Our house in the middle of winter
It was end of January, with our village covered in snow since October and a brutal, cold season of storms. Snow and low temperatures is one of the worst conditions you can possibly have when delivering tons and tons of material, walls made of glass windows and while climbing on the roof.
But a prefabricated house can’t wait. It has been produced over weeks, the parts packed in trucks and waiting to be delivered. The builder crews are booked through the year and missing an appointment means you don’t get another one for months…
That morning, I was tired, excited and super anxious. It was the moment I waited for very long, but many things could go wrong. By this moment, it has been more than six months since we bought the land plot, have been visiting different prefabricated house fairs and dreamed a million times about the designed house plan would look in real life.
The morning started with -10º C (14º F), the crew arrived and started getting busy.
Assemble with care
It was fascinating to see the parts coming in through the air with the crane, guessing what part it was. One can’t describe the feeling of seeing your own design becoming reality like a jigsaw puzzle or gigantic proportions.
The crew was extremely careful and precise with such and amount of glass windows and doors. There was a great risk that the glass might react badly at the low temperatures and expand to oblivion. Hauling the whole wall from a truck through the air into a cold slab surely put the glass frames through a great stress. I feared a big window would explode into pieces at any moment and kept holding my breath when the really big ones came over.
The crew members themselves said they never before assembled glass windows are big as those. But despite the extra care, they were very experienced and pushed on in order to keep the pace and use the day light.
It is real!
I walked all around the place, making photos, videos and being delighted on the details. Above all, the real size of walls and rooms don’t really “register” in your mind until you see it with your eyes. As we were not supposed to be in the way of the crew, I climbed on scaffolds and looked from the top, checking the space, imagining how it would be to live there…
The first day was almost over and most doubts, fear and anxiety were dissipated under the joy of seeing my house becoming real. You may look at it and think this is just a skeleton of a building and have no beauty to it. Or you can look at it with the eyes of an architect/engineer, and understand how amazing it is to be able to design, plan and build all the different parts of a building, transport it around the country, bring it to its final place and then put it together precisely, in a way it fits exactly as it was planned to be. All of that in just a few days!
Alone the project logistic is a huge challenge. The amount of know-how of the involved professionals is astounding. But the precision and quality with which it’s created and brought to life makes it truly fabulous.
What's next
Both house and garage should be standing and dry (closed with a roof) in four days. A smaller house might even get ready in three days. But this project was more complicate and the weather conditions were hard. For me the worst had past.
That night I went to sleep happy, relieved that all went well and deeply thankful for it.
