Project Eco Home in Finland

Our veggie garden

2014-04-12T11:07:00.001-07:00

When I was teenager me and my brother were helping our grandparents in the garden in the country side in East of Romania. It was to a certain extent nice, but at the same time I did see it as "work" which I would rather not have done. We would plant potatoes, carrots, garlic, onions, beans, tomatoes, corn, pumpkins, etc. for which we had to dig the ground manually. And of course most of work was going into taking care of the grape plants which my grandparents had plenty of (5000 m2).

Mashed grapes (mix of red and white)

That was then. Nowadays since I am a glorified office rat, I miss being outside and doing something useful with my hands and the house project is (nearly) finished. So last year, in early spring, we decided to start our own vegetable and fruit garden. We thought we would like grow the veggies in raised beds of wooden boxes since we have so much wood left from the construction project. But then one day a friendly neighbour asked if we needed some wooden trunks since he had too many. My brilliant other half came up with the idea that we could makes boxes out of the trunks instead of wooden planks.
The soil on our land is quite mixed with clay so no very usable to grow stuff.
We ordered some soil and wooden chips and got to work...

we made 7 plots

we planted sugar pea together with leek


plenty of cucumbers, some were bitter

"Tiny Tim" variety had plenty of tomatoes. We have planted between tomatoes also garlic and onions, just to be on the safe side. Tomatoes were free from bugs, maybe garlic helps.


Tiny Tim and spaghetti pumpkin

In early September due to cold weather we had to rescue some tomatoes and ripen them inside the house

Very tasty green beans

12kg pumpkin which became soups and pies

leek

I really enjoyed our first year of "farming". I found it therapeutic to come home after work and to look after the plants and of course I appreciated them even more when we eat them :-).

House painting project 2012

2013-10-18T10:46:00.001-07:00

During summer of 2012, we had to paint the house to its final color (Valtti Color Piki 5089). The paint is not the eaiest to use as it's quite liquid but it does look nice once dried, as it lets the wood patterns be visible.

Herebelow the outcome:

we rented a lift for paitning the higher parts

Before

After

Before

Partly done

After

Winter wonderland

First snow in 2012

Storage & car shelter also in the picture

View from the hill

View from summer 2013 with our vegetable garden set up!

Everything ok, but what did it cost?

2013-03-23T08:03:00.002-07:00

One of the difficulties when planning to build a house is knowing what is it going to cost. Can you afford it?

I remember when I was looking for information about costs, it was not easy. There is quite a bit of information in Finnish but almost none in English. That is actually one of the main reasons I wanted to start this blog, to give more information in English about what it takes to build your bad/good dream home in Finland.

But you know what, building a house is good for learning Finnish too, because many of the building contractors don't speak English :).

Even with packages "ready to move in" the price is not telling the whole story.
These package prices do not include:
- concrete foundations or pillars if needed,
- potential design of foundations
- land work preparations (gravel, stone, road),
- sewage and electricity connections
- rental cost of hiring a lift truck to lift the tiles/ house elements into place.
- fees of the foreman, HVAC foreman
- garden lights
- removal of construction waste
I would say that these extra costs can range between 50 000 - 80 000.

In the link below I prepared a breakdown of the actual costs for our house and land, hope you find it useful and looking forward to your comments!
http://project-eco-house-finland.blogspot.fi/p/breakdown-of-costs.html

pictures of our kitchen and living room

2012-11-11T11:12:00.001-08:00

One of the wishes for the house was to have big enough open space (living+kitchen) as that is the place where family usually spends most of the time. The whole space is about 50m2.

Here are some pictures.

ok, not the straightest of panoramas

We have bought the kitchen cupboards and sink from Ikea as for us it was the best & by far the cheapest option for massive wooden doors (black).We did spend quite a lot of time putting the cupboards together.
The kitchen appliances we bought from Gigantti at a house fair (http://project-eco-house-finland.blogspot.fi/search/label/appliances).
The sink tap is Hansgrohe Talis S² Variarcand bought it from Germany over the internet (www.armaturendiscounter.de) together with other taps. It is possible to take it off and open the bigger window if needed and also it has pull-out spray.

