Floors and Doors

I’m happy with the overall structure now and Ive moved on to detailing the house. This week was a learning experience. I found that if I make structural changes, this time to accommodate flush mounted flooring, caused a dozen other items to move out of alignment and needed to be re-adjusted as well. I’m sure there’s a fix to this, like attaching items to a host, but could not do this with everything. I still have a lot to learn in Revit and in general about design. But I am persistent and keep moving forward.

I added two types on floors this week:

1.This first is SwissTrax RibTrax and RubberTrax products. The RubberTrax are made from recycled tires and can be used for LEED points. They are less durable and softer so I have used them in the areas we will be working and walking and the rest of the areas will use the harder vinyl RibTrax version. Because I could not find a CAD or BIM file for these I created my own from a photo of the item the company sent a sample of. These will be used as the flooring for the Garage, Office, machine room and L2 Bathroom. We figured out that having these in front of our cat litter box will stop litter from being tracked all over the house. The spaces requires 825 tiles, with a few on-site spares. We stuck with minimalist all black with no patterns as the RubberTrax only come in black.

2. The second was for the Zen Room. Traditional Japanese tatami was selected for this space. My wife grew up in Japan with all of her houses containing tatami. Its only fitting that this house has a room with it as well to fit in with her lifestyle. Once again I could not find any Revit tatami mat family so I had to do a lot of reach on materials and sizes to create my own. I came up with a nice pattern that represents a typical pattern and then modified it to fit in a container. A total of 9 mats was used and can be seen in the image.  Locking forward to that wonderfully smell of fresh tatami!

The rest of the floors in the house will be polished concrete, possibly with patterns, colored and sliced/embedded rocks.

The other area of interest was doors. Some of the doors are just placeholders for now as I find and define the hardware needed. To keep with the open feel of the house, we will use as few doors as required, but the ones that are needed have to be large, minimalist and stable feeling. There’s a total of 11 doors throughout the structure. That’s half the amount of doors of our current house. The front door is a large pivot door, but most of the other doors are Bard Door slier types with different panel materials based on the area of the house. Example: Bedroom 2 has an all steel door, the office and garage/house entry both have a glass door, as seen in the Garage image. The most difficult was the creating an abstract Shoji door for the Zen Room as seen in the picture. It took a dozen ties to come up with a pastern that fit well in the space.

The list of parts is getting long and difficult to edit in a text file, so I investigated software to build houses. It seems like there are two solutions, a simple excel spreadsheet or a much more expensive software, which is geared toward commercial operations and buildings which is much more software then I need at this time. To keep it simple, I’m going to import all of the data into an older commercial building spread sheets Ive used in the past for Data Center build outs and then mod it to fit into this situation of using commercial construction methods and materials to build houses.

Large Images:

Image 1 –  SwissTrax pattern layout

Image 2 – SwissTrax overview

Image 3 – Garage render

Image 4 – Zen Room entry