What happened to the Outpost Project?

okay so the outpost project this is um this is complicated let's just put it that way we're 12 months into construction we started about a year ago i don't have 12 months worth of construction to report because in the spring of 2021 we pressed pause on this we regrouped and we onboarded another contractor kate and ellard taylor with great blue heron builders so you're going to see some new faces in this video they have a small crew but we are finally making forward progress again and i'm proud to be able to show the high quality work that's happening we've had to make some course corrections and revisions and updates and retool things and this is not an easy thing for anyone to take on a project in midstream and these guys have done an incredible job here i also want to extend my sincere gratitude my thanks to my clients for continuing to allow us to document the reality of what it means to build it's oftentimes a pretty messy process [Music] today you know we're down to me and two carpenters today on this job part of that i think has to do with covid part of it has to do with just the labor shortage in general um one of the things you know about island life is that almost nobody does just one thing almost everybody is good at a lot of different things so you tap into those skills you know to make projects happen the lobster fishing industry i mean those guys for the most part they fish really hard from about the first of july until end of october or sometimes up to around thanksgiving and they have to make an annual income in that period of time while a lot of crews you know don't work in the wintertime we always have you know we've employed lobster fishermen quite a lot interesting and the thing is that most of these guys you know are really quite skilled carpenters so one of the early priorities once the building is framed is to get the roof on so we want to keep water out of the structure we have two types of roof coverings on this project for the flat roofs we're using a commercial grade rubber membrane and we fully adhere that to a tapered insulation layer which is installed on top of a flat roof deck so it's the tapered insulation that really creates the positive pitch directing water to the roost guppers and those scuppers we actually fabricated just using a heavy gauge aluminum channel that's then flashed in by the roofing contractor for the pitched roofs obviously we need to use something that's corrosion resistant here we're using a pre-finished aluminum coil stock and we form those into these interlocking pans the pans are installed using a concealed clip fastening system they're attached through a high temperature underlayment beneath the metal roof pants fabricating these on site just allows us to adjust the width of each one of the pans along the length of the roof so we can center our roof penetrations and by that i mean things like the flue and any plumbing vent stacks that we have all the roofs you see here they're all unvented or what we call hot roof assemblies and that just means we're insulating to the underside of the roof sheathing everywhere which keeps our mechanical runs inside the conditioned envelope preventing things like condensation it's just more efficient way to do that this also means that we don't have to vent the roof at the eve and the ridge and that just keeps a really nice low minimal profile to everything it's always gratifying to see the doors and windows installed because it's the culmination of many months of planning and design thinking there's lots of documents that go into sort of showing the contractor what they need to order so i want to walk you through some of those drawings that we actually create we'll start off with the floor plan the way the architectural set is designed is to take you from drawings which are more broad in scope to more detailed in scope the further you drill into the set the more detailed the drawings get so everyone's familiar with the floor plans and we can see that the openings for doors and windows are called out here on the floor plan and you'll also notice that they have these different little tags so this is called a window tag this is a door tag we're going to tag each one of these windows so we have an a2 window and an a1 window so in plan they both look the same so we need to give the contractor additional information to help them figure out you know what's the differences between those two windows so as we come to that particular elevation you can see we have the a1 window here and an a2 window here so the window tags are calling out two different windows and you can see it's very subtly different there's just a dashed line shown in this one this is typical of two openings and then this one is typical of two openings so those two and you can see we have a different designation here so as we drilled further down into the set we'll move into the door and window elevation sheet and this is the a6 series and you can see this is just a more detailed drawing this is a half inch scale so we're moving from a quarter inch scale zooming in to a half inch scale so you can see the a1 window is an awning with a wood screen and the a2 window is just a picture unit so the awning is denoted by this dashed line here and a couple of things that we're calling out on this you know we're calling out where the finished floor is where we want the finished window to be mounted above that floor and how big the actual unit size is so it's five feet wide by six feet tall and then there's a designation here which is called out as ro and that's the rough opening so it's basically when the contractor frames this opening we need to give the unit some room so that we could slide it into place and position it and get it plumb and square the rough framing is typically going to be close but it won't get you perfectly square so if we were to make that rough opening the exact size the window wouldn't actually fit in it and it wouldn't allow any room for deflection or you know changes in temperature and humidity and you know differential materials move differentially as we look at this window unit here you can see there's some detail bubbles that are associated with it and if we click on those that brings us to the typical window detail sheet this is drawing a 6.3 and each one of these windows as we cut through the head and the sill and the jam has a set of details and flashing conditions and a very specific information that's related to installing that window in the wall system it's one of the reasons why we choose the windows system very early because we need to be able to tell the contractor exactly how to install this window what do the corners look like how do we flash them all of this fits together like this giant puzzle additionally on this sheet i like to include you know a typical window flashing sequence so i'm calling out the steps so there's absolutely no confusion as to what has to happen in what order and all the different components of it even though the drawing set has a lot of information in it it's very specific and detailed it's generic in the sense that our contractor wouldn't be able to use this information to order the window and door package and have it arrive just as we imagine it we need to provide additional very precise information so to provide that information we're going to use schedules and this is an example of the door schedule that we've created for the project this has all of the door units what type they are sizing manufacturer all the different attributes associated with those door units and then there's the specifications so the specifications are really the place that we use to collate all of this very detailed precise information and if we scroll down to the door and window section here which is section 8 we're able to describe interior finishes and sticking details you know maybe there's special sills that we have or glazing