It just keeps looking bigger! Week 21 -- 11/19-23/07

This was a short work week due to the Thanksgiving holidays. Still a lot was done & the place looked even more like a house by the end of the week.

Kelly, our friend & cabinetmaker, came to measure for the kitchen, laundry & master bath cabinets. He said it looked like a strip mall. So this week you can imagine where the UPS store, the fast food joint & the ice cream place are. There's no question but that Brake Max is at the end.

The week started with our first out of town visitors -- Sally from WA & her son, Mark, from Phoenix. That's the front porch they're standing on. I'm standing on the footing for one of the posts that will hold up the roof of the front porch.

This is the shop with a pretty good view of what the viewing deck on the right will be like.

This is just the house by itself. See, it doesn't look so big without the shop attached. And it's not that big. Many of you have houses with much more square footage. The house interior is actually only 2336 square feet.

Most of the interior rough framing was completed this week. This is the kitchen in the foreground.

Remember when we were struggling with the fireplace last week? Dave, our builder, did this mock up for us to look at. You can barely see the strings indicating the shape of the cone. We made some slight changes to make the shape a little more dramatic -- narrower at the ceiling, sticking farther out into the room at the hearth ... Check back next week to see how it came out.

Most of the sheathing was completed. Much of the work done you can't see because it was done on the roof. The guys framed the crickets that lead to the scuppers. You can see some of the scupper holes in this picture of the west side of the house. These scuppers will empty onto the back porch roof.

This is the garage with its scupper holes. Several are required to help drain the shop roof. You can barely see one from the shop roof on to the garage roof at the right. There are 4 coming off the garage roof.

This is a closeup of a scupper hole. The sky sure was blue that day. I must've taken this picture pretty early in the morning.

The route we will likely tell people to use to get to the house will bring them to the entrance on Lynnette first.

If they miss the driveway, they will see the south side of the house.

And if they keep going they will look back over their right shoulders to see the back porch.

If they go on around the corner & come in the back way off Cinnabar, this is what they'll see.

For those of you who think there's nothing to eat in the desert, this is a barrel cactus fruit. There's a show on TV where a guy is put in wilderness places alone to survive for about a week. I saw the one where he was in the Sonoran Desert down here. One of the things he said was that he could find much more to eat here to survive than he was able to in a forest in BC or Alberta.