La Mansión Maybe Mañana: tin punching

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.

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.