Getting Closer -- Wks 49 - 51, June 1 - 21, 2008

We're guessing we might be able to move to La Mansión Maybe Mañana sometime in August. Here's what happened in the past 3 weeks.

More Concrete

Most of the action happened inside the house, but additional concrete was poured for the front and back porches and the courtyard.

This is a shot of the front porch. I like the way the expansion joints line up with the bases for the posts. This is the part of the porch just enroute to the front door.


This is a view of the back porch outside the great room. Both the front and back porches will be stained just like the floors in the house.

This is what we decided to do with the area in the courtyard where the stairs and the door from the garage meet. I didn't want a straight line and I didn't want the big faucet to be encased in concrete.

This is a dove's eye view of the curve Trout drew.



This is the forming for the concrete.

And this is how it came out. That box to the left is the stoop for Trout's shop.



Cabinet Men

Kelly and Trout worked away at installing the cabinets. Most of them are in with the drawers in place and ready for Dave to tile. Doors will not be added until after the tile is installed, the appliances are in, etc.

This was a common scene with the two of them pondering over a fitting situation. This happens to be in the laundry. Check the post after this for how it all turned out.

Here's Trout working on the kitchen island.

This is Kelly working on the cabinets on the back (cooking) wall of the kitchen.




This is Lo's vanity as of this past week. Isn't it fun how different the same yellow looks in different light?



Tile

Dave decided to do the tile himself and seems to be having a good time with it. We think it looks great.

This is how the guest bath looks now without any grout.


This is the mural that will go at the back of the tub.




The master bath tub isn't quite trimmed out yet, but it's almost finished. Can you find the "odd" tile?

This is the beginning of the work on the master bath shower. You can (barely) see the river rock floor and the lizards frolicing in the yellow field tile.

Paint

We decided to do some accent walls, so we tested some paints on the already yellow painted walls. Our primary colors in the house are the Mexican Talavera versions of terra cotta, green, yellow and blue you see here. Everything is a play on those.



Well, almost everything. These are the two possible colors for two accent walls in the office. They look almost exactly alike, but the one on the left is a little lighter and greener. That's the one we're going to use. And yes, it has nothing to do with the 4 tiles above. I just wanted some turquoise in the place and it's one of the colors in the Garland sofa which will be in the office.

This is the Garland sofa. It's one from the 60's that belonged to my uncle. I had it upholstered here.

These were the possible colors for the wall behind the bed in the master bedroom. We already decided to use the redder, darker one far to the right.

My Feng Shui book said we needed red or pink in that room, so I got two different quilts (on sale of course) to use in there. They inspired using this accent color. It's also very close to the color Trout wants for his shop exterior.

We really like the guest room being all yellow, but when we put the bedframe in there it will get lost against that back wall because it's natural pine, so we decided to use the terra cotta color on the left in this picture for it and for the inside of the closet. It's just one shade lighter than the color on the kitchen cooking wall. The color inspiration piece for this cowboy and Indian room is the denim quilt shown at the left.


After seeing my paint ball experiments, Trout really got into the accent wall concept, so we may do one or two in the master bath in terra cotta and maybe green. And we may do the back hall wall that you see from the kitchen hall in green. Film next week.

He also agrees that we need to paint the inside of the kitchen nicho and upper wall above the shelf in the same blue as the fireplace. This is that nicho with that blue sample.



You can see the area above the shelf in the upper right of this picture of the kitchen cooking wall.

And the reason we decided to paint the inside of the kitchen nicho blue is that I bought a piece of furniture in Santa Fe for that location. It's also a light pine color that would not contrast enough with the yellow walls. The reason we decided to paint the back wall above the shelf in that blue, too, is that it is in the same plain as the nicho.

I wanted to get a desk-type thing for this nicho and just never could find anything quite right here in Tucson. Then I was in Santa Fe last week and found this desk made by an 81-year old man named John Spagnola. He calls it a territorial desk. It's very rough and funky and we love the little details.


And the artist/woodworker put his initials on one of the legs.



Lighting


We finally finalized our finally final lighting. We thought we'd done that back in May, but the bid(s) kept being adjusted -- up, unfortunately -- so we made some changes so as not to go too far over budget. For example, we originally picked an exterior sconce from Lowe's. Then we switched to one from HiLite (an industrial light manufacturer whose fixtures you see everywhere). There are 29 exterior sconces. The bid for the HiLite sconces was $147 each. The Lowe's sconces cost $19 each. Needless to say, we switched back.

So this is what we'll use on the exterior now. We will use compact fluorescent bulbs rated for exterior use and probably yellow ones of lower wattage than the fixtures are rated for so as to keep the bugs and the lumens down. Most of the time they will be turned off.





A similar thing happened with the interior pendants. So we decided to use these in the kitchen. This will be the fixture.




And this will be the shade.

In the baths, we'll have this fixture.





With this shade.
We chose these to mimic the school house light kits on the fans we will have in almost every room. Here's the fan style. It will all be silver in color including the blades.


And here's the light kit.




All these light fixtures have an old-fashioned feel instead of the industrial look we originally wanted, but they were a close second choice.

For fun, we will have these in the entry.



And these will be the sconces in the great room, dining nook and hallways. For once the thing we liked the best was also the cheapest of our choices.


The Kitchen Sink


You may remember how excited we were about our cobalt blue 42" sink. Well, it turned out it was discontinued and no one told our builder, so when she tried to order it, she couldn't get it. We came up with 4 other acceptable options, but our favorite is this one and it is probably what we will end up with. I like the fact that the big faucet, filtered water faucet and the hand soap dispenser will all go on the deck instead of in holes on the sink.

