Thursday, February 14, 2008

Planning...

Did I mention I'm close to never wanting to see AutoCad ever again?

Yesterday, after a horrible work day I managed to sit down, fire up my windows computer (I'm a convinced Mac user, but AutoCad just does not run on a Mac, so when a Friend gave me a Pentium IV for free I did some upgrading, mostly free parts and now use it for some special stuff, but compared to an iBook it's awfully noisy and I suspect it will once send the disc of the elctrical meter flying out the front door, so I have to really convince myself to plug it in and turn it on) and did some more tweaking.

At 1m width the upstairs hallway was too narrow to fit a regular size door + trim (roughly 90cm for the door and 24 for the trim, 12 on each side), so I had to widen it a little, and to keep the room sizes equal make the back room a little smaller.

Now the plans are in a stadium where I can make a screenshot and post it here. I have the footprint of both floors more or less done and a rough front elevation drawing.

I also browsed through a Bauhaus catalogue where I found something interesting. Now I'm considering to do for all plaster and lath since cheap 12mm pine paneling seems to be only half the price of Heraklith... I'm slightly worried about the strength of it though, after all Heraklith is 25mm thick and feels really sturdy. The old ceilings in Vienna were done with 15mm lath and still have a very slight give to them. On the other hand, the ceiling beams are on 80cm(!) centers and our studs will be more like 40 or 50cm centers.

Doing everything with plaster and lath would take care of two issues. First, Heraklith was simply not around in 1910, so it's not period. Second, a plaster and lath wall should be less prone to cracking than a wall made of large panels. I simply don't like the idea of doing all the extra labor of spackling in mesh over the entire surface.

Tomorrow we're heading out for the weekend. My parents buy some shelving at IKEA today, so I might be able to actually do something. I need to get the books out of the goats stables to get space for the garden stuff from the pigsty.

By the way, does anyone know a person who'd like to buy an ancient metal grave marker?

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