for all the questions and long introduction post!
