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.

Gimme Color! -- Wk 45, May 4-10, 2008

Color Prep

Most of what happened this week was preparation for color. The interior walls were sanded. The fireplace got its first coat of stucco and the exterior 1st stucco coat was finished. Here's a look at some of that.

Sanded wall. Doesn't look a lot different, huh? That's the Baby Chick paint sample leaning up against it.

Stuccoed fireplace. Now that's a little different.


Fully stuccoed exterior on the slightly SW side.


These are not the final stucco coats yet. More curing time has to pass before those are done.

Sunday Tourists


Sunday has become the day for us to visit LMMM -- even if we have been there during the week. For the past several Sundays, we've had folks along with us that we're starting to call the Sunday Tourists. Trout and I usually act as tour guides, but this week I had some measuring and counting to do, so he did most of the guide duties.

The folks in these pictures (and there are more than one) are some new friends, Barb & Bud, recently transplanted to Tucson from Long Beach, CA. He works for Raytheon and has a Cobra roadster. We met them through the Cobra connection. As young as they look, it's hard to believe they have grown kids, huh? Oh, and yes, some of us have been wearing shorts here for weeks...

Now for the Real Color

Dunn-Edwards, the paint company we're getting our paint from, has a program that makes it possible to load pictures of what you want to paint into it and paint them with D-E colors. A few weeks ago, I purchased some D-E samples and actually painted on paper the elevations of the house, but doing it with real pictures is much better.

In neither case will the house look exactly the same or will the colors look exactly the same, but it comes pretty close. So below are some pictures using our potential interior and exterior colors with a few modifications.

This is the fireplace painted in Dive In with the Baby Chick walls. I adjusted the intensity of the blue to a very dark one that appears to be very close to the blue wash Talavera tile.

This is the front of the house as best I could do it with the dumpster in the way. You may notice that the trees, the prickly pear and the scaffolding are the same colors as the walls. I was too lazy to try to delicately paint around them.

This blue is called Lapis. It's a little greener than Dive In which tends toward purple like most cobalt colors. The green is very close to the color of the palo verde trunks. It's called Spanish Olive.

This is the shop and garage with Baby Chick people (Trout, Bud and Barb) inside. I did get up the energy to make the floor gray like it will be. The shop is Pomegranate. I may have the intensity off a bit with it in these pictures.

The texture you see is the stucco showing through the color. I guess that's how the program is able to show shadows and light. Anyway, in reality the walls will be very smooth with little texture.

This is moving around the house to the south side.

I have two shots here. In the first one, you can see a lot of detail including the shop and courtyard stairwell wall. However, I screwed up the dining nook extension and I couldn't figure out how to go back and change it. It's supposed to be green, like in the 2nd picture.

This is the west side of the shop. In this case I tried to use a color on the door opening that would similate the rusty door. It didn't work.

This is the east side of the shop. Here you can pretend the door is up and you can see the interior Baby Chick color.

Finally, you've seen this picture before, but I painted the wood with the Dive In color so that the drawer fronts look something like they will when they are finished.

Drop dead gorgeous, eh?!

Stucco, Cabinets, Tin Punching Process and Colors -- Wk 44, April 27 - May 3, 2008

The most noticeable thing that happened this week was that the first coat of stucco was put on the exterior of the house. This is called the "brown coat," but it sure looks gray to me. It has to be watered down regularly for several days so the lime can leach out. Hopefully, that will help avoid oddities in the paint when it is applied.

So this is the front. That pile of sand is part of the process. When I was a kid, I loved playing in the sand piles out behind our house. They were to be used by my dad, a bricklayer, and I got in trouble for spreading out the sand and making it useless, but I think it was worth it. The red door you see is to the dumpster being used for the leftover construction materials.

Here's a shot from the south east edge of the place.

This is Trout, Lani, Holly and Kelly on our back porch.

And this is a closer up view of the stucco on that porch.

Trout continued to work on the doors and drawer fronts for our cabinets. These are some shots during the process. He didn't pose for me. I just kept clicking while he worked.

Here he is punching away on what we called the Moon panel. It's for one of the wide drawers below the cooktop.

This is a close up of the punching.

Here he checks his work.

Then he pounds it in a different way with the rubber mallet and mat above it. That helps to even out the punching and keep the piece from curling up or cupping. He was going so fast here, I never did get a shot where you can see the mallet as anything but a blur. You can see it in the picture above lying on the table.

After checking again, he's back to punching. Now all you kids out there, please notice that he is wearing ear protection, safety glasses (new prescription ones this spring) and a glove on his left hand so it won't hurt so badly if he hits it instead of the punch and to help isolate that hand from the vibration when he whacks the punch.

And this is the result for that piece. You can see some of the other work stacked around it.

While Trout was in Kelly's shop punching tin, Kelly was in his former house assembling the cabinets.

Instead of the "normal" drawer glides you see in most places, they decided to use some heavier duty ones. Not only were they cheaper, they were also stronger and silver in color.

I wanted the drawers to be full-extension. These are that and then some.

And they decided to use these adjustable feet. We had those for the cabinets in WA. They make the process of leveling much easier, saving on labor. They are less harmful to the floor in case you ever want to change the cabinets and they are comparable in price to building the normal plywood platforms.

We ended the week by selecting the basic colors for the interior of the house. Those should be painted this coming week. We will have some additional accent colors, but I may paint those myself later. I did want to have the painters paint the accent colors in the great room that go behind the TV on the fireplace and the range hood above the cooktop. I figured those would be super-hard to go back and paint myself.

So we will have the darker color on the left in this picture for the fireplace and the inside of the bancos. It's called Dive In. Trout wanted the lighter blue, but Holly, Lani and I all agreed that the darker one would be better. It matches the cobalt tile and has a purplish cast. My feng shui book says we should have some purple in this room.

The yellow is the color called Baby Chick that will be the base color throughout the house. Yes, it will be the color in the shop and garage, too. It's actually not as green as it looks in this picture. It's really 4th up the line in color from one that is exactly the same as the lighter yellow in the tile we'll be using for field tile in the kitchen. In case you forgot what that is, here it is again except the yellow tile will be laid diagonally.

After considering several options, we decided to paint the wall behind the range hood and above the tile pattern a terra cotta color called Georgia Clay. It's the darkest one on the left. Lest you be concerned about all these dark colors, the great room was very bright when I took these pictures, even with all the windows and door obscured with visqueen inside and out. The lighter colors tended to really fade out.

One other thing we did this week was verify the color for the floor. Here that is on a piece of concrete. You can never be sure it will turn out exactly like the sample, but it will be very close.

We contracted separately with the company to have them stain the shop bath floor and the shop pedestrian entry like the rest of the house. We also set up for them to seal the entire shop and garage floor with a clear sealer that isn't slippery and will help keep fluids from seeping into the concrete.

So that was week number 44 of La Mansión Maybe Mañana's gestation period. She's not an elephant, but she's getting close.