Paint & Tile & Light, Oh My! -- Wks 57 - 59, July 27 - August 16, 2008

During the past 3 weeks the exterior painting was finished. There will be touch-ups of course, but this is it for now. We absolutely love it.

We had a landscaper in to take a look and design a landscaping plan which will include addressing rainwater issues and harvesting, hardscapes and what to plant. His name is Scott Calhoun. His company is Zona Gardens (http://www.zonagardens.com/). Check out his portfolio at his website.

He recently won 1st Place in the Professional Residental Category of the 8th Annual Xeriscape Awards given by the AZ Department of Water Resources and the Tucson Botanical Gardens. We went to a couple of his classes and really like his style. He seems interested in working with our dramatically painted house, our natural open space requirements, the walled area we want to create and the transitions between all those.


Exterior Paint:

So here are some recent pictures of the exterior of the house. This is the front porch.

This is one of the painters working on the north side of the shop. Don't try this at home.
This is the front of part of the garage and the shop.
This is the west side of the shop with a little of the courtyard peeking through the palo verdes.
This is the courtyard. At first I thought this was going to be a throwaway space since it has kind of an odd location. Now, largely due to the colors, it's my current favorite spot.
This is the back porch on the west side of the house.

And this is what you see when you drive up these days.

Kitchen:

The kitchen is usually the most complicated and expensive part of the house. I'm sure ours is no exception. This is how the tile and rangehood developed over the past three weeks.

Here Kelly and Trout start attaching the drawer fronts.

And this is the way they look now.

This is the bar countertop not yet grouted.

Great Room:

There are a couple more great room detail pictures later, but this was a major accomplishment. This hearth isn't grouted yet, but it's exactly what we wanted.

Laundry:

The laundry is my "shop." This is the where the sink will go.

And here is Trout checking door instally gaps and adjusting the hinges.

Master Bath:

When I started working on this blog, I thought I had more pictures, but there's been so much activity in the master bath I haven't been able to get in to get very many good ones.

This is my vanity, but the grout hasn't been cleaned yet.

This is Trout's countertop laid out.
This is the shower, still not grouted in this picture.
And the same goes for this pebble shower floor. The pebbles are very similar to those on the hearth in the great room.
Guest Bath:

This tile did get grouted. This is the mural at the back of the tub. Now I have to get busy and finish the shower curtain I'm making for it.
Most of the light fixtures were installed this weekend. This is the little baby fan for the guest bath whirring away.

This is what the vanity looks like. It's not attached and the sink isn't installed yet.
The vanity lights were installed, but they are going to need some changes. I wanted them just like this, but the bar across the top hangs down too low so the fixture needs to be turned with the lights pointing up. The sconces were made slightly differently from the picture I had of them. The difference is that the light part is about 3" higher, so they are going to need to be lowered or turned with the light pointing down if possible.

More Lighting:

Some of you may not know about my Horned Toad fetish. Most people call them Horny Toads but they are really lizards. The ones we see most often here are the Regal Horned Lizard (http://www.arts.arizona.edu/herp/phso.html) and the Desert Horned Lizard (http://www.arts.arizona.edu/herp/phpl.html). My bible for these guys and the other similar cold-blooded creatures we see on our land is the Tucson Herpetological Society (http://www.arts.arizona.edu/herp/index.html). They have a great website with all the species within a hundred mile radius of Tucson.

I just had to have some on the house. There is a company here that does these plasma lazer things including light sconces. So these guys will flank our front door with lights in their bellies. One will point up and one will point down the wall. Both will face you as you arrive at the house.

You will also see the entry lights from outside since the door is glass. This is what they look like now from the inside. At first I thought these mulit-colored glass stars wouldn't provide enough light, but many of the glass panes are clear. I love the shadows they cast on the ceiling and walls.

In most houses these days there aren't any overhead lights. Frequently you flip a switch to activate a plug that turns on lamps. That's just not enough light for me. So we have sconces around the great room and dining room and in the hall to our master bath. When you get Talavera pieces from Mexico, you usually don't know what you will be getting. I think we lucked out. All the ones we got are great, but don't expect them to match.
In this picture you can see 2 of them lit as well as one of the fans in the great room. This house is defintely mix and match with some very contemporary stuff, some vintage stuff and lots of funky stuff. We chose a school house type globe for the light kits on the fans.

Exterior Lighting:

Now for the real fun. These pictures are hot off the camera from last night. Trout and I got into it over the bulbs for these fixtures. I had purchased the lowest lumen and wattage compact fluorescent bulbs I could get for them both due to our lumen restrictions and for conservation (money being a big one) reasons. He still thought they were too bright. So I looked again and verified that this was the best we could do for outdoor bulbs.

You may remember that we chose these <$20 fixtures to replace the >$150 ones we originally picked. I'm sure glad we did. They not only were cheap but they look great.