The white quartz kitchen tops we bought from a company from Estonia (http://www.liidukivi.ee/) that were the cheapest and also came to take the measurements on the spot. Delivery and installation was fast. They speak both English and Finnish in Liidukivi company.

Window wall has ply-wood board of pinetree ordered from Puukeskus. It was difficult to find suitable one since it cannot be very thin nor too thik and have no holes. This wall will have black-painted linear illustration inspired by the photo under (Hugo Boss shop in Shanghai) once we have time and energy to make our own design and finish.

The kitchen hood is model IH-55 from Savo and it is suitable for external blower on the roof (http://www.savo.fi/index.php?page=194&lang=2&usertype=2). It is sort of Finnish thing of having the hoover on the roof and Savo is only one of the few companies that have such suitable model of hood. It is not the cheapest but we enjoy that there is very little noise in the room when the fan is on.

Total costs for kitchen were:
2300 the quartz stone tops
5300 Ikea cupboards & drawers (about 25 of them) including pull-out and corner cupboards, oven, 78 cm kitchen electric plate and double sink (there was at the moment we bought the kitchen a 10% discount offer)
2800 appliances (fridge, freezer, dishwasher, kitchen hood and sink tap)

The white quartz price of 2300 is the price for:

- 4 stone pieces including installation: 30mm worktops thickness 847x619mm,1518x619mm, 2055x1014mm and 1083x618 mm

- 1 cutout for cooking top, 6 corner radiuses R10 + 2 corner cutings

- Visible edges straight polishing

- measuring, transport and installation
Average price about 530 euro/ m2 of white quartz.

updates: bankruptcy and more

2012-11-01T14:03:00.000-07:00

Many things happened since our last post, we learned that the house building company Lapponia House is in bankruptcy proceedings (see: http://www.kauppalehti.fi/omayritys/lapponia+house+kamppailee+maksuvaikeuksissa/201207221423). Luckily this did not have impact on our house building, but it's sad to see this happening. I think they had good ideas but badly packaged and marketed.

Also Nord Energy, the company that did the LVI work for us (HVAC) is not longer active in business.

In the meantime our storage/ car shelter was built, we painted the second time the house this summer, etc.
We'll do a more thorough update after the break...

Bad design

2012-04-23T10:23:00.002-07:00

It's all nice and well to have the rain water being collected from the roof and being taken further from the house to keep foundation dry as below:

The only issue I stumble upon was that I bought relatively expensive Uponor Down Pipe Gutter Plus (Rännikaivo Plus), which should fit on top of the standard water collector of 110mm. The problem, which I noticed only when it started raining, is that the water instead of going smothly into the pipe it starts leaking next to it. This is because of the stupid design of this Uponor piece (for which I am sure there is an explanation :)).

I went to K-rauta and told about my problem and then seller said many people complained about the issue but nothing happens (at Uponor, he meant). The interesting solution was to put a middle piece in between of the type as below:

Other people seem to have noticed this issue as well. See http://keskustelu.suomi24.fi/node/1263964 (in Finnish).

With this piece in between there is almost no leak.

Maybe is time for Uponor to design their gutter pipes to fit perfectly on the 110mm pipes without the need to buy another piece in between.

We moved in 4 weeks ago

2012-01-15T13:07:00.000-08:00

Yes, on 18 of December 2011 we moved in together with lots of boxes.

We're in and all things are working well at the moment.

The snow has come in the new year and it looks really pretty out here. Kids love it too.

Just today we tried the fireplace and being first time, as it's recommended, we only burned couple of killos of wood. And the fireplace is working well, chimney has good draft, etc.

We had quite a few problems with the house since we moved, later more on that...

UPDATE (October 2012)

Among the problems we had when we moved in was that geo-thermal heating pump had wrong settings with the heat curve set too high, meaning it was heating needlessly much so that in the first week it was really warm in the house. In the end it was fixed and issue was that we should use in the the NIBE pump just curve 5 instead of 9. 9 is is the default setting in the pump but our house is very well insulated and does not need too hot water in the floor heating. The heat curve sets how warm the water in the floor heating should be for a given outside temperature.