It's only the standard 33" wide, but it's the right color, deep and the divider is shallow so it will sort of be like having one big sink. Of course, the cabinet underneath is 42" wide for the original sink so it won't match up. If we had known in advance about the discontinuation, we would have made the under sink cabinet narrower and widened the other cabinets by 9" or so. If our builder had known it was going to be discontinued, she would have ordered the sink early.

So whaddya think? Should we center this sink on the bigger cabinet or line up the main faucet and the shallow divider with the center of the cabinet?


Windows


What with all the work inside and the 100+ temperatures, some of the plastic was removed from the windows. That allowed us to get a real feel for what it will be like after we move in. This is what the guest bedroom looks like from the inside with some of the windows open.



And this is what it looks like from the outside. Perfect!

Dramatic Changes -- Wks 46-48, May 11-31, 2008

If you just write them out, the differences to La Mansión Maybe Mañana from the last post to this one don't sound like much. But when you consider the amount of work done, they are pretty impressive, so let's get to it. There were three major accomplishments in the past three weeks.


Smooth Stucco Completed

The first of the big three is the completion of the stucco on the exterior of the house. That means that it will soon be ready to paint. The surface is not quite as smooth as a baby's butt, but it's just what we wanted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know it will be more likely to show cracks. When we envisioned a place in Tucson so many years ago now, one of the ideas was to create a new place that looked old. So cracks are a blessing instead of a curse for us so long as they don't affect the structural integrity of the house.

Here are some pictures of the smooth stuccoed exterior. The most common wood frame stucco surface down here is one that is blown on rather than troweled on. It's very rough. The stuccoed-over adobe walls are often very smooth, but somewhat uneven. That's the look we wanted and this is very close to that. We can hardly wait until it's painted with the colors shown in the last post, and it will be better yet as those colors fade.

This is Trout walking on the south side of the house. You can get a hint of the smoothness here as well as the slight imperfections that make the wall a little lumpy looking.

This is a close up of that same wall a little farther to the west.

Here's a porch post base.

This is a view of the roof parapets. You may remember that these will be capped with adobes for the territorial look we want.

And this is the stairway down from the shop deck. That handrail is just primed. It will probably be silver. The wall on the right of the stairs will be capped with adobes by the builder. Trout plans to tile the tops and fronts of the stairs.

Interior Painted and Floor Stained

The other two big changes have to be taken together since it's almost impossible to separate them from each other visually.

The entire interior of the building was painted that Baby Chick color. One wall in the kitchen was painted the Georgia Clay and the insides of the bancos were painted Dive In. The fireplace won't be painted until the stucco on it has cured.

You will see from these pictures that the yellow varies greatly depending on camera angle, amount of light in the room, etc. It does that in person, too. I know our builder is a little concerned about the seeming brightness of the color, but all you HGTV watchers and anyone who has painted a room anything but white knows that it all changes when you put your stuff in there.

So let's start with the shop and garage. Here we have a smooth stucco exterior and the Baby Chick walls showing.

The shop and garage floor is just sealed, not stained. It really is clear sealer on concrete gray, but it looks like a totally different color in this picture taken in the garage.

This is one of the shop. We expected them to leave the metal columns gray, but...

We did have them stain the entry to the shop office like the house floor along with the office bath. The porches will also be stained like this. This is on the exterior of the shop but under the stairwell.

Now for the house...

The floor finish is a multi-step process. We caught it through peek holes in cuts in the plastic covering over the windows. You can see how dull the finish looks here compared to later when the sealer was applied. You can also see how they protect the walls while they're working.

This is the entry as seen from the hole in the plastic over the sliding glass door across the great room.


This is the entry from outside of the front door.

This is the guest room peeking around the edge of one of the open awning windows.

And this is the fireplace with the bancos covered in the front.

In these photos, the floor has been sealed and the protective plastic has been removed. The floor is shiny, very shiny.

This is looking into the guest bath from the entry.
It may be reflection, but the color of the walls when you're in there looks exactly the same as that of the tub.

This is a corner in the master bedroom. You may remember that we will not have any baseboards. The painters will have to come back and do the touch up painting along the bottom of the wall where it meets the floor. They may also be adding some accent walls if I can get them to do it without charging extra.This is another shot of the master bedroom with the colors looking somewhat different.
In many of these pictures, the floor just looks brown, so here's a shot of what it actually looks like close up, like at the bottom of your feet.This is looking from the office across the entry into the guest bath. You can see the variety of colors of the same Baby Chick produced by the different lighting. You can also see how the door works with the floor.This is the kitchen from the great room. That's my camera bag hanging on one of the supports for the bar.

This shows the dining nook and part of the kitchen from the great room.

Here's the fireplace. Maybe the interiors of the bancos will look more blue when the fireplace is painted. They look very blue in person, but not in these pictures.

Other Progress

Other progress during this three-week period included the beginning of work on the tin patterns for the master bath cabinets. As before, it's my initial design with Trout's improvements and actual execution. This will be used only on the narrow drawers, but related designs to be seen next time will go on the wider ones and the linen closet doors. We call this design Ocotillo and Mountain.

Dave also got a lot of work done on the master shower. He got the drain set up completed.
And he got the bench built.

After the painting was done, the plastic was removed from the inside of most of the windows so that they could be opened a bit to allow circulation to dry the paint and to cure the floor. This is a pretty good side view of the north windows in the master bedroom. I include it because we love these windows and we haven't seen them uncovered in awhile.

So now we wait. Although we were able to get in to take the pictures and to shut the windows and sliding glass door, the floor really isn't quite ready for people to walk on it much yet. It should be totally cured by about June 4th.

Trout kept his boots on and I wore hospital sox inside. He tracked dust all over the floor, but nothing stuck in the finish. I followed along in my sox and wiped up the dust as we left. When I checked the bottom of the sox, there was hardly any color on them, so I guess the floor is already pretty well set.