5/27-5/30 | Taking Shape

TLDR

This is a much more technical update. My house's interior will be roughly 800 square feet. I have also been able to make great progress on my Revit project and am excited to continue putting things together.

Dimensions

The dimensions were informed the most by truck cargo regulations. The idea is that you can carry anything that is 8 feet wide and within the length of the Grandfather bed (usually 48 feet), which is just a standard bed in trucking that changes slightly from state to state. Anything wider than 8 feet and you need an oversized cargo permit. Anything usually over 12 feet, then you need escort vehicles and can most likely only drive during specific hours.

For this house, I'm trying to maximize my space while still going by these standards, so I opted to have each half of the house be, on the inside, 10 feet by 40 feet, so that, with the connection between the two, the house is just a little over 800 square feet, which is pretty much a New York apartment. This means that each half has a width of 10' plus 1' 4'' from the interior walls plus 6'' from the wood paneling, which comes out to be 11' 10'', meaning I can just have the halves transported with an oversized load permit.

I'm pretty content with these sizes, but I might be able to change them later on in Revit if needed.

Revit Project Developments

So far, I have worked on the Revit project for two days and I'm pretty excited by how much I've been able to do. I have been dedicating a lot of time, though (more than five hours each day for sure), which is great because this weekend I won't have access to my computer.

The house so far viewed isometrically

This image, as well as all others shown below and more, can be viewed in this folder.

The first day was marked by a pretty steep learning curve. My experience with other 3D modeling programs helped a bit, but it also hindered my performance because many of the shortcuts and methods of moving around the interface were swapped so I sometimes did unintentional actions. Nonetheless, I managed to get about one half of my house's main shape done.

Creation of the slanted roof and wall

The first half rendered in Enscape

The hardest part was the slanted wall and roof. Revit is a very powerful program but the ways in which users can make these specific shapes are very complicated and, most of the time, obscure. So I had to do a lot of research to find exactly what tools were needed for which job. In the end, I did get the shape I wanted with the particular dimensions needed.

I then basically copied this half, mirrored it, and placed it next to the first half offset. I had to make some changes to the wood paneling on the exterior to make enough space for each corner. You can see in the floor plan below that there is a thicker structure on the inside with very thin walls on the outside. The thicker walls are the 3D printed material and the thin walls are the wood panels.

Project floor plan

You can also see above four distinct areas. The long section above is the kitchen which bleeds into the living space. Connected to it is a small study and relaxing area. There are two rooms with doors. The bedroom is the leftmost room with a sizable window to enjoy views. The bathroom is the middle room and has a thin window to allow light in. Do note that I haven't made the kitchen window, the main entrance or the large ceiling-wall-floor window in the study area nor have I actually made windows to fit into the large holes in the wall for the bedroom, bathroom, and living area. These are developments that I should hopefully make next week.

Above the structure is also a thin metal roof that follows the V-shaped roofline.

Elevation view from the East

Overall I am super happy with how things have been going so far! I knew that there would be some sort of learning curve and there still definitely is, but I have become a lot more efficient in the program and I'm excited to continue. I've already started furnishing the interior to just see how the space would be used, and I think it looks quite nice!

In terms of the Revit project, I still have to do a lot of the interior, all of the windows, the entrance, the concrete slabs at the top and bottom, the outdoor space, the metal support beams, the overhang for the garage, and the surrounding forest environment, so I'm definitely going to keep busy.

You can view the project in the Autodesk online viewer as well. Do keep in mind that there are no textures so everything is flat, but you can hopefully get a better sense of the space. At the bottom, you can switch between an orbit view and a first-person view.