August 13, 2008—My birthday at the site

Today was my birthday, but unlike last year, it was a working day. It started out with me hauling a van-load of stuff from the old house to store in the barn.

It was a beautiful day and the first thing I saw was the hole with all the water pipes had been filled in. That meant that the water had been hooked up to the house at last.

Kai had been working hard on getting the brackets completed. He had gotten all the Douglas fir pieces installed.
I took this picture from the rose garden of him up on the dining room bracket installing latillas.
By mid-afternoon he had all the latillas installed.

Here are the living room and dining room windows with their new sun-shades.

Ginger never gets very far from Kai, so since she is in the picture, you can bet he is just out of the shot.

The shower door had been installed in the master bathroom. It is a very simple door—in fact the company only had one door to chose from—but since it looks good, that was fine with us. (We did get to pick the handle and hinges however.)

It needs a little “weather stripping” around the edges to make it steam-worthy but that will be done with clear silicone strips that will not really show much.

(You can see a silhouette of me taking this picture in the door.)

 

The toilet is in in the master bath as well.

The toilet room, itself, is pretty stark. I didn’t really think about the lack of color in here when I told the painters to do everything in white.

Jim has suggested that I paint a mural of the view out the window so it looks like you are outside. But, I will probably just faux-paint the walls in terra cotta up to the picture rail, to give some visual relief.

The shower trim was installed and looks wonderful. After all the angst I had over plumbing fixtures I am very happy with the way these look—except for that fat pipe on the shower head—when I had specifically told the plumbing supply store rep to give me a thin one.

I told Kai to tell the plumbers that I know it’s not their fault but please change it. To me that pipe looks just too clunky.

There are 3 knobs to operate the showers. The fancy one in the middle will set the temperature for all the water. The knobs on either side will regulate the flow for the hand-held spray on the left and the regular shower on the right.

With this system, all the water will be the same temp but the flow on the shower and the hand-held are regulated independently. Although until it starts raining again, we will always have everything on dribble to conserve water.

The guest bath toilet, sink and faucet were also installed. Unfortunately, the plumber doing the work did not know that his boss had ordered a shorter spigot for this faucet. We can’t use the one you see here, because it is so tall, it would inhibit the swing of the medicine cabinet door. He will come back and replace this spigot with the correct one.
The sink was installed too and looks pretty good although it is a little warmer in color than the marble counter.

The whole bathroom looks nice and I have gotten some very handsome, white porcelain towel rods, hooks and a matching toilet paper holder to finish this room off.

The plumber was able to swap out the tanks of both our toilets for the Toto Eco-Flush version which uses 1.23 gallons per flush. We put this toilet in our current home to save water and have found it to be remarkably effective—meaning that we haven’t managed to plug it up yet.

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