As a project sponsor, Productspec are really proud of the
Meridian First Light Team for their incredible achievement to date. Here's an update from the team following the successful auction of the house:
"The shipping of the Meridian First Light house has always seemed like a distant idea to us. We knew it had to happen and designed the house accordingly, but still, the idea of the house sitting packed up on a boat and making its way across the pacific has always been hard to imagine. Now that moment has finally arrived.
On Friday the 17th of June the last of the containers with wrapped up components of the Meridian First Light house left Frank Kitts Park in Wellington. It was transported up to Tauranga by Mainfreight to join the rest of the house before being loaded onto the ship to depart New Zealand. While the team will have a relatively direct flight to the US the house will get to visit a few interesting spots on its way to Washington. We are used to jumping on a plane and arriving in the US within a day but the house will take over a month to complete its journey.
The house left Tauranga on the 30th of June and will stop off briefly in Auckland before heading out into the Pacific. A container carrier the ‘Bahia’ will be loaded up with a whole lot of shipping containers including the Meridian First Light house in Hamburg Süd containers and flat racks.
The ship will take over two weeks to cross the Pacific Ocean – here’s hoping for calm weather as it passes through the tropics! It will reach land in Manzanillo, Mexico’s busiest port, before making its way through the Panama canal. Once through the canal the boat will stop off Cartagena, Colombia before reaching Philadelphia, the final water bourn destination for the house, on the 26thof July.
Once the containers and flat racks holding the Meridian First Light house are unloaded the ship will continue on its way. Our containers will then need to go through customs (fingers crossed we have cleaned everything to their liking) and get loaded onto trucks to make the final leg of the journey to Washington DC.
Along with the logistics of getting the house packed up and into a transportable state there were a number of decisions made around the materials used in the house to make sure the house could make it through customs and back again. The treatments used on materials in the US have different restrictions and needs to those in New Zealand.
Here in NZ it is standard to use CCA treatment which gives timber an extended life and protects against fungi and insects, but in the US the use of this is restricted and cannot be used in domestic buildings. The team discussed a number of alternative treatments which would fulfil the building codes here and in the US. A variety of treatments were used including ACQ, Boron and Copper Azole. Where possible we chose materials where treatment was not needed, for example our cladding made from Herman Pacific Western Red Cedar did not need treatment to be used here or in the US.
As well as the treatments the containers needed to go through fumigation before leaving Tauranga and will go through a similar process on the way back. We will be bringing the house back the way it left and certainly would not want to bring back anything with us that we didn’t take in the first place!"