Also the were some leakeage from the dish washer water connection which was fixed and luckily the floor did not get damaged.

The third most anoying thing was that after a week or so we noticed that we could not anymore fluch the toilet. That was in the evening of 23 December 2011, really nice ! Likely issue was solved in the same evening with our electrician having to come and connect the the sewage pump to electricity. Small detail but rather important as the sewage water needs to be pumped to the main sewage line, so that sewage tank does not get full, yaaachh!

We're moving in about a week....

2011-12-09T13:18:00.001-08:00

Yes, we're planning to move next Sunday!!!

And it feels unreal as there is still quite a bit to be done before that:
- carpenters will install all 10 inner doors, sauna benches and all lists for windows, doors, floors and roofs
- sauna stove is not yet installed (can be also done after that but before Christmas please)
- electricians have to finalize quite a bit of stuff: garden lights, electricity for 2nd floor, put room thermostats
- install TV antenna (and satellitte dish)
- get Internet connection working
- plummer has to install one missing toilet and kitchen sink connections
- we have to finalize the assembly of our kitchen, finish painting 2 remaining walls and finish the brick wall in the sauna. Also assemble lights, and couple of new clothing cupboards :).

And above all, pack our stuff from old place to be ready for the move!

A deadline serves its purpose even in house moving and ours is to move before Christmas and latest before year end as by 1st of January we should be out of our old place.

More updates...

2011-11-30T11:52:00.001-08:00

I left it in previous post at the status as at the end of August. Pictures tell the story a bit although we have not been taking many pictures especially that my phone got some water under the lens and started taking rather blurry pictures :(.

A lot of work was done to tile the bathrooms' walls (upstairs/ downstairs), sauna, etc. We had the tiles laid by same mason that built the brick walls as he claimed he "can do" tilling as well. He turned out to be ok at laying tiles but really messy in keeping work place tidy. He's also been staining things with water insulation (vedeneriste). And then he screwed up with the silicone so bad that we had to take the silicone out from all places and have somebody else come for one day to finish the work.

The beginning of upstairs bathroom. Looks small but there will be a toilet, double sink and a bathtub :)

Retro Pukkila tiles ready for bathrooms

work in progress

downstairs bathroom floor

2nd floor bathroom coming up

sauna room wall that we were really happy with

1200 kg / 150m2 of laminate for our floors from Byggmax.fi

For our wooden panel walls we choose a white color "eco" paint Uula that is marketed as "latex-free and odourless water-borne natural oil paint". And indeed it was easy to paint and did not smell of any chemicals or plastic. My father did the big job of painting about 130m2 of wooden panels. He's our HERO!

We used about 18 liters of paint. Other choices of paint we've been looking at were wood wax Osmo Color and Bloom. Osmo Color wax did seem to have in it quite a lot of VOC which made us avoid it. When looking at prices for it we did find that prices for same paint were almost 50% less in Germany and they deliver also to Finland!

Bloom wax was also an interesting option but was more expensive than Uula. As we did not want to see the wood paterns of the panels Uula was the right choice for us as it is pretty much fully covering the wood grain. Some like it semitransparent but we already have the outside house walls with lots of wood paterns to look at :).

white painted wooden panels versus laminate floor and roof panels

the white corner for the house have been added

also balcony was done out of the wood I painted white

We have not had time to update the blog as often as we'd have liked, as building a house and having a regular job leaves little time to spare...
We'll post more about the rooms, kitchen etc when we get tofind the time.

It's been a while, but here we go...

2011-11-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

PART 1 of catching up articles:

We did not publish updates to the works at the house since beginning of July. In the meantime a lot has happened at the house, besides being a lovely summer! The carpenters were working on the house about half of this period and the rest of the period building other houses (no holidays for them:) or so we've been told).

I listed the events told by pictures in chronological order:

The fireplace was delivered (real soapstone - vuolukivi) and I carried the 1.5 tonne thing piece by piece inside. Strong (office) man!

