April 23, 2011 - For a project like the epic Creative Co-Op, you try to plan for as much as possible in advance, but when something unplanned that is good comes along you would be foolish not to include it to the project. That kind of serendipity happened to us a couple of months ago when we met Chris Larimore, president of Grupo Daissa. Although the company is headquartered in Mexico, and does much of it's business in South America, Chris lives a short distance from our studio.

Chris had been watching our building go up, and decided to stop in one morning to talk. He asked me what we were planning on using for the roof decking and siding, and I told him R-panel, which are the pre-formed steel sheets popular on metal buildings (and what we had used on the epic studio). Chris had a material with him I had never seen before (or at least never really paid attention to). His company manufactures ACM or Aluminum Composite Material. ACM as I was about to learn, is one amazing product.

Posted by on April 24, 2011

April 17, 2011 - With the exterior painting behind us, we turned out attention to getting everything ready for the insulation crew from ComforTemp.  Many of the questions we've had over the past several months had to do with our plans for insulating the epic Creative Co-Op, so we have created a separate blog entry just for that purpose.  Running wires and pipes are relatively easy to install when there is no insulation in the walls. Once insulation is added to the wall cavities, things get much more complicated.

Posted by on April 17, 2011

April 15, 2011 - This week the folks from ComforTemp came to the job site and insulated 9 of the 11 containers. Over the past year we interviewed almost a dozen companies trying to determine what kind of insulation system we would use, and who we would choose to install it.  Last week we selected ComforTemp after several meetings with Paul Adamoli the General Manager. We were most impressed with the questions he asked and his ideas on how to provide the best building envelope at the lowest cost.  

ComforTemp is a unique company in several ways. They install the three most popular kinds of insulation - fiberglass, cellulose and spray foam. When it comes to cellulose, you won't find a better price because they not only install it, but manufacture it in their plant here in Houston, TX.  It is also a family owned company that understand the importance of great customer service. In this post we will show you how their crew tackled the insulation challenges of this unique structure.

Posted by on April 17, 2011

April 9, 2011 - Our goals for this week were to get the building painted, get the water and sewer lines working, install the main electrical lines, and get started on the HVAC installation. By Sunday evening we had met all of our objectives.

Glidden was kind enough to extend a professional discount to us, so we opted to go with them for the exterior and interior paint on the project. We visited the local store and met with Jack Biggs, the Field Service Rep for Glidden who has years of construction experience,  Jack asked us a number of questions about our project, then suggested a Glidden formulation that was developed specifically for external metal surfaces. This paint is not cheap, but we wanted something that will give us years of service and not fade. Mike Huffine of Silver Rock spent a great deal of time trying to get just the right color for the containers. We decided on blue, but were not sure of exactly what shade of blue we would go with. Jack gave us 3 samples of paint and suggested we do some tests.  He offered to come by after the paint has set up (72 hours) to see the results.

Posted by Vic on April 11, 2011

March 31, 2011 - One of the most challenging aspects of building with large metal boxes is how do you keep the inhabitants cool in the summer and warm in the winter?  We spent quite a bit of time looking at insulation systems for the inside and the outside of the building. For the exterior of the building, we found people saying good (and not so good) things about insulative paint coatings. We met with several vendors and had a difficult time believing some of their claims. 

I wanted an external coating that would reduce heat load along with the chance of condensation forming on the inside walls of the containers. The differential in temperature on the outside and inside can be quite dramatic. We actually watched it "rain" inside the container on one cold January morning when a "Norther" blew in early one afternoon.  We opted to use a radiant barrier on our roof deck, so I felt like we needed one on the walls as well. The heat load in the summer on the west and south walls will be substantial, and anything we can do now to help our HVAC system, will be returned in lower AC bills, and happier tenants.

Posted by on April 01, 2011