Above is a picture of our West wall with all the doors and windows installed.
Gary and his son Brett were back on Friday to get the last two custom arched windows in. These were pretty big and heavy. It took four of us to hoist them up into place. Gary’s vacuum glass grips sure came in handy. We are now fully closed in on three sides of the house. Only the North entrance wall is still open. This will have to wait until we figure out what we are going to do for a front door. I have designed a round top steel door with a round window in it. We are getting estimates on having it fabricated but we can’t close off the North wall until we have dimensions for the door.
The other big project for this weekend was putting in our “temporary” homemade skylight. With the left-over scraps of double wall polycarbonate panel from our South arched window, I was able to build a skylight for our cupola.
Eventually we will want to build this from a single insulated polycarbonate sheet, but that will have to be specially ordered. I used “H” channel strips to join the three pieces of polycarbonate. We will line the inside of the cupola with a highly reflective material to help transmit light down into the living space. Overall, I am very pleased at how this worked out especially since it was made from scrap material that otherwise would have been thrown away.
Here is a shot of the East wall with all the windows & door installed.