Visible and Notable Progress. Wks 31-32, 1/27/08 - 2/9/08

In my opinion, the major thing to happen in the past two weeks was the beginning of the preparation for the stucco work. After going to an enviromental event here, we decided to use a special kind of Tyvek wrap that will help insulate the house primarily against the heat. You can see that at the first layer next to the sheathing in these pictures.

This is a close up of the layers on the north wall of the shop.
Here's the foam and chicken wire that will hold the stucco.

It has to go on the parapets of the roof because those will be stuccoed, too.
This is a post base being prepared for the concrete to be poured below and the stucco that will cover it.
And here you can see how the post bases look after the preparation, along with a lot of the rest of the house.

Loose ends:

You may have noticed that I removed the hardware for the guest bath vanity from the last post. That was because I found something at Lowe's that would work and bought it instead. So here's one of the drawer fronts with the new hardware on it.

During this time period, most of the mistakes got fixed. The stairs to the shop deck were reworked to have the right size risers and all the interior adjustments that I can remember were made. Most noticeable were the relocation of the plumbing and wiring for the guest bath vanity...

...and the lowering of the kitchen bar.

The shower pan was put in the shop bath and the platform for the master bath tub was rough framed in. Trout at first thought the tub would sit on top of this instead be sunk into it. That's a hint of how often he uses a bath tub.

Whole house speaker system:

We decided to at least prepare the house for a whole house speaker system, even if we don't install all the speakers. After several trips to Lowe's, hours on eBay and smoking VISAs, Trout got most of the materials ready to do the job. Then Dave recommended that he not do the wiring until the insulation is in and that won't go in until the doors and windows are in. Those should arrive and be installed next week. At least Trout and Kelly were able to make a few boxes to hold the speakers like this one...

...and hang a few boxes to hold the volume controls like here in the laundry/hobby center. Just this past month or so, I've been seeing large laundry rooms like this show up off garages in plans for development houses in the local paper. They're being called "hobby centers."

Here's Trout trying to figure out where to put the volume control in the master bedroom. When you wonder why some things are located in seemingly odd places in a house, it may be due to necessity. Trout learned that sound quality can be compromised if the speaker wire parallels electrical wire within 18" of it. Speaker wire can cross electrical wire but not parallel it. So locations like this get dicey. We finally decided to put the volume control box on the side wall close to the window.

Pocket doors:

I'm not sure when the pocket doors are due to be installed, but I would guess it will be after the exterior doors and windows are in so the place can be locked up. Here are a couple of shots of the frames for them. The first is of the ones for the guest bath and the second is from the guest bedroom looking past its pocket door frame across the hall to the one for the office.

Fireplace:

The fireplace continues to be a complication and a delight. Trout drew it one way originally, but the builder and the framers came up with something even better which can be seen in these pictures. The TV will actually sit in an open-sided nicho. The first picture sort of shows that, but mostly shows the solar gain we will get in the winter from the south side of the house.

You can see the top of the nicho a little better in this picture.

We also continue to have visitors to see the progress. This is Trout with Al, a fellow student from the welding class he took last spring. Both of them will be building Cobra replicas. Al's already volunteered to come help Trout in the mega-shop so long as he can spend the night in our guest bedroom.

Color differences:

Last post I included a picture of the stained porch wood. It looked really dark. The color varies in the sun and it will definitely fade out over time. These are two examples of how different it looks.

Getting Going Again ... Wks 28-30, 1/6-26/2008

The past three weeks went by slowly for us as far as the house goes. Progress happened but there wasn't much to document. Still, I can always find pictures to show, so I did.

Let's start with these tile murals. Painted tile murals are often seen in this area. They can be put anywhere. We're not positive and always reserve the right to change our minds, but here's where we think these will go. Y'all want to start a pool?

This one will be a surprise in the guest bath. It will be a part of the tile work. It was painted by someone in Tubac. The rest are from Mexico.

This one is planned for the front porch. I'm not quite sure where yet. It will be embedded in the stucco.I think we may use this one in the wall when Trout builds it around the house.
The artist says this is a scene from Guanajuato. I've been there but I don't remember this. I bought it because it reminded me of the River Walk in San Antonio, my home town. I'm thinking the courtyard for this one.

It was time to pick hardware, so this is what we picked for the cabinet hardware for all the drawers and doors. I swore I wanted to keep the black and white to a minimum in the house, but this is what looked best on the galvanized metal that will be the filler for the doors and drawer fronts and most of the hardware will be mounted in it.


Now to the real work.

The water makes its way to the house through the piping in this trench.

The driveway goes partly over it as you can see from this view from the Shop Deck.
Steve from WA was one of our recent house inspectors. Here he and Trout stand in the great room while Trout does the tour.

They partly obscured the work on the fireplace. You may have noticed that the fireplace is a recurring photo op. That's because it's unique, complicated and the major focal point of the great room.

The electricians started wiring in earnest. The shop gets really big wires.
The house gets more wires but smaller ones.


Dave, Trout and the electrician, Bob work out some issues with Trout's vanity lighting.
The painters stained all the porch wood, back...and front.
This is Jodie, our friend from Santa Fe, walking her dogs on the road next to the house. I hope by this time next year, a picture can be taken of me doing that, but it will be only one dog and probably one a bit smaller than Pedro the Borzoi or Zeus the Irish Wolfhound.

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.