Laying the cladding

The stage that dresses up the building 🧥 and gives it its charm! This long work requires many steps. We chose a Douglas fir cladding, previously soaked in a saturator bath, which should allow us to delay the first treatments, necessary to do on the facades 🏠, by a few years and also favour a more uniform greying of the wood. We hope so anyway 🤞!

Step 1: attach the rain screen film, it is stapled directly to the wood fibre boards.

Step 2: put the vertical battens in place to create a gap for air to circulate from the bottom to the top and for water to run off. Then fix horizontal battens to which the cladding boards will be fixed. If we had chosen to lay the cladding horizontally the vertical battens would have been sufficient, only the cladding would have been damaged more quickly as the wood fibres would not have allowed the water to run down to the ground! The battens are nailed vertically and horizontally directly into the wood fibre boards 🔨.

Step 3: Laying the cladding! This step, which requires a special cut 🪚 of each board is long and tedious, because it is the finishing of the building and while we're at it we prefer it to look nice 😍 ! All the boards are fixed with "finettes" (very small, almost invisible nails) and then the big nails are driven in with the pneumatic nailer, following the chalk lines drawn with a ruler ✏️🧶.

February and March 2023