...and this was the result after being installed:

This will look differently in the end because the surface will be tiled with white classic tiles and will get fireplace and oven (black) doors.

Then the inner brick walls were finalized one by one:

wall towards shower room

kodinhoitohuone (washing/ cleaning room)

coming sauna

Then there was the issue that the floor materials included in the house package from Lapponia house for second floor were not fitting very well for the floor heating option. We had these wooden chip boards (lastulevy) which we decided to replace with floor gips boards. Luckily we could sell the chip boards on tori.fi.

The floor heating is transmitted evenly through the floor by aluminium plates. The initial installation of the floor heating pipes went wrong because the installers did not seem to care too much where walls were going to be, were pipes should not be (like in the cold area of the wall) or to leave space for clothes dropping vent :)...so they had to come back and redo part of the work.

upstairs before floor heating

Vital wood fibre insulation (40 cm)

we live in a wired world...

fire escape installed

also rain water collectors and snow stops were put in August

The upper floor where you can see an organized mess and the gips board floor and the wind paper covering the ceiling. Do you see the hole on the ceiling next to the 2 windows on the far left? Through that hole the ekovilla (recycled wooden fibres) was blown on top of the paper to make up about 40 cm of roof insulation.

The living room has been paneled (roof and walls) (August)

the west side of the living room

busy summer day at the house

storage/ car shelter foundation iron work


storage/ car shelter foundation

my parents helped us a lot, especially with chopping the wood

...to be continued. This is how things were in the end of August 2011.

2011-10-26T00:02:00.000-07:00

Got wallpapers for kids rooms ordered from Holland and they are gorgeous!! We have Eijffinger and Room seven but there are several interesting. Can recommend www.behangstore.nl and www.kidsbehangstore.nl

One more month to go and it feels that now things start to fall apart... inside doors were all wrong and have to be ordered again (bad case senario is 4months delivery time), plummer is still missing, fire detectors are totally missing from downstairs and our current house is not yet sold due to... greeks... financial situation in the world.

But hey, we are still happily married, healthy and going strong...

Last delays, I hope

2011-10-24T07:28:00.000-07:00

Airco-machine was ordered only today... and it takes 3 weeks to be delivered. How convinient. Somebody is not doing their jobs too well. And in 4 weeks we are moving in, or were planning to. So we felt totally abandoned by Nord Energy. Have to check our agreement tonight and discuss with wiser people how to proceed.

Our kitchen machinery was delivered today and the freezer was all bumped and need to be changed. Luckily we donot need it desperately since kitchen will be delivered on coming friday and been put together during the weekend (Ikea; 160 packages and 1 million screws...)

All the wooden pannels will be painted twice and that's what we are busy with right now. We choose ecological paint UULA and with two painters it is going really fast and well. Cip's dad is here to help.

iam back!

2011-10-22T12:47:00.000-07:00

As you have noticed we are totally running behind. House got ready outside this week and next week we should get the heating on. Not everything has gone smoothly... Our KVV-vastaava (person who is liable for plumming, heating etc.) has vanished, gone hiding, left the country, god knows, but he is not to be reached. So Juuso Pelkonen, if you are reading this, pls. give us a ring :D

Foundation of the storage is finally done accordingly but we have no longer time nor money to finish it before winter. Cannot recommend to anybody ME for making foundations unless you enjoy calling everyday begging them to do the job... After threathing them with a lawyer, things started to move on but honesly we have spent hours and euros trying to get them to do the job agreed ^Ö*&@¤??!!

But as I am the most positive person on earth, our new home looks and feels exellent and I cannot wait to move in and start living there. Sauna is very nice and the retro tiles I choose for bathrooms are super next to blue metallic showers and tabs. Got lucky again and found tabs on sale.
Land around the house is finally flattend and all the holes/ ditches closed: MUD everywhere.

Will post you new photos soon.

Yes, building a new house but how about the current house?

2011-08-04T06:31:00.000-07:00

This site is more about building a new house, but one of our concerns is also selling our current semi-detached house (paritalo).

We are trying at the moment to sell it by ourselves on www.oikotie.fi and hopefully we can get it sold soon We plan to move directly from the old house to the new one somewhere in November.

