House painting project 2012

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!

updates: bankruptcy and more

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...

Pictures and comments of the wall structure and insulation

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.