Surprise! A new Plat House fully formed!

Most of the time when we send out House Plans to customers it is like sending a message out into the void, never to be heard from again. But every so often one of those houses bounces back, and appears one day, fully formed in the flesh, both surprising and delighting us! This week was one such time.

Roughly two years ago we posted that we were working on a Plat House 3 modification, and gave a preview of the modified house elevations showing the appearance of the attached garage. The Construction Prints were completed and delivered to the Owners a few weeks later, and we moved on to other deadlines and projects. Last week it occurred to me that I had not checked in with them in a long time and sent off an email to see if they had started building. What I got back was a series of photos of the nearly fully complete house - amazing!
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New Customer Build: Michigan XHouse2

I am super thrilled to be able to introduce a new customer project that we are going to track on the blog. There has been a drought of customer builds and I hope this one inspires some others to correspond about their builds. Ok, lets go over some of the interesting features of this build.

The first thing is that this build is a First Build of the 0956 XHouse2, or at least the first build of the house from the Stock Plan set created of this house design since it was first built in all steel as the 3030 House. I’m always excited about First Build projects because its great to see a design realized in real space and time!

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USA New Wall - The never ending question of electrical boxes

Now that thousands of people have learned about the USA New Wall model for easy to build high performance wall assemblies the single most common question is how do you put electrical boxes in the utility cavity? It could not be easier.

Here is the explanation one more time:

In the 1.5" wiring chase you use 4x4x1.5" square boxes. These actually have a few more cubic inches inside than a regular switch box. Then you use a reducer cover to take it down to a normal switch plate - the reducer has a 1/2" or 5/8” extension that reaches through the drywall.

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