This is the front of the guest room last night.
This is the front porch. Before I bought yellow bug compact fluorescents, I wanted to try regular yellow bug lights on the porches. Any yellow light has lower lumens, so I wanted to make sure we had enough light and that the yellow color didn't mess up the wall colors. I think they are fine and we will gradually replace them with the CFLs as they go out.
Now we're back to the regular white CFLs in front of the garage. The exterior lights are switched in a number of places inside so that they all don't turn on at the same time. We will need to label where the switches go. This was the hardest location to figure out.
I just love the way the light hits the walls, but I particularly love it on the Pomegranate shop. There is still plastic on the interior of these windows for some reason. It has some interior Baby Chick paint sprayed on it and Trout thinks it looks like the interior is on fire. He will hate to see the plastic go.
No, it wasn't raining. This is what you see as you drive in at night if the lights are on. Some TV shows would lead you to believe that those globes of light are spirits of some sort. I think they are just a dirty camera lens or maybe some bugs.
So that's it for the last 3 weeks. I will try to update it again next weekend, but don't hold your breath.

More Refinement -- Wks 52 -53, June 22 - July 5, 2008

There are lots of cabinets and there is lots of tile work to do, so the past two weeks have been primarily devoted to that.

Septic System

However, we can't talk about real refinement without showing the septic system. For those of you who have one, if you didn't see it put it from the beginning, you probably have little idea of how it works or what it looks like.

Ours in WA was built when the house was built (1927) and was tiny -- 600 gallons. The drain field had only one line originally. Of course it failed just before we sold the place, and we had to have it replaced, but the tank was grandfathered in due to the house's age.

Most newly installed septic systems in western WA require a mound system and pumps because the water table is so high. One thing we learned when we moved here was that it is pretty cheap to put in a septic system here unless you hit solid rock, but very expensive to put in a well. In WA those two expenses were reversed. Fortunately, we didn't have to put in a well because we have Tucson city water, so we saved that expense down here. You can see how well-drained, sandy and dry the dirt is in these pictures.

But there are no sewers where we're building and it's so far out that we will never see any in our lifetime, so we will have a septic system and this is what it looks like.

This tank is 1200 gallons and has 2 lines out from it.

This is a close up of some of the apparatus.

This is a close up of one of the lines. The pipe sticking up is one of the clean outs. Perhaps the new ones in WA are this way, too, but down here they put a clean out close to the house before you get to the tank and then some at the end of the drain field. Along with the tank itself, that makes for 3 clean out options if you ever need them.

Gas Trench

Other digging that was done was for the gas line from the street to the house.

Cabinets

Last time I promised an update on the laundry cabinets and this is it. This is Kelly and Trout working on the doors for them. Kelly found some very cool hinge hardware that automagically closes the doors without allowing them to slam when they reach a certain point in the closing arc.

And don't worry about Trout pressing down on the door on top of the drawer here. Those drawer glides are very strong.

Master Bath

Tiling moved right along on the master shower. The wall goes up to 8 feet and then stops just like we wanted it to. The tiling goes almost to the top. All the lizards are in.

And the top rows of trim tile are almost complete. The tiles in this pattern are the primary decorative tiles in Trout's and my vanities. The gold is his and the blue is mine.

This is how the corners look. Dave and Tim did a great job of going around the corner and continuing the tile pattern. This is the way these tiles are intended to be laid. They won't be laid like this on our vanities.

This is a cut-off corner we will face as we shower. It was planned so that two 4" square tiles would fit across it.

This is the master tub almost finished. We decided to put a lighter color terra cotta accent wall behind it and the toilet. I will also used that color on the back wall of my vanity.

It's the darker of these two paint samples. This is one shade lighter than the accent wall behind the rangehood in the kitchen.

Our Sinks

Several posts ago I mentioned that we bought our vanity sinks but that I didn't have pictures of them. Now they are in the house and I do.

Trout's is the same pattern as his primary vanity tile. In fact he picked the sink before he picked the tile.

When we went to do the final selection, there wasn't one like my primary decorative tile. I debated whether to get a blue and white sink that would be plainer or to get one with a wilder pattern. Both Trout and Vicki (our builder) encouraged me to get the wilder one, so here it is.

This is the vanity tile that this sink will set into.



Guest Bath

The tiling was almost completed in the guest bath. This is the edge by the side of the vanity.

I don't have a picture of the sink for this bath yet, but the rim is the terra cotta you see here, there's a terra cotta peacock feather trim like this and the basin has a white background with green prickly pear painted on it.

This is the tub and the mural at the back of it.

Exterior Colors

We had to make final decisions on our exterior colors so Dave could order the paint. We pretty much stuck with what we'd already picked. All along we intended to let our neighbor to the north choose the color for the north wall of the shop since it faces them and we will rarely see it. She chose the same color as the rest of the shop -- Pomegranate.

I put some of these pictures in a post before, but this is basically what we will end up with.
The east side of the Pomegranate shop.



From the southeast side of the Lapis house.

From the southwest side showing the Spanish Olive fireplace and dining bay.



Spanish Olive courtyard stairs and Pomegranate shop.