requirements that we have all of that can be provided for in the set of specifications and the advantage to this is if we have to make a change say to the cladding color in the future we can come to one document and update it here rather than in the distributed set of drawings and details that we were just looking at taken together the drawing specs and schedules allow the contractor to really help us develop say competitive cost comparisons so for this project we looked at marvin modern line of windows and we compared that to the signature ultimate line of windows and eventually this combination of documents will be used to develop the final order for the window and door package [Music] as an architect thinking about the windows in very early design process but there's a lot of different considerations that you probably have as a builder right what what are some of those things they're a really big chunk of the budget right but they also define the space and one of the things that i really like about you know construction and houses is that you design light when you design a building and the windows are the light building out here on the island i guess we also have to consider size of the units right i could make this whole wall glass but you have a crew that's trying to get this window into the opening right right so we're sort of limited in a lot of ways by the fact that we're building here right right right and especially with these windows i mean these these particular windows i mean they're large and they're heavy yeah um i'm guessing they weigh around 300 pounds okay a piece yeah um so the two strong guys really struggle to lift them sure yeah so we you know in order to manage these windows we we try to have you know four people uh on the window at a time moving it and um you know if you look outside this window you know it's it's 12 feet or so you know down to the ground so i mean you're definitely not going to put these in you know on a ladder right we had to stage this entire wall and the staging had to be really substantial staging i mean it's not something you can just have a couple planks out there going on ladder jacks or something like that there is this process that i think a lot of people don't fully appreciate that construction starts and we know let's say the windows are going to take 12 to 16 weeks to get and i don't remember how long these actually took but the ordering of the windows happens very early right in the construction process that's right so you initiate the order and then marvin or the lumber yard does a set of shop drawings right right and they send it to you and they send it to me and then we both review that and i i think for this one it was something like five rounds of revisions that happened for that so minor changes because we're looking at okay is that the right hardware is the screen right all those things have to get sorted out right right and then you place the order and then we wait and then eventually it ships to where shipped to the lumberyard bumper yard right which is where lumberyard is about 40 miles away and then it gets loaded onto a mailboat which then gets carried out to isla ho then it gets loaded off the mailboat onto the dock onto a truck you know which then finally gets it to the job site which sounds kind of complicated but actually it's a pretty efficient process i mean with these units um you know we couldn't just bring them all out at one time you know we bring out we stage it you know we bring out um three of these large ones you know we bring out three or four each day okay is that limited by the mailboat because no yes and no i mean the mailboat has its limits but the mailboat can carry quite a lot i mean yeah i mean we can put several lifts of plywood on a male boat i look at the hoist at the dock i mean as being one of the limiting factors it absolutely is the the hoist at the dock it's rated for 1400 pounds and we try to keep our lips down to a thousand okay and that's quite a lot of material [Music] so we're standing in the principal bathroom you know as we're talking about these window details and shop drawings and everything i made every effort to think all these things through and as i was reviewing the shop drawings i noticed with this window being a push out window you have to open the screen so this is a giant screen in front of this and it's hinged on that side and in order to do that if we have a tub in the way it's obviously not going to work so in the shop drawing i made it a point to change it from a push-out window to a roto-operated awning and that way the screen stays in place no need to hinge we can open the window just from here and i made the change but i never put it back in the drawings right if it's not on the drawing it doesn't exist basically so when it came time to load the windows into the house you loaded all the windows according to the schedule according to the elevation drawings and installed this window and lo and behold when we mocked the tub up oh yeah that window is not going to work here and when you got to the guest bedroom you said why do we have a casement window here right right and so right that's on me because it never got folded back into the trailer we realized that there was going to be a problem when we installed the window but we said to ourselves well they're probably just going to eliminate the screen on this window one of the things that you mentioned when you were mocking it up the way it's oriented on the plan is kind of 45 which is basically pointing you right at this corner post and you said we're getting ready to do the rough plumbing you sure you want it here so we got the the client to come in and you know she looked at it and said oh yeah i mean clearly that's the view right yeah this was really helpful too thinking sequencing wise we've got door openings that are three feet wide right we've got a hall we got a corner is this going to be able to make it in the front door or do we have to bring it in here i don't want to bring it in there the tub weighs 500 pounds 500 pound tub 490 pounds is the tub when i saw that on the uh on the cut sheet i thought that that's what it weighed when it was full of water but no that's what it weighs by itself we twisted this thing every which way we could to try to get it around the corner of that hallway through this door opening and it just would not go um even though the door opening would be wide enough if we could make the corner but we can't make the corner we basically just take out a couple of two by fours and we hold off on sheet rocking that one little piece of wall i mean we do actually use mock-ups quite a bit in construction right yeah it's they're helpful not only for our client to envision this because you know when she saw it um she said geez it's blocking the window and it felt weird to her and so we ended up exploring maybe recessing this in the floor or doing a different tub style altogether i'm always appreciative when a builder is willing to do that these kinds of projects require a different level of care [Music] so installing the windows it's always an important milestone here especially because it's allowing us to move ahead with our electrical rough-in and that allows us then to move on to things like law framing at the barn we have the stair in there and on the outside we've been mocking up trim details in preparation for the siding installation we've been running subgrade utilities and we had to report all of the footings for the screened porch the pace is starting to pick up and i'm so happy to see that as we head into the winter here in maine which can be really brutal stay tuned for more updates real soon [Music] you

Channel: 30X40 Design Workshop

Views: 58,590

Keywords: architect, architecture, architecture tutorial, architecture school, architecture students, 30x40, 30x40 design workshop

Id: m7Qz0EAnoFo

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021