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Entry tags:	hacks/house

construction time again

I'm building a house. This is neither a figure of speech, nor some geeky jargon to obscure the point. I'm speaking about a real house like those where people live in:

People construct houses as dwelling-spaces for human habitation. Such dwellings generally feature enclosing walls, a roof and one or more floors. This overall structure provides shelter against precipitation, wind, heat, cold and intruders [...] The house often provides a permanent residence for a family or for a similar social unit. When occupying a house routinely as a dwelling, English-speaking people may call this building their "home". People may leave their house most of the day for work and recreation, but typically return "home", to their house, at least for sleeping.

-- From the Wikipedia entry on houses

Yep! It will have all of these: Walls, a roof, more than one floors, the works!

After about 15 years of living in the same 65 square-meters flat down-town in Athens, I took the big decision to change place of residence. Initially I thought that buying a new, spacier apartment in a decent neighborhood would be the most economic way to go. After asking around, and after doing some rough calculations, it became obvious that building a house---in a lot my brother and I had inherited from our mother---would cost about the same and the result would probably be much better.

The lot is in Nea Penteli; formerly a village sitting on the slopes of the Penteli mountains. Now Nea Penteli has become a suburb not too far from the center of Athens, especially given the very good access to Attiki Odos ring road. The area is still surrounded by a lot of greenery (mainly pine-trees forests) and is quite agreeable. The exact coordinates are:

38o 03' 27.36'' N
23o 51' 01.00'' E
Elevation 352m

(you can easily find it in google maps. It's the empty lot on "Digeni Eoka" street, third from the intersection with "Neas Pentelis Ave"). The postal address is:

Digeni Eoka 24,
152 36 Nea Penteli
Attiki

The total area of the lot is 400 square-meters (20 by 20). The building code allows a coverage ratio of 0.4 which together with all other rules and regulations results in a a total of about 300 square meters in two above-ground floors. Since my brother owns half of it, a single building will have to incorporate two residences, 150 square meters each. Constructing two independent buildings is economically out of the question, and also probably impossible due to regulations.

I'm new to all this construction business, but the consensus among friends who have done it before seems to be that in each and every stage---even if you take for granted an engineer that oversees the project, and whom you can trust (something that is usually not so very much granted)---even then there is an enormous amount of work for the owner.

Currently works on the concrete frame of the building are almost finished. Soon brickwork will begin, after cleaning up and leveling the surrounding area. If you are curious you can take a look at the floor-plans for the ground-floor, the first-floor, and the basement. All plans are in 1:75 scale and were prepared by yours truly using the very nice, open-source program QCAD. If you see anything flaky in them (like "oh my God, the elevator door opens in the bathroom!"), please point it out. Maybe there's still time to fix it.

I'm thinking of occasionally reporting here on the progress of the construction, as well as on experiences gained from it. I'll tag the relevant entries using: "hacks/house".

I hope next time I also have some pictures to show you.