This is just a quick update on the Passive House Project which is wrapping up this week. This has, for a variety of reasons, been a hurry up and wait kind of project, and right now we are in final hurry up mode. A crazy amount of stuff is getting wrapped up each day. These are a few pictures I managed to take amidst the work.
The image below shows the birch plywood back-splash wall in the Passive House. The mess in front of the walls is made up of kitchen cabinets and assembly instructions. Those will likely all be installed tomorrow.
The next picture is the best I could get of the OSB wall in the M&M House. The stairs themselves are still not finished and you can see the temporary treads in the image. Expect better pictures of this beautiful details soon, but this will have to do for now.
Moving upstairs in the M&M we can see the crew installing the OSB floor in 2×8 sheets. You will also notice the OSB covered half wall on the left side of the picture.
And finally here is picture of the birch floor in the Passive House. It isn’t a great shot, but it will give you an idea of how the 2×8 sheets go down.
I will be posting again with final pictures next week so stay tuned. Any questions or comments on what you’ve seen here are welcome as long as they don’t mock my photography skills.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m loving the OSB walls and floors. Can you give any specs – thickness, coatings, prep, etc?
I did a birch ply floor in my house that we then bleached out. Sublime. People at first think it is stone!
Michael,
Did you just spray on Clorox and let it sit for a while? Then you sealed it with water-based polyurethane?
Sorry, I should have written “bleached.” We stained it with a watered-down white stain, and then sealed it.
Thanks for the compliments on the flooring. We had all the sheet goods used for the floors and walls on this project prepared off site. Pappajohn Woodworking precut all panels to the 2′x8′ size we needed and then used a product called Parlay 21 from Green Depot to seal them.
Parlay is a Low-VOC diamond coat polyurethane that we have found provides the most durable and glossy coating of all the Low-VOC poly’s we have tried to date. Pappajohn sprayed on a Parlay primer and then 2-3 coats of the topcoat to give a perfectly smooth and glossy finish. Not shown yet are the matching stair treads that Pappajohn cut to size, laminated with a heat press and sprayed the same Parlay 21 finish on for us.
This may be the last time we see these sheet products in our homes for some time. As we increase volume, we are concerned about not being able to offer a warranty on our flooring and will most likely switch to a pre-finished eco flooring option that is more traditional. The half walls wrapped in wood upstairs will remain, but the full wooden stair wall will be replaced with a new drywall design by ISA that will fall in line a bit better with our strict budgets.
Not bad for a 100k home! I like this blog. I just stumbled across it looking for trends in the housing market.
Interested in the floors. Looking at OSB or some sort of plywood flooring. Just wondered if this product Parlay 21 is available in Canada.
Also wondered why you cut the flooring in 2X8 pieces vs say 4X4.
Also wondered about staining the wood prior to putting the finishing on.
Thanks
We are interested in this flooring for our house, but am wondering how it has held up for y’all. We are in southeast Texas so normally our humidity is very high. Thanks for y’alls input.