Research and Action -- Wk 43, April 20 - 26, 2008

My week was spent in doing a lot of furniture research mostly for the great room. At least Trout actually got something done that shows.

Cabinets

He was working away on his tin punching. He insists that it's not happening, but I see his work steadily improving and him getting faster at it. He's completed all the narrow drawer fronts for the kitchen. He's also finished the two doors that go under the sink.

This is what they look like on the floor of our rental.

At present, all the pieces are just held together by fitting, but they will be glued. Then Kelly will do the finishing on the wood. The stain will be the closest blue we can get to the Talavera blue of the tile.

Here are some details. That dot in the middle of the drawer front is the marker for the location of the knob.

My original design had the stars randomly scattered all over, but Trout improved on that by creating grids and putting groups of or individual stars in each grid.

The way this works is that he rubber cements the pattern on top of the tin, punches the pattern into the tin through the paper, removes the paper and cleans off the tin with a solvent. This is the way the guy in Albuquerque's DVD tells how to do it, and it's working very well as you can see.

Trout developed a standard pattern for the border from what I drew. He copies that on our copy machine and expands or contracts it based on the size of the piece.

For the stars, he copies the ones I drew, cuts them out and glues them randomly on the grid he creates. So far about 1/4 of the time spent on each piece is involved in setting up the pattern and the rest is punching. The clean up at the end just takes a couple of minutes.

Drywall and Stucco

While he was working on that, the drywall guys were finishing up, taping and mudding. Here are some shots of how that looks now.

This is the obligatory fireplace/banco shot you'll get almost every posting.

This is the SE corner of the guest room.

And this is the kitchen nicho above the refrigerator/freezer and desk nook.

One of our requests for this house was to have the corners be as broad a circle as possible so that they would look more like the adobe we couldn't fit in our budget. Here's a close up of one of them. This is the broadest curve possible, but it still doesn't show up very well here.

We went out once this past week to answer some questions for Dave and to position the mural place holders in anticipation of stucco this week. Here are Trout and Dave putting the wood placeholder in for the one next to the front door.

The way this will work is the wood will leave a depression where there is no stucco. We will remove it and the mural will go in that depression so that it looks like, well, shoot, it will be, embedded in the wall. The edges will curve down to meet the tile.

Pocket Doors

Our interior pocket doors were supposed to be hung this week, but as has been the frequent case with the window and door company, it was a comedy of errors.

First it turned out that the frames had been improperly installed. So some adjustments will have to be made to the doors. Apparently someone lost their job over that.

Then a mishap with the truck enroute to the house caused some damage, so one of the doors will need a major repair and two others had to have minor ones.

The third thing that happened was that we got there and discovered that only one frosted door had been put in the right location. All the doors have reed glass. The ones to the guest bath, guest room and between the guest room and guest bath, also are backed with a frost so that they are more opaque.

Well, a clear reed glass door was put between the guest bath and guest room, and the door that was supposed to go there was put in the entrance to our bedroom suite. Those two doors are standard height. The door from the guest bath and guest room into the entry are both 8 feet high as is the one into the office from the entry. They put the frosted one into the office. I don't know how they're going to fix this one, but it will be fixed somehow. How can there be only 8 pocket doors and over 1/2 of them are either damaged or hung in the wrong place?

Having said all that, the doors are beautiful. Here are some shots, but as usual they don't do them justice.

The stain matches the color of the twisted columns on the front and back porches very well. This is a frosted one. I can't remember if this is in the right place or not!

Here's a detail that shows the wood better. It's knotty alder. The color is actually much darker and redder than this.

And this is the (amazingly) right door for the laundry.

Furniture Planning

While Trout was punching tin and the drywallers were doing their thing, I spent an inordinate amount of time refining the furniture plans for the great room and the office with a lot of help from Joan.

Great Room

For the great room I decided on two matching chairs for us and two loveseats (no longer than 72") opposite each other for guests. Here's the basic plan. In spite of having such a large room, we want lots of open space, so there's really not a lot of room for furniture. This plan shows a large coffee table and a table between Trout and I. It also shows the footrests up on our chairs, so pretend we are in them. The TV will be mounted on the fireplace. There will be other comfort pieces like lamps, little tables, etc.

Some time ago I got an 8x11 oriental rug for the great room. This shows its colors pretty well.

The colors are consistent with what I'm using in the house. In case you're wondering why oriental instead of Mexican, we don't want too much of a good thing. I did get a southwestern-esque rug for the entry. I chose the design to encourage people to move through to the great room faster since the entry isn't very big.

I need to move back to the great room myself...

I convinced Trout (shades of Frasier) to get a new chair for himself and decided to get one just like it for me. Although he resisted, he did just fine choosing something at LaZBoy and selecting the fabric for it. As it turned out, his visit to the doc on Tuesday confirmed that he needed to elevate his feet more at night than he has been, so it will be good for that.