I would be interested to hear from other house builders how did you manage the sale? And the “bridge” financing? Any tips welcome.

Having two house loans at the moment does not feel very good/ safe. Luckily, at least the bank agreed that we can pay interest-only and no loan repayments for an extended period.

I have found at this website which explains quite well in English the steps in selling your house by yourself without real estate agents. This site belongs to Finnish consumer protection agency.
http://www.kuluttajavirasto.fi/en-GB/housing/selling/

summary of the last month

2011-07-09T09:14:00.000-07:00

We have been a bit busy lately and did not update the site for a month now. You know, all those trips to swim by the lakes leave no time for blogging :).

So in chronological order a summary of the happenings at the house:

First the insulation for the floor was laid with quite a delay as the carpenters have done an error when installing the walls. Walls should have been installed on 5 cm higher beams, but they forgot to put an additional wooden piece of 5 cm between concrete beams and the wall foot. The plan was to have 25 cm of EPS polystyrene insulation. However, due to this error there was only space for 22 cm of insulation. Hhhmm! The solution was then to put 15 cm of EPS and 7cm of SPU. SPU is a better quality insulation material as it's harder, water proof and insulates better. The idea is that 7 cm SPU insulates as well as 10 cm EPS, or so. Below you can see the place for the fireplace and chimney with the SPU insulation on top.

450m of floor heating pipes were installed

Then the concrete floor was done (about 8 cm of concrete that covered the floor heating)

Thereafter chimney was built from prefabricated Schidel pieces. I took a day off and helped with lifting the pieces to up to 8m on top of the house.

View from the top of the house: There are 2 chimneys holes: one for the fireplace (the bigger one) and the small is for the sauna stove. It was interesting to lift the 25 kg a piece elements on the roof!

Also there has been work done on installing the ventilation ducts in the house and on top of the house and the 2 teraces are almost done. Also the ceiling insulation for the first floor was installed (10 cm wooden fibre).

Then the windows were made ready with white iron trays and also the white wooden planks were attached under the roof edges as below:

Brick colored roof

2011-06-06T10:19:00.000-07:00

After 2 and 1/2 weeks from the delivery date our house has gotten roof. More or less in one day 8.5 tonnes of tiles were installed on the roof. That's a positive example of Finnish efficiency :). Our carperters then took a break from work on our house and went to bring another house to the same state as ours...

Check out the pictures:

before

and after...

Last weekend we visited Porkkala peninsula in Kirkkonummi. The place is beautiful and scenery is great if you can cope with the winding/hilly road. There we photographed this small cottage below which is resembling the inspiration for our house.

week 20: work on the house goes on

2011-05-24T13:35:00.000-07:00

The assembly crew made of father and son (plus their Lapland Shepherd dog) continued working on our house and they're doing a good job as progress looks good.

Here are some pictures of the progress in chronological order:

This is how it looked inside after 3 days

House is getting rain cover (sateelta suojaan), our team working even on Saturday

Et voila!

some serious woodwork happened inside too, here's the upper floor

new generation of carpenters is getting ready...

the brick carrying wall in the making, next to which sauna and bathroom will be built

our wall wooden panels apparenlty are called URSUS. Let's drink a URSUS beer to it :)

11 May: Day of house delivery

2011-05-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

Last night we got pieces of roof (kattotuolit) delivered and today the actual elements of the house were delivered and installed. We took a day off in order to witness this little miracle coming true and had a great sunny day observing house taking its shape piece by piece. With a crazy smile on our faces we did some clearing of the riverside and collected branches into one pile. Photos will tell you more. Happy.

Windows on wheels

The very first element is the kitchen corner with window

Flying terrace door

3rd day. House covered for the weekend

Riverside and a balcony-to-be

Main entrance and living room windows

All pieces seemed to match, only Lapponia House had a delay delivering and the second day didn't go as planned. Workers couldn't do as much as they wanted and were not too happy. There was a night delivery between day 2 and 3.

