Watch our show home come to life with our demo diary!

We are very excited to announce that our show home build has begun. We’re building on the site of our factory in Ropley — on a farm with beautiful far reaching views.

As we progress the build, we will share regular “demo diary” updates on our website and social media channels. These will include lots of images, video clips and on the ground updates of what is happening.

Keep an eye out here:

Instagram @thekisshouse
LinkedIn @ Kiss House
Twitter @TheKissHouse
Facebook @TheKissHouseOfficial

We cannot wait for your visit…

Timber i-Beams arrived on site. These beams are used to make the floor cassettes, and are around 13m in length.

The team was delighted to have a new spindle moulder delivered and installed in the factory. This will shape the timber to the right profile and create standard lengths of Kiss House Passivhaus window frames — yes, you read it right — our own windows! We plan to invest in additional tooling over time to expand our product range further. It’s going to be amazing to be able to experiment and see what else we can do! One plan is to add a five axis CNC machine to aid the detailing of our window frame joints, watch this space…

Right now we are loving working with the spindle moulder — the system is great because it’s plug and go and we can assemble speedily and accurately. It also creates stronger details than a typical dowel system.

What we’ve made this week: we have had a lot of fun creating fabricated Plybox columns which we have stored in our climate controlled warehouse until installation. We are in the process of further refining our panel design to enable us to use a small machine or manual lifting!

We have fabricated lots of screw pile caps for the top of our screw piles (they’ll take the weight off the floor cassettes and columns), and lots of brackets which will be a regular feature in the installation of the show home.

We have also produced the ring beam which will sit on top of the screw piles and spread the load of the floor cassettes and columns. This was installed to a level of plus or minus 1mm which is beyond the norm for foundation tolerances, and for which we must congratulate our team!

Things have been progressing nicely with our temporary works locating plates — some are complete, others are due to be powder coated. When they are finished and we start building, they will be screwed to the floor and ceiling cassettes and when we’re ready, we will use them to aid installing our temporary works. Our system ensures very high levels of accuracy so we look forward to reporting on that to you.

Perhaps the highlight of our week was the assembly of the bespoke Kiss House wall cassette stillages. These govern how we move the multiple sized walls to site, and allow for everything to be unloaded safely. We’ve designed them ourselves and they enable multiple stillages to be loaded onto one vehicle for return to the factory saving on transport costs and reducing our carbon emissions — what’s not to love!

Over the last few days, we’ve been producing first floor, floor cassettes. These have been formed from timber i-Beams on bespoke Kiss House floor cassette rigs designed and fabricated in the Kiss House factory.

Following this, we attached OSB boards to the top to complete the cassette. We then cut service routes and fill with insulation. It is exciting to see the cassettes coming together having put so much into the design and planning. They are now ready for installation in the show home, which is very exciting!

We also created a variety of cassette lengths — the longest being 11m! These go across the length of our houses / the show home, and are supported by the internal walls. Smaller sections detail the stairway entrance.

Finally we finished the first floor, structural Plybox columns this week, and we have now put them aside ready for installation.

We have now finished building all the transport stillages. These will be used to take the walls and columns of the system to site. When we arrive on site, we will be able to use them as storage which will be handy! We have made it so we are able to collapse the stillages for the return journey, which will reduce trips and lower carbon emissions to and from site.

We also managed to complete the storage racking for our timber boards and the i-beams that we are currently making. The storage is heavy duty, so we will be able to store a significant amount of materials and parts.

Finally, we have started designing certain elements of the house! The stairs and the transportation package that will move them into place on site have been designed. The transportation package will also protect them from any damage during their journey!

What we’ve been up to recently: There have been multiple plates spinning in the factory of late, but we can finally share our latest demo house update.

We broke ground on our new assembly warehouse which will be next to our factory, alongside the demo house.  This space will provide us with a dedicated area for us to assemble all Kiss House components. All components will be made in the main warehouse, and then complete kits will be transferred to the assembly warehouse and put together. The space will keep all finished panels in a clean space, and allow for more room to install rigs, cranes and stillages.

We managed to complete the structural columns for the demo house, and finished them with Vapour Control Layers (VCL) and fire proofing. These are now ready to be added to the installation kit of parts. Following this, work on the roof cassettes began, and we can’t wait to see them all finished.

Our CNC machine has been creating integral structural components. This has been a fascinating process, and it’s great to see the machine start to create the smaller details of a Kiss House.

We are creating roof cassettes, and finally using our new wall cassette jig to make parts from pre-cut material.  Excitingly, the land for the new assembly warehouse is now scraped away and prepared.

Just a little update:

Just before Christmas, the factory received a new machine for window production. Richard has been practicing with it, creating new profiles and frame parts for the first Kiss House windows which will feature in the demo house. The machine is now in its new home, ready to produce more Kiss House home windows.

Work has begun on our new warehouse building which is situated next to Barn 1. This building will be used for the assembly of Kiss House home components.

We have also run two more open days which have been a great success! We have enjoyed showing customers, potential customers and industry folks around our factory so far, and can’t wait to show more in the future. If you are interested in attending any of our future days, please register here for industry and here if you are a customer.

Stay tuned for the next update. Get all the Kiss House news here