This picture is the chair in the fabric he selected, but it just doesn't come across very well online. So I scanned in my fabric sample and it's below the chair. If you want to visit your local LaZBoy store or online, the chair is called Faris and the fabric is a microfiber called Round Up. The color is Sequoia. It looks like leather with a red tinge. We didn't get leather partly because of the expense and partly because past experience indicates that we slide out of it.

Then I started on the quest for the loveseats.

We have a big issue with furniture in general. Most of it is way too soft. It's not just that we're old. We've always felt that way.

The 2nd only somewhat smaller issue is price. I never want to spend a lot of money and it's hard to get anything decent these days for less than $1000 dollars. So I was looking to buy 2 loveseats no longer than 72" each, comfortable for both Trout and me that cost around $1000 each.

I pre-shopped with Joan and on my own and in a store here called Table Talk, the local Bassett store, Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn and a custom furniture place called Contents. I found pieces that would work for me at all of them except Pottery Barn. Trout's more discerning butt found only one at Bassett and one at Crate and Barrel that sat okay for him. He would tolerate the one from Contents only if they would make the back cushions firm.

I liked the style of the Contents one best, but even though I found it at two other stores in town, the cheapest I could get it was double my budget, so it went out of the selection pool. The Bassett one was 50% higher and they were willing to cut the price down to my budget level, but I finally decided I liked the one from Crate and Barrel best.

Simultaneously, I was trying to decide what color to get the loveseats made up in. The fireplace will be painted a blue very close to the Talavera cobalt-like blue. That's why the rug has a blue base. Incidentally, it's very difficult to find an oriental with a blue base. Most are red or beige.

Anyway, I brought home green, gold, red and blue fabric samples. Because of that red border, I think the red looks the best, so that's what I'm going to go with. Because the sofa Trout liked best doesn't come in the fabric I like best, I will wait to order the loveseats until Crate and Barrel's big 25% off custom upholstery sale in August. So who knows where people will sit while we wait for them to arrive 6-8 weeks after we order them on sale. Bancos anyone?

Anyway, here's what the sofa looks like. It's obviously very plain. I did it online in a red, but this will probably not be the actual red color I get. Since it will be so long before we order it, I hope the fabric I scanned in below it will be available. It's a cushy kind of velvet. Its pattern is Josephine and the color is Cinnamon. If you want to check it out online, the sofa name is Troy. They don't show a loveseat with arms either online or in the catalog, but they do have that frame, 70" long.

Office

I originally planned to have the office all built-in. After years of working in cubicles, it was my comfort zone. The only thing I didn't like about that was the permanence of it. After Joan saw the place, she felt like it was too nice to have a built-in laminate-based office set up. Combining her good logic on that with the fact that the only place the Garland sofa would really work was in the office, I decided to work on an office plan that would use individual pieces.

Here's the current plan. Remember, Trout has a big office of his own in the shop, so he will not get quite as much space as I have in his house office area.

Here's the Garland sofa. I call it that because I got it from my uncle in Texas and had it reupholstered. It's a very funky but excellent quality Drexel Heritage piece from the early 60's we think. The company couldn't identify it, but their name is clearly marked on it.

Going on around the room clockwise, Trout wired that corner for an audio source. We planned it to be a CD tower of some type. I get this catalog called Home Decorators which turns out to be a piece of Home Depot. Joan found them online and found this line of office furniture called Oxford. It looks pretty good -- better than the laminate would -- and it actually won't cost as much. I'm showing it in the Merlot color.

So here's their media piece.

Going on around that side of the room, the next piece would be my file cabinet unit. I would face the drawers toward my desk, so the back will need to be dealt with some way. I would probably upholster it.

What I haven't figured out yet is the little 2x2 piece to hold the printer, so I don't have a picture of anything for it. The next piece would be my L-shaped desk.

Then comes empty space that allows for some access to the windows, especially the egress one. And Trout's (ta-dah!) executive desk on the next wall.

He will need some house office file drawers besides the one in his desk, so this is my fun choice for that. They are also from Home Decorators These pieces would round out the major furniture for the office.

They still do not provide enough storage for all our office supplies, files, etc. so we will probably have some shelves or upper cabinet units on our respective office walls. And hopefully, whatever I find to serve as the printer table will have storage underneath for paper, ink, etc.

Joan

So I mentioned Joan several times in this post. Here's a recent picture of her in Tucson mode. What that means is she actually has a print top on rather than her usual plain colors. And...and...and...it has cowgirls on it.

Gringo Pass

Last post I put in the image of Gringo Pass I was having framed. We got it back this week and here's what it looks like now.

And here's a close up of the frame painting.

