Mackay Laneway House: Framing nearly complete

Framing is nearly complete at Mackay Laneway House. The rest of it should be finished up this week so that the team can get started on roofing and siding. It’s starting to feel like a real house and it’s exciting to see the spaces come together. It also feels a lot more spacious than you might expect from looking at the site and the drawings

Double height space to bring light from a second floor skylight down to the ground floor

As of right now, the plan is to keep the ceiling joists on the ground floor exposed. Because the entire house had to be raised out of a Tree Protection Zone and because laneway suites are capped at 6 meters above established grade, the ceiling heights were getting squeezed down to 8 feet clear on both floors. Ideally, we would have preferred more.

To try and reduce the impacts of these lower ceilings, we decided to expose the ground floor ceiling as a way to create the feeling of more height. (The second floor ceiling won’t be exposed because it needs to be insulated.) Similarly, we decided to expose the ground floor ducts (and paint them matte black), as opposed to building out any bulkheads, which would also compress the space.

But the biggest design challenge that we faced during framing had to do with working around our famous tree. There’s a large branch that runs overtop of the (future) stairs on the east side of the house. The project arborist didn’t think it should be removed and so we modified the roofline to accommodate it.

Our famous tree

Fortunately, we were able to keep the maximum allowable height throughout all of the living areas on the second floor and only had to adjust the roof over the stairs. All of the spaces work just fine and we don’t think this change hurts the architectural intent in any meaningful way. More photos of this to follow.

Stay tuned as we start to close in the house. For more frequent micro-updates on Mackay Laneway House, you can also follow Globizen on Twitter.