July 9, 2008—A lot of progress and an intruder

Opps! I realized last week that we had forgotten to include the pad for General Debris in the recent concrete pour.

We had to move General Debris forward, away from the front wall, because we added the little roof to it. The General is about 8' tall and would not fit under the roof. Abe and I had worked out the configuration right before he left Todd Jersey Architecture and it never got incorporated into the plans.

Here is his old stand with his footprints, we are using that to position him and then will pour the additional concrete.

Meanwhile, the General is still at the San Jose Museum of Art. He is also on the Table of Contents page of this month’s Wired Magazine, as you can see here in this photo.

Nemo Gould is quite disgusted that the magazine did not give him credit for his wonderful sculpture and I agree that was pretty scaly. He says that Wired is supposed to do a little article on the show at the museum and the curator will insist on credit.

Anyway, our General is famous! I kind of think that anonymous fame is the best of both worlds!

Here are more photos of the library. We are most likely going to be seeing at least an arm of General Debris through that window, now that he is being moved.
I thought we had so many book shelves, but now I don’t know. I may have to put a lot of my books in my studio in the barn.
Late in the afternoon, I was taking my last round of photos and saw something move. If you look closely at the baseboard, you can see my intruder.

It was a baby kangaroo mouse—the kind with the high hindquarters and funny legs. It wasn’t very lively—I am sure it was sick—because usually you don’t see them at all, they move so fast.

At any rate, I tried to chase it out with a broom, but it just ran under the paper the painters have taped to the floor to protect it and I was too chicken to just step on the paper, so I just left it.

Here is another intruder—but a more welcome one—a praying mantis. Kai and I found this in the back hall and brought it outside. These interesting insects are a huge boone to gardeners since they prey on insect pests. They are so beneficial that they sell them in garden stores. I have never seen one in real life before so this was exciting.
Here is a close-up of one of the installed corbels. They really finish the beams off.
You can see them better here in the kitchen/family room. It is so cool to finally see them up.
The tile setter worked today on installing the tile back splash in the kitchen. We used some Jerusalem Gold limestone, which I thought would look good with the wall paint and the granite. Since we have a custom paint color, I don’t have a swatch to carry around with me, but I have a pretty good color memory; and, at least this time, I was right—the color works great.
Here is the full back splash behind the stove. As you can see the color blends in beautifully with everything.

The tile setter put in a panel of diagonal tiles which will show above the flange at the back of the stove. We also decided to tile the underneath side of the range hood rather than use a sheet of stainless steel as we had planned. The tile is a lot less intrusive than stainless would be.

One problem we ran into is that the first jig on the end of the corbels kind of gets swallowed up by the thickness of the tile, but I don’t think you really notice. And after all, we are going for the “handcrafted” look.

Click here to see more about July 2nd  
Back to top