Beginning construction in China

Posted: Mon Sep 08, 2008 6:44 pm

Thanks Rod! Ha. I didn't even have to wait for Mason. You da man!

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2008 10:11 am

I just did a drawing trying to figure out the door design (I plan on doing Rod's "super door"--IF I can find a place that sells lead sheets. Otherwise I'd have to do a two-door design).

(Please ignore the stuff in orange. For some reason my brain was going off on some weird tangent and felt that I needed a furring strip there so the door frame won't tear off the gypsums accidentally when we install the door. After thinking some more I realized it's really not necessary.)

So how does this door design look? Since I have the door sitting on an elevated solid wood base so the bottom of the door could clear the raised floor, there's actually very little weight, if any, that is distributed to the wall, right? I guess things means when I calculate the weight distribution for that wall, I could ignore the door altogether?

BTW, my contractor came back with some of the numbers according to the local suppliers of building materials:

-Weight of joists and studs - 0.766 per cm3 (during this time of year add roughly 3.8% weight for moisture)

-Gypsum (0.9cm) - 9kg per square meter

-Glassfiber 50k per m3 (the place we're getting it from didn't have 48k. Since 50k is so close I think it should be fine?)

An acoustic engineer friend of mine in the States told me this interesting tip: He said that since the quality of the wood is often that that good in China, you need to test each joist you buy, by pounding on it with your palm and listening for any kind of resonance due to gaps in the wood. If the wood isn't totally solid and resonates, then fill any gap you can see with caulk, or they might cause problems later. Anyone else has heard of this before?

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