Week of June 25, 2007: Alot of time has gone by but the 6 steel columns that hold up the entire house are finally ready for erection. One of our main ideas for this house is to use less resources for the construction of the house and to generate less waste during the construction process. By using steel columns and beams as the structure, all steel waste during the fabrication was able to be recycled by the fabricators at their shop rather than being thrown in an on site dumpster and eventually landfill as is normally done when traditional wood framing is used.

The house is based on a 30' structural grid and 6' design grid. This also translated into our metal stud wall framing being 18" o.c. (which works with a 6' grid) rather than 16" o.c. Following the module from 30' down to 18" also helped to reduce the materials used as well as decrease the construction waste as we'll see later.

These is a view from the street. Yes, the columns are there but so are the trees...