Has it been that long since the last update? Wks 39 - 42, March 23 - April 19, 2008

This is going to be a long one, so get ready to see lots of pictures. It seems like the time has all run together, so this progress report will probably not exactly be chronological.

More friends from WA:

We got a nice surprise when an old Boeing buddy of Trout's let us know he, his brother and his niece would be in town and wanted to see us and the house. It turned out that his son is a freshman at the U of A and his niece was down here checking it out as a college for her. She's interested in architecture, so she was also curious about the area and our house.

Here they are in our great room. Left to right: Matthew (the son), Mark (the friend), Nicky (the niece) and Megan (Matthew's girlfriend). The brother's sleeve just barely shows in the picture.

Insulation:

For those of you who also keep up with the Travels with Trout blog, you may know that Trout made a blitz trip to CA to get his Cobra kit from 4/3-5/08. The way it worked out with the house, the insulation guys came in while he was gone and were done by the time he got back.

Here's what the shop looked like with the insulation.

And this is what the great room looked like.

There's also lots of insulation in the background of the pictures of Trout running the wiring, much to his dismay. Every night we came home, we washed out clothes and took showers to get the fiberglass off us. Of course, he got it a lot worse than I did.

It is amazing how much cooler it was with the insulation in, even before the drywall was put up.

Audio wiring:

That meant it was time for him to run the control and speaker wire for the whole-house audio system. And he didn't have much time because the drywallers were coming on the following Thursday (4/10). So he worked solidly everyday for 5 days and part of another one to try to finish up before they caught up with him. However, the best laid plans didn't take into consideration having to order more control wire and having the supplier wait 2 days before they told him they were out of stock so he'd have to get it from someone else. As a result, he didn't finish up until after a lot of the dry wall was installed, but it all worked out okay.

This is a major entry point for the wiring into the house from the garage. The reason running the audio wire took so long was that he was wiring almost all the rooms and the wires have to be carefully run in reference to the electrical wire or else you can end up with a constant hum even if no audio equipment is on. The requirement is that if the audio wire has to be parallel to the electical one, it needs to be at least 18" away from it. Crossing an electrical wire with an audio one is okay, but that needs to be done at a 90 degree angle.

That OSB box to the left of the picture is what he and Kelly made to locate the speakers later. The speaker wires come into these place holders. The control wires go to a volume control on the wall at the height of normal light switches. They are also used as source wires from our audio sources in the great room, house office and shop office.

So here's Trout trying to manipulate this speaker wire to make sure the hum is avoided.

This is the classic, "Don't try this at home, kids" pose.

Here he is at a junction box where speaker wire for 6 speakers comes in. Those little tags on the wires were my contribution. Each wire is marked as to where it goes.

Here he's pulling speaker wire out to the back porch.

This time he's up on a very tall ladder creating a speaker box in the shop.

And finally, he's doing some of the last of the control wiring in the garage.

This work was tedious and required paying attention. It was also frustrating for him when he had to deal with very tight quarters. This location in the master bath was his nemesis, but he finally managed to make it work.

Part of the time he was wiring, Dave the builder (on the floor) and Tim the assitant (on the ladder) were also wiring. They were stringing alarm wire.

During the whole process, Trout had only one mishap. It happened the one day I wasn't out there with him, but fortunately, Tim was there. Trout tried to move some drywall and it fell on him. Thank goodness he had on his steel toed lace up boots or his ankle might have been crushed. As it turned out he got some bruising and hurt pride for being such an idiot, but he wasn't hurt badly.

Drywall:

The drywall really made a difference in how the place looks. I think it's finally starting to look like a house from the inside as well as the outside now.

I love the way the sun comes through the front door in the morning.

The fireplace will be stuccoed, so it has lath on it. The rest will have a hauk and trowel finish. This picture with the fireplace, bancos and windows show the design really starting to come together. For comparison, just look back at the first picture. The fireplace is behind Mark and the gang. That picture was taken March 30th.

This is what it looked like on April 6th.

And this is what it looked like on April 15th.

This is the kitchen work area. The SolaTubes work very well and they don't even have their lenses yet.

This is the kitchen and the dining nook.

This shows the refrigerator/freezer wall with the nicho/shelf above it. The higher opening next to it is for the kitchen desk -- probably.

This is the guest bath. You may remember that many off-plan changes had to be made here because the toilet was positioned incorrectly. I think they have all turned out for the better in this bathroom.

Here are the drywallers finishing up in the high bay of the shop.

Gringo Pass:

Twice a year, 4th Avenue, the Tucson equivalent of the Ave in Seattle, has a street fair. I'd never been before, but it happened while Trout was in CA, so I went. I found a framer that does painted picture frames. I ordered this print to be framed by her. It seemed very appropriate because the closest border crossing to where we're going to live is at Sasabe, only about 45 miles away from our house. There's nothing much there on either side and on the Mexico side, I'm not even sure if the road is paved.