Topping-out ceremony of our Oak Framed Passivhaus
The oak frame is up!
Our experience of self-building our oak-frame house was a series of exciting steps, but the most significant was seeing the oak frame go up (described in our main blog, here) and celebrating its completion with a topping-out ceremony.
The pictures on the right show the crane ready to move the oak frame onto the foundation slab and two views of the fully-constructed oak frame. Strictly, a topping out ceremony celebrates the finishing of the top-most part of the building’s frame. In our case there was some additional construction to complete the roof ridge and gable ends above the insulating encapsulation system. (To contribute to achieving the Passivhaus standard, these were structurally disconnected from the frame and, literally, completely outside the encapsulation system, and thus did not create any ‘cold bridges’ through the house’s insulation. You can find out more about our passive house’s insulation system and the ‘fabric first’ approach here.)
Anyway, an oak-frame house is really all about its oak frame itself so the topping off ceremony celebrated the finishing of the erection of our oak frame. Whilst we had seen lots of diagrams of the oak frame and experimented with a software programme that enabled us to see the components of the house and its frame, seeing large oak beams being put together over just nine working days was our first real feeling that this was the house that we were going to live in.
Celebrating the erection of the frame was thus a fitting acknowledgement of achieving this most significant part of our journey.
Traditionally, in various countries, topping out is celebrated with beer and cake and involves the builders, the neighbours and the people paying for it all. We were delighted that many of our immediate neighbours, and some from further afield, wanted to join us for some beer and cakes, together with the team who erected the frame, their firm’s managing director, and our main builder and his family.
The highlight of the topping out, or topping off, ceremony is traditionally performed by the youngest member of the construction team fixing a small tree or, in our case, an oak tree branch, to the highest point of the frame. This is shown in the pictures below and in this video of the youngest team member fixing the oak branch to the oak frame.
We also thought it rather amusing that one of our neighbours, who had had an Oakwrights oak frame porch added to their house, complained that there had been no topping out ceremony for them. We like to think that they felt better about this after sharing a few bottles of beer with us.