Week 16: Foundation is fast and furious here/ thriller in the price

2011-04-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

The Me-Perustukset team have tried to install the frames for pouring concrete last week Friday. Firstly, they had to wait a day as there was a problem with the steel delivery. Then, our foreman decided to go and visit the site and inspect the foundation to make sure that there is enough steel placed in the frames before pouring concrete.

Unfortunately he came all the way from Lohja in vain as the steel was not yet placed in the frames due to the delays of the steel delivery. He could have called Me-perustukset first and ask if the site is ready for inspection instead of coming and wasting his time...better communication would be nice! Especially as we're paying for foreman's' visits :).

Anyway by Tuesday the frames for the plinth beams (sokkeli) were ready for inspection.The foreman did notice one error as the middle floor frame was misplaced (in mirror image instead) and then the foundation crew made the necessary changes in time.

Inspecting the premises :)

steel reinforcements before concrete was poured

terrace

ventilation hole

the entrance terrace

And after a while at 8 pm same day, the trucks with concrete arrived and concrete started pouring...

Then the concrete was left to dry for one day and on Thursday the frames were removed and the prefabricated floor beams were brought in onto 40-tonnes truck. This was the one we were afraid of... Will the road last or not the heavy weight...

And on Thursday, the super heavy truck came, road was ready and wide enough...but the truck driver was probably not very experienced as he took a too narrow turn from main road to our land and this is what happened...

A super heavy assistance truck was called in to pull the truck with concrete beams out of the ditch.

3 hours were lost but in the end the rescue was successful and the team installed the floor beams and look what became of it...

our house's got FOUNDATION :)

The crawl in space under the foundation

Then the day continued with the last act taking place...
The empty truck was not able to reverse up the hill to the main road...and then another assistance truck was called to help in... (excuse the video quality)

What a thriller Thursday it's been! But in the end the foundation crew was able to finish and leave at about 4 pm, I guess ready to celebrate something. Easter?

See also our other post on foundation:
http://project-eco-house-finland.blogspot.com/2011/03/its-question-of-foundation.html

Pictures and comments of the wall structure and insulation

2011-04-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

At the Omakotitalo fair we met with Lapponia house representatives at their stand. We got free entrance tickets and "coffee and buns" coupons from them. That was nice, but we're a nice customer too :). I hope they still can make some profit on our house :).

They had on display the wall structure of our future house. Basically they call it "thermo log" because (as I understand it) from the outside and inside of the house it looks like a laminated log but inside the wall structure there is VITAL wooden-fibre insulation and not solid wood. The VITAL wooden-fibre has certain advantages compared to solid wood:
- it insulates about 2 times better (250 mm wooden fiber versus 250mm tick log)
- one cubic metre of wood makes 10 cubic metres of VITAL insulation
- will not create a so-called "bottle phenomenon," but the structures are breathing

More information can be found from: http://www.vitalfinland.fi/english/pages/why_vital_insulation_/ and from

http://www.lapponiahouse.fi/international/en/company/woodhouse/

This VITAL insulation is being produced from fresh wood or from recycled card-board. Our house package insulation will be made of fresh wooden fibre.

Thermo log wall structure with VITAL insulation.

The view of the wall from the outside. The white insulation is made from fresh wood fibres.

The wooden-fibre wall structure from Lapponia House has received recently the qualification of being "suitable"/ friendly for people suffering from allergies, which is almost 1 in 2 people in Finland.

That sounds good for us as myself and my youngest daughter have some allergies.

Appliances deal made with Gigantti

2011-04-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

We were at the fair last weekend and bought 4 appliances from Gigantti. They had offered a lot better deal compared to Expert who made us an offer for AEG stuff. And also had better sales person. Of course at the fair you have to kind of decide more or less on the spot so I was wondering if we got a correct deal or not, but after getting home and checking the prices on the Internet it was indeed a good deal. Anyway at the fair I asked the sales person "So I can call you on Monday if it seems that the special prices you offered us are not that special? Yes sure", he replied.

