[papercreters] Re: 16 sided house

Dag nabit.

Now you went and got me frustruated.

Why? Because I had built a nice custom spreadsheet from scratch a few years back for the explicit purpose of doing all the detailed math calculations for constructing a building of any type of regular equilateral polygon.

The spreadsheet would allow you to enter the number of sides you wanted in your structure.
Desired thickness of your walls.
and some other parameters I can't recall right now.

The spreadsheet would spit out the centerline dimension of each wall, the interior dimensions, the exterior dimensions, the sq footage of the building footprint, the interior sq footage, the volume of the entire structure, the interior volume, and a bunch of other things I can't recall.

It even would calculate the volume of material it would require to build the walls, and if you knew the costs for those materials you could budget and plan accordingly.

I think the spreadsheet even calculated the interior and exterior surface area of the walls to make it easier to plan and budget for material quantities of plaster/stucco/clapboard siding/paint/etc.

Importantly, I distinctly remember calculating the corner distances from a center point. That would greatly simplify the layout of the structure on the ground. The spreadsheet would tell you how long of a stringline to use from a center post.

You simply use that string line as a compass and mark a circle on the ground of your building site. Pick a point on that circle for an initial wall corner, then mark off every other corner using the wall dimentions in the spreadsheet and a tape measure keeping every corner on that circle.

You could lay out the entire structure in a few minutes, especially if you had two people to hold both ends of the string and/or tape measure.

It's not that the calculations are anything earthshattering, but the spreadsheet made everything so convenient, fast, and easy. You could use the spreadsheet to quickly and easily play around with different building sizes and configurations. Want to try a funky heptdecagon? Just enter a 17 in the number of sides you want on your structure. Blammo. A fraction of a second later, you have all the dimensions and could walk outside, shove a stick in the ground, grab a string, tape measure, and a can of spray paint and mark it out full size just to get a feel for it. If you knew the cost of all your materials, you'd even have a rough idea how much it would all cost to build.





Problem is, I can't find that dag nabit spreadsheet. It's pissing me off. I'll be searching through old hard drive backups to find that dang spreadsheet to give to you.

Now that I think about it... I think I asked spaceman to double check my work on that spreadsheet to confirm that my calculations were correct?


SpaceDude? Do you still have a copy of that old spreadsheet from years ago?

Please say yes.




--- In papercreters@yahoogroups.com, Garth & Kim Travis <gartht@...> wrote:
>
> Greetings,
>
> We are seriously thinking about building a 16 sided house, one story
> only. We do not want a fireplace in the middle, as roof leaks are a
> major headache in the Gulf Coast region.
>
> I am wondering what to use for a center pole. The interior measurements
> are a 40' diameter, with 18" walls and a 5' porch wrapping the building.
> We plan on using the center as our entertainment center, with a rocket
> stove on an exterior wall.
>
> Every home built like this that I can find is a two story, and built for
> the cold north, not my hot, humid Texas.
> --
> Bright Blessings,
> Garth & Kim Travis
> www.TheRoseColoredForest.com
> Bedias, Texas
>




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