Foundations

When we were at the house last month, there were a number of little things that needed to be completed. Sooz tallied a list to send to Wille. Most of the list items are small trim and completion things that he was going to do anyways.

But there was one big issue remaining. Basically, neither Sooz or I are happy yet with the foundations on either house. Our house is damned heavy and it sets on a number of plinths, some fairly tall. A few of them are a bit out of alignment, two were off-height, and perhaps a third of them are not perfectly straight. These misalignments make them not as strong as they were designed to be, and they don't look quite right, especially set against the lines of our great cube of a house.

And there's an issue about the proper number of foundations in the first place. Stefan added two plinths to the original drawings back on March 1, and Wille has spoken to Stefan about the need for more, especially on houses of our size.

I think Wille's done a good job on our house overall, and we are happy, but the foundations are the one area that isn't up to the specification of the rest of the building. I spoke to Wille at length and asked him to do two things.

1. Add a few more foundation posts at some of the key load beams under the building to make sure it's well shored up. The idea is that three posts at 75% strength are as good as, if not better than, two at 100%.
2. When done, we need to cover up the perimeter of the house with skirting boards. All of the houses on Aspö have these installed. The underside of an island house is pretty unsightly, especially with all of the plumbing and electrical infrastructure snaking around. In our case, the boards will also cover up what will become a bit of a jumble of foundation posts.

I had flirted with the idea of leaving the posts as an integral part of the building, like the Villa Savoie as shown above. But frankly, given the exigencies of island construction, that really wasn't realistic. And comparing my little stuga to one of Le Corbusier's is a tad harsh, too.

In any case, Wille was gracious and understood our concerns, he said he was glad we were honest with him and he wants us to be satisfied. He's going to work on adding foundation posts and then skirting the perimeter of both houses.