Cheapest prices on the Internet for the stuff we got are:
EUF29420X - Electrolux freezer metalic- 1036 euro
ERE38520x - Electrolux fridge metalic - 1026 euro
D5257S - Asko dishwahser metalic - 916 euro
EDD2400RH - Electrolux drying cupboard - 484 euro
Total 3462 euro on the Internet

We got offered 2550 euro for the whole package so not too bad thinking that the appliances have on them "made in Sweden" :). They will deliver the appliances when we need them somewhere in September/ October.

Freezer

Fridge

Dishwasher

Drying cupboard

week 14: Choosing parquet, fireplace and some of the kitchen appliances

2011-04-10T04:45:00.000-07:00

We have been changing our mind on what kind of floor we wnat in the living room/ kitchen. Initially we were thinking that tiles go better with underfloor heating but in the end we still like better the feel of wooden floor. So we now decided to use parquet (or so called engineered wooden floor).

We checked various floor options from Parador, Upofloor, Karelia and Kährs. We wanted a floor that is sort of whitish but not look too "made" white. Ash tree (saarni/ frasin) has quite white wood but we did not like much the options found for ash parquet. We found and interesting parquet for oak from Kärhs, model Oak/ Tammi Dew (Harmony collection).


Kährs Oak Dew (promo picture from their website)


photo taken with my phone- it's surface fees relatively rough as it's been brushed deeply and oiled. It also feels solid compared to other parquets and Kährs gives 30 year guarantee. But it does come at a price, about 40 euro/ sqm.

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Also we have decided on the fireplace, it will be from Vuoleri. We have some criterias based on which we have chosen the fireplace:
- we like the classical looking fireplaces with tiles
- we would like to have also baking oven
- price was also a contraint - our initial budget was 6000 euro including chimney
- it should not be very wide and very deep (max 90cm X 70 cm)
- it should less than 2000 kg and chimney less than 1500 kg (foundation constraints)
Vuoleri fireplaces are made with real stone inside compared to the fireplaces Kermasavi from Tulikivi thus with a smaller fireplace one can get more heat as stone retains the heat better (at least in theory :)). Also Vuoleri were flexible to make us a customized version of the fireplace. We wanted to have a small fireplace with baking oven model like Aino below but then higher by 30 cm and looking tiled like Päivänsäde below. Päivänsäde would have been too heavy for us.

Aino and Päivänsäde next to each other

The baking oven in Aino is closed, not connected to the fireplace underneath thus it keeps clean (no smoke inside). The temparture in the baking oven can get up to 250 C.

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The appliances story to follow...

week 13: House steel pillars were installed

2011-04-04T04:46:00.000-07:00

17 pillars in total.

Not that much happened in week 13 except that in one day the pillars for the house were installed.

I drew the imaginary line of the house. The pillars will support the plinth beams (sokkelit). On these beams the floor beams and the house walls will be standing. There is an additional plinth beam on the middle of the house floor. Also on the side you can see the place where terraces/ porches will approximately be.

Also we have added to thew blog the original Lapponia House package plans which we have modified quite a bit to get to our own model. There are modifications both on the inside (mostly) and outside. See:
http://project-eco-house-finland.blogspot.com/p/house-package.html

week 12: Building permit was approved 22-Mar-2011

2011-03-24T07:39:00.000-07:00

Yes. Bulding permit was approved. Work can now start properly.
Here are some pictures from this week.


The house and garage exact spots were marked by the engineers from Kirkkonummi municipality.


The house ground has now been prepared for the steel pillars (paalutus) that will be knocked into the ground for 7-10 meters until they reach solid ground. The pillars will installed next week.


There is now electricty for the works.

Spring is not yet here but weather was beautiful this Saturday morning when I ran/ walked from home to the land and back (about 8 km in total).

week 11: Old cottage and some tress are gone

2011-03-21T13:21:00.000-07:00


Snow was cleared to the side and road was made. A bit of snow as you can see.


Road ready


The sad cottage wating for its faith :(. At least we tried to recycle all material possible.


Half done

Wood is being collected and recycled (usually used for burning).


Also windows/ glass will be recycled

Cottage is gone making way for the house place!

Some fir and birch trees that were in the way had to be taken down. We'll use the wood in the new house's fireplace.