Has it been that long since the last update? Wks 39 - 42, March 23 - April 19, 2008

This is going to be a long one, so get ready to see lots of pictures. It seems like the time has all run together, so this progress report will probably not exactly be chronological.

More friends from WA:

We got a nice surprise when an old Boeing buddy of Trout's let us know he, his brother and his niece would be in town and wanted to see us and the house. It turned out that his son is a freshman at the U of A and his niece was down here checking it out as a college for her. She's interested in architecture, so she was also curious about the area and our house.

Here they are in our great room. Left to right: Matthew (the son), Mark (the friend), Nicky (the niece) and Megan (Matthew's girlfriend). The brother's sleeve just barely shows in the picture.

Insulation:

For those of you who also keep up with the Travels with Trout blog, you may know that Trout made a blitz trip to CA to get his Cobra kit from 4/3-5/08. The way it worked out with the house, the insulation guys came in while he was gone and were done by the time he got back.

Here's what the shop looked like with the insulation.

And this is what the great room looked like.

There's also lots of insulation in the background of the pictures of Trout running the wiring, much to his dismay. Every night we came home, we washed out clothes and took showers to get the fiberglass off us. Of course, he got it a lot worse than I did.

It is amazing how much cooler it was with the insulation in, even before the drywall was put up.

Audio wiring:

That meant it was time for him to run the control and speaker wire for the whole-house audio system. And he didn't have much time because the drywallers were coming on the following Thursday (4/10). So he worked solidly everyday for 5 days and part of another one to try to finish up before they caught up with him. However, the best laid plans didn't take into consideration having to order more control wire and having the supplier wait 2 days before they told him they were out of stock so he'd have to get it from someone else. As a result, he didn't finish up until after a lot of the dry wall was installed, but it all worked out okay.

This is a major entry point for the wiring into the house from the garage. The reason running the audio wire took so long was that he was wiring almost all the rooms and the wires have to be carefully run in reference to the electrical wire or else you can end up with a constant hum even if no audio equipment is on. The requirement is that if the audio wire has to be parallel to the electical one, it needs to be at least 18" away from it. Crossing an electrical wire with an audio one is okay, but that needs to be done at a 90 degree angle.

That OSB box to the left of the picture is what he and Kelly made to locate the speakers later. The speaker wires come into these place holders. The control wires go to a volume control on the wall at the height of normal light switches. They are also used as source wires from our audio sources in the great room, house office and shop office.

So here's Trout trying to manipulate this speaker wire to make sure the hum is avoided.

This is the classic, "Don't try this at home, kids" pose.

Here he is at a junction box where speaker wire for 6 speakers comes in. Those little tags on the wires were my contribution. Each wire is marked as to where it goes.

Here he's pulling speaker wire out to the back porch.

This time he's up on a very tall ladder creating a speaker box in the shop.

And finally, he's doing some of the last of the control wiring in the garage.

This work was tedious and required paying attention. It was also frustrating for him when he had to deal with very tight quarters. This location in the master bath was his nemesis, but he finally managed to make it work.

Part of the time he was wiring, Dave the builder (on the floor) and Tim the assitant (on the ladder) were also wiring. They were stringing alarm wire.

During the whole process, Trout had only one mishap. It happened the one day I wasn't out there with him, but fortunately, Tim was there. Trout tried to move some drywall and it fell on him. Thank goodness he had on his steel toed lace up boots or his ankle might have been crushed. As it turned out he got some bruising and hurt pride for being such an idiot, but he wasn't hurt badly.

Drywall:

The drywall really made a difference in how the place looks. I think it's finally starting to look like a house from the inside as well as the outside now.

I love the way the sun comes through the front door in the morning.

The fireplace will be stuccoed, so it has lath on it. The rest will have a hauk and trowel finish. This picture with the fireplace, bancos and windows show the design really starting to come together. For comparison, just look back at the first picture. The fireplace is behind Mark and the gang. That picture was taken March 30th.

This is what it looked like on April 6th.

And this is what it looked like on April 15th.

This is the kitchen work area. The SolaTubes work very well and they don't even have their lenses yet.

This is the kitchen and the dining nook.

This shows the refrigerator/freezer wall with the nicho/shelf above it. The higher opening next to it is for the kitchen desk -- probably.

This is the guest bath. You may remember that many off-plan changes had to be made here because the toilet was positioned incorrectly. I think they have all turned out for the better in this bathroom.

Here are the drywallers finishing up in the high bay of the shop.

Gringo Pass:

Twice a year, 4th Avenue, the Tucson equivalent of the Ave in Seattle, has a street fair. I'd never been before, but it happened while Trout was in CA, so I went. I found a framer that does painted picture frames. I ordered this print to be framed by her. It seemed very appropriate because the closest border crossing to where we're going to live is at Sasabe, only about 45 miles away from our house. There's nothing much there on either side and on the Mexico side, I'm not even sure if the road is paved.

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.