Scraping Sky

It's been two weeks again, and it seems like all I've been writing about is this Regina Street project.

(I swear we have more on the go than this one. Although, we are pretty excited to get this one going)

I've create another panaromic image of the site, I may even include a google street view of what the site looked like before the demo started. Until then, you can have a gander at this one. Try to point out all the differences you see. My favourite is the yellow tower, that's when I know things are underway.

We're still set for an end of September, and there will be more pictures to share before then. You can follow the progress at our flickr page, as well as on twitter. The contact info for the twitter account is in the margin next to this post.

The project is a 18,000 sq ft, 17 storey student residence and will be ready for September 2012 occupency. There are nearly 500 rooms in apartment style living. There will be shared living area, but each bed with have its own bath.

We have had a few lengthy meetings about some adjustments to the window details. We have to design a way to have concrete flow to the outside of wall so as to break the connection between ICF, meeting a new fire regulation. We have a solution, because as we've said before, anything can be done with our ICF. When we have the design finialized I'll share it with you, until then I'll leave you in suspense.

Enjoy this image and I'll talk to you again soon.

Cheers,

Brad

(again, the image isn't the greatest here but a simple click will get you to a better version. If anyone has some tips to make my flickr account get along better with my blogger account please, by all means, share them)

Sky's The Limit, week 2

It's two (and a bit) weeks later and I have another photo to share. The job site in Waterloo is slowly taking shape; changing from a hole in the ground to an organized footing site.

I compliled another stitched panoramic shot, this time Darrel posed for it while he surveyed the changed site.

We're set now to start at the end of September, but there will be more pictures to share before then. You can follow the progress at our flickr page as well.

The project is a 18,000 sq ft, 17 storey student residence and will be ready for September 2012 occupency. There are nearly 500 rooms in apartment style living. There will be shared living area, but each bed with have its own bath.

Again, we are very excited to get started on this project and I look forward to sharing the experience with you.

All the best, and happy thursday!

 

(Clicking on the image will get a better version for you to see)

Wasteless Wednesday

In the spirit of my discovering the hashtag #WastelessWed, not to mention the twitter handle @WastlessWed, I wanted to share something that we've done in the past with some of our left over material.

The block we work with needs to be shaped to fit the projects we work with. Since a wall is never easily divisible by 4 feet, nor is the height divisible by 16 3/4", we have to cut away the parts that don't need to be in the wall. It can result in quite a bit of waste, waste that we don't like because for 1), we've already paid for it and 2) it ends up in a landfill, not contributing productively to society ... unlike the energy efficient buildings we so proudly erect.

So, we started bagging it up. And bagging and bagging and bagging. It took up a lot of space, but we wanted to do something with it ... we just hadn't figured it out.

Then we did.

While touring around at a homeshow in Toronto a couple of years ago we found a company who made beanbag chairs. As it turns out it wasn't going to work to supply them with pellets to stuff their chairs, but we could start making our own. A lot of time and a few trials later we had a couple of prototypes to play with.

We rented a bail grinder and started separating the leftover block from the plastic webs (which are completely recycable when not part of the block). The beads that came out the machine the first time around weren't quite small enough, and thus took a couple of trys. Once we were happy, we created a funnel to get the beads into our bag shell and voila: Recylced BeanBag Chair.

They aren't designer by any means, but they are homemade with tons of love. Now we have a few chairs to give away at homeshows that we attend, or to families who's houses we build.

The chairs are colourful, comfy and a friend re-use of otherwise useless material.