December 7, 2007—We get our shower floor
I got to the site late because I had to pick up stain for the windows. It rained the day before and the site was very muddy. Despite the rock Holly & Associates have put down, things are still very mucky in front of the house when it rains.
A small concrete crew was finishing the shower floor when I arrived. It will also be a steam room, so the high place on the left will be the base of a bench to lie on when the steam is going.
Here is the view from the bathroom looking through the door into the shower. The drain is hidden under tape so the concrete doesn’t clog it up. Once the concrete is dry, they will remove the tape. I hope I am on site when they do that, it looks like it might be a tricky process.
We also have a new water feature . . . hopefully only temporary. This is outside the family room doors looking out at what will be the veranda patio. For a while, we weren’t going to put concrete here due to cost concerns, but we decided to do it after all, thank goodness!

This is the small arch out of the dining room going toward the kitchen. It got framed in wrong—it is too narrow. There is another arch just opposite it which is the same size, and when they tried to frame that one, they realized that the first one was incorrect.

Thomas, the framing boss, tried to talk me into having a narrower arch, but I said that it had to be the right size because this area would be the bottle-neck of the house and we needed all the opening we could get.

To be fair, Thomas’ reticence to change the arch is due to this lag-bolt (the bolt at the bottom of the L-shaped piece of steel next to the wood.) This bolt goes through the sill into the floor and when the arch is moved, the bolt will be sticking out of the bare floor.

Here is another misplaced lag-bolt, plus the slab is unfinished around it. This one is just on the opposite side of the arch and a little in. These bolts were hand placed while the slab was being finished, instead of hung in place like some of the others. This one was put in out of line.

Kai explained what they will do to patch this spot and the place where the other lag-bolt will need to be removed. They will grind the bolt down below the surface and come back in with some concrete the same color as the floor and feather it in.

I am not too concerned because we intend to stain the floor, so slight variations in the color won’t matter once the stain is applied.

This is the guest bathroom, finally sheathed. I couldn’t get a more complete picture because the sun was shining right in the window.

This bathroom is pretty small and will double as the powder room. I wish we had been able to have an actual half-bath as well as a guest bath, but it was beyond our budget.

This picture is looking toward the living room from in front of the guest room and library. The foyer ceiling is lower than either the living room ceiling or the guest room/library wing. Moving from the foyer toward the guest room and library, the ceiling could either stay the same height as the foyer ceiling or rise to the natural ceiling height of that wing. I chose to have the ceiling in front of the library and guest room doors be high.

You can see where it will change height at the top of the photo. Right underneath that beam, there will be a pair of saloon doors to give that wing a sense of privacy. The doors will also help give legitimacy to the ceiling height change.

Here is the guest bath and foyer from the outside. The parapet is framed already. The area between the guest bath and the chimney forms a sort of back porch for the foyer. You can see it will have a little roof ending flush with the guest bath wall.

Soon, they will install one of the rough pine beams from New Mexico between the chimney and the guest bath. Although it is actually only ornamental, it will look like it is holding up the soffit on the porch.

The chimney has been partly sheathed. The framing crew has installed this weird brace for the time being. I guess this is to keep everything plumb until they get the rest of the sheathing on.

We have been so lucky with the site grading. Originally, we thought that the door coming out of the living room would require four steps to get to ground level. Because of the spoils (dirt removed) from the east side of the house, we had enough to make a level area outside the living room. This is so much nicer than we expected it to be.

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