The Poziombke Page: SIP delivery

The exterior walls of the upper floor will be constructed using SIPs ( Structurally Insulated Panels ). We chose Premier SIPs in Fife, WA for our SIP supplier. SIPs offer a few key advantages when building. First they are structurally very strong, and well insulated. They are basically OSB sheathing sandwiching 6 inches of XPS foam. Due to the added strength none of the interior walls are required to be shear walls, and the insulation performance increase comes from the reduction in thermal breaks. In a traditional stick frame construction there is a thermal break every 16 inches. Another advantage is the speed of construction, as the walls are already insulated and sheeted. The panels for my project total 45 total panels with the largest ones being 8 feet by 9 feet.

To install them a 2x6 is attached to the floor and the SIP panel is placed on top of it. A bit of mastic and some screws and you have a wall. The major disadvantage is with plumbing and electrical. While it's never a good idea to run plumbing in exterior walls, it's pretty much impossible with SIPs. Luckily we designed with this in mind and only have two areas to address. The first being the Master Bath. Since the room is fairly large we opted to fur in the West wall for plumbing, and in the kitchen we are also going to fur in the East wall. In the kitchen this is primarily for the sink vent, but will also make electrical a bit easier too. For electrical there are factory pre-cut chases at both outlet and light switch heights along with vertical chases on each end of a panel. It does require a bit of wire fishing, but you do eliminate all of the hole drilling required in stick framing.

The panels arrive on a flatbed truck. I needed to rent a four wheel drive fork lift to offload them. Since I ended up being the forklift driver I wasn't able to get pics of the process, but here are some pics of my snazzy fork lift and the panels after we got them onto the second floor.