We developed our panelized Passive House construction system specifically for the GO Home line of predesigned houses, but it’s proven efficient and cost-effective on a number of GO Logic custom home projects too. This current project on Cape Cod may be the system’s most challenging application to date, and with the first of two panel installations now complete, we’re very pleased with the results.
The site, in the town of Truro, is beautiful, with elevated views that follow the curve of the outer Cape all the way to Provincetown. That remoteness, plus an overheated local construction market and a shortage of skilled labor, weighed in favor of prefabricating the building shell in our Maine panel shop and assembling it on site with our own crew. But the complexity of the design required extra care at every stage of the process.
The building’s main living space opens to the view at its northwesterly corner with a 15-foot-wide sliding glass door, establishing a diagonal axis that is emphasized overhead by a trapezoidal roof rotated 90 degrees in relation to the walls below. The eccentric roof form—which repeats over the master bedroom wing—created a number of unique structural conditions, along with the need for lots of trapezoidal building panels. The fact that the building reused an existing foundation meant that the shell design also had to account for numerous anomalies below.
Credit for the project’s success to date goes to Robert Nelson of Becker Structural Engineers, who came through with an elegant, practical structural design; GOL project designer Alexandra Pagan, who has put in a ton of hours coordinating structural and design drawings; and the GO Logic framing crew, who have set the panels for the house’s main volume—plus half of the garage/master suite wing—and are making fast work of their first diagonal-ridge, trapezoidal roof.
With the final panels scheduled for installation in mid-July, the project is on track for completion in December.
