My flat wants to kill me

It´s the beginning of April, I am sitting at my desk, writing this post and slowly melting. Why? Because my flat is trying to boil me alive! As an explanation, me and my girlfriend live on the second floor of an old factory, which was renovated and repurposed. There are now around 50 flats on 4 floors. The building is really massive and beautiful. I like industrial buildings because of their roughness and therefore I like our flat. I like the column in the middle of our flat, I like indoor atrium in the centre of the building. I like chimney in the back of the building and I like the view from our window. We are looking on another repurposed factory. Below you can see what I see every day from my desk.

But the most interesting thing about our flat is its height. I must admit that I did not know the exact height of our ceiling, but I carefully measured it just for your amusement and my curiosity. And by carefully measure, I actually mean that I stepped on the floor, then on the ladder and observed how many times could I fit there if I stood on my own head. Hence I can tell you that our flat, floor to ceiling is 2.5 constructing architect (that´s me) high. And if I put on my math cap I can tell you that means it is 4.6 meters high. Wow. And we are slowly getting to the reason why I want to dive right into a pool of ice cream.

Our apartment is located on the south side of the building, and by south I mean totally direct south with maximum possible exposure to the sun. And practically whole wall facing south is, guess what, one big curtain wall (wild guess 70% of area). And since our flat is so high, the curtain wall goes from floor and stops around half a meter below the ceiling.

That means that solar gain through this wall is huge. At school, we are always being reminded about danish weather, cold winters, rain and wind. And that we must insulate well and build tight. But in my apartment we turned the heating on probably ten times this winter. And our energy bill is smaller than bill for printing drawings at school. And since the flat is otherwise quite small, and this is our only window. We can open the hinged part of window and it does nothing, because there is no draft. Therefore, starting probably this week, we will be sleeping with window totally opened.

And since I am suffering from heatwave, you can endure looking at my sketch where I am showing section of our apartment with evil sun, maniacally grinning at the corner.

Oh and did I mentioned that law of physics which says that the hot air rises? That law that sentenced us to sleep in the hottest area – on the second floor up the ladder? Bummer.

I like my flat so much, but it is literally slowly killing me. So now you can laugh at me, how you want. But since I am always more a “pint half full” type of guy, I am going to lay down with my sketchbook and a pint of Ben&Jerry´s.

Cheers

Ondrej