Once the shell is in place, your plans become even more important because it is all that you have to ensure that everything comes together with the different contractors that will do the rest of the work. Make sure you have spent the time to work out as many kinks as you can while still just putting it on paper. Unfortunately, unless you are building to the same set of plans you built to before, there will be some mistakes, or at least things that you wish you had done a little differently. We did spend a lot of time on our plans. I even entered them in my computer and created a 3D layout to do a virtual walkthrough. This was very helpful and I'm sure we avoided quite a few mistakes by doing that. We have been living in the house for 4 months now and I love the layout. My only regrets are that we did not realize we could not get DSL in our location, so computer usage requires ethernet lines that I did not plan for. I did, however, make sure there were lots of conduits to each room which did allow me to make the adjustments.
The large white pipes you see above are the drain lines. The red lines are the hot water, and the blue the cold. The gray pipes are electrical conduits. The strings were layed-out to indicate where the walls would be so everything lined up correctly.
This shot shows the white pipe used as air ducts. Notice the aluminum riser used to direct the air up through the floor. Notice also that the top of that duct would be the actual floor height.
Once everything has been layed out, the strings have been removed, and gravel added to bring the height of the floor up a bit, a layer of plastic and 4 inches of concrete are poured inside the shell. I was not able to be there for the whole process, and found out later that no stress relief cracks were added. Since concrete always cracks in large areas, the floor found it's own areas to crack in, mostly around the air ducts. Fortunately, it is a floating floor, meaning the walls set on the foundation, not the floors, so the cracks do not affect functionality. They sure are ugly though.
This last picture shows the wooden window frame with the rolling shutter installed. We chose this type of covering for it's security and safety aspects, as well as the fact it can be retracted from inside the house. We also chose a manual mechanism to avoid loosing function if the power went out. We have one of these on each window, and each door.
The large white pipes you see above are the drain lines. The red lines are the hot water, and the blue the cold. The gray pipes are electrical conduits. The strings were layed-out to indicate where the walls would be so everything lined up correctly.
This shot shows the white pipe used as air ducts. Notice the aluminum riser used to direct the air up through the floor. Notice also that the top of that duct would be the actual floor height.
Once everything has been layed out, the strings have been removed, and gravel added to bring the height of the floor up a bit, a layer of plastic and 4 inches of concrete are poured inside the shell. I was not able to be there for the whole process, and found out later that no stress relief cracks were added. Since concrete always cracks in large areas, the floor found it's own areas to crack in, mostly around the air ducts. Fortunately, it is a floating floor, meaning the walls set on the foundation, not the floors, so the cracks do not affect functionality. They sure are ugly though.
This last picture shows the wooden window frame with the rolling shutter installed. We chose this type of covering for it's security and safety aspects, as well as the fact it can be retracted from inside the house. We also chose a manual mechanism to avoid loosing function if the power went out. We have one of these on each window, and each door.
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