Now weather tight ... on the road towards air tight!

Welcome Back!

The Cech House is finally weather-tight with the SIGA Majvest membrane system with the SIGA Wigluv taping system.

Before we provided the weather seal on the project, see below the photos that are from setting the rigid framework for this house, in addition to the roof panels. All in all the roof took 1 full day of work to set into place, and now it's time to move on to window and door installation. Stay tuned!

THE BIG DAY HAS ARRIVED

Welcome back to the coolest prefabricated Passive House around. These blog posts will be organized in order of completion and will highlight the progress that is made at each step of erecting this building. Let's start off wit the first floor:

Basement vapor barrier and floor framing

A continuous vapor barrier is added to our basement foundation, with taping at all seams and penetrations. This barrier will be under the concrete slab of this house.

In addition, we were able to set the steel and floor joists. Notice that all of our floor framing sits inside the concrete ICF wall - eliminating any thermal bridging and/or heat loss that would occur at this typical construction detail.

The OSB floor deck is starting to go on in preparation for arrival of the wall panels next week!

An Idea for What's to Come ...

The moment is fast approaching when the Cech House will begin to take shape. This post is to help everyone image the detail of the house. A few items still remain missing on this rendering, and some items will change, but all in all this is what the shape of the house will be.Thanks for following, check back often to see this house take shape in the coming weeks.

Cech House foundation

Welcome back to the Cech House, as we continue with a super-insulated foundation.

You'll see that with the addition of the extra foam to the outside of the ICF foundation walls (extra foam is white that wraps around the ICF walls) adds the extra R value that we need to ensure the proper R value that is designed for this house. We await the installation of the slab foam for the floor of this project's basement. You can see in the photos that the slab foam R value is 12" thick, which is significantly higher than what is typically installed.

As we are working on this foundation, we've been fabricating the wall and roof panels that will form the super-insulated pre-fabricated shell of this house. The delivery of this envelope is planned to be delivered late early August.

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The Cech House: Ground breaking for pre-fab Passive House

We finally broke ground on Michigan's first pre-fab Passive House project, the Cech House, in accordance with the Passive House Institute U.S. 

Below are a few images of working with the footings, in addition to pouring the ICF foundation walls. The targeted R value for the foundation walls will be R-50, with a slab R value roughly the same. This super-insulated below grade basement will support a prefabricated state-of-the-art performance envelope made of dimensional lumber. Every piece of the envelope is built off-site, and will be shipped in to be erected in a matter of days. Check back in to watch the progress of Phoenix HP's first Passive House.

Culvert and Driveway Installation

Picture 1: View East showing the 12" tile and newly placed driveway

Picture 2: View West - Craig with GM Adamowski Excavating leveling a load of sand

Picture 3: View looking Northwest - an almost finished product of a driveway

Today will be a short posting. We begun our driveway efforts today with the excavation of brush and a couple more trees and the addition of a ton of fill. We found that to allow the driveway to drain correctly and not cause issues in the future we went with a wider path. We also chose to widen the path for this site due to the fact that our modular product will be arriving in 15' sections. This width is limiting in some sense. Either way, we will be replanting as many or more trees as the ones we removed for a sense of coziness and also to help hold the grade we have sloped.

Today we had one correction we had to make to the building design - No basement walk out door. With hours of deliberation on our minds and factoring in the cost to place an exterior walk out door at the basement level we found that the sloping lot causes many problems. We would need to excavate in towards the basement to provide a door, and this would be an extremely obvious grade issue with having the finish floor starting not much higher than the grade of the to-be basement walk out door. We decided to make emphasis on the walkout stairs on the back porch and go away with a basement-egress.

The Next blog post will be an update on the installation of the septic tank and septic field as well as the excavation of the hole to which the foundation will be poured and placed and back filled.