Wednesday I took the day off from work and put in a little sweat equity into my project. Thankfully the crew from Berget Construction was kind enough to let me think I was doing some good by helping out. I had been on site for the first few panels on Monday but I really wanted to get in and get a hands on understanding of what goes into building a home with SIPs panels. I had spent summers in college doing various construction jobs from pouring concrete walls to framing homes, but SIPs panels were nothing like what I had seen before.

The idea of an entire home built from foam insulation sandwiched between two pieces of OSB plywood really sounds crazy. Each panel comes in a 4 foot section and is tipped into place on the bottom sill and fastened with screws every couple of inches through the OSB into a plywood flange that is inserted into a groove in the insulation. The flange is adhered to both panels with some incredibly  sticky blue adhesive and spray foam to create an airtight connection between the foam in the two panels. Like Giant puzzles pieces each pieces ties into the one before making the entire structure very strong and very straight. For the most part all the panels go together well, however occasionally need some minor adjusting. This is done easily with a circular saw, a reciprocating saw and a foam heating tool. After completing about 3/4 of the first floor walls we were less than 1/4 of an inch out of square and with the slightest little adjustment, the crew was able to bring the house back to square. Although this was the crews first SIPs home, they quickly learned the key techniques from Curt Stendel of Panel Works Plus and after a few panels they were off and running.
Thursday I was back in the office and out of the way, while the crew was on-site to set the floor trusses in the garage, frame up a few of the interior load bearing walls and set the major beam to hang the remainder of the floor trusses.

I arrived at the site just before our major down pour to snap a few photos of the days work. The panels for the roof had been delivered and they seemed to dwarf the building. Tomorrow the steel truses for our living room arrive from Leum Engineering. Next week the second floor should be sheeted, the walls should be set and if we’re lucky the roof panels may even go up.

After Wednesday most of the first floor walls were up.

The boy enjoying the view of the dirt pile from our front windows.

Finally an idea of where the front door will go.

I’m not exactly sure how thick the insulation is on the roof
panels are but they’re really something to see at over 20″ long.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Green, Main, Products, building. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.