March 12, 2008—The General leaves for well-deserved R & R
Here are some more shots of sprinklers in the family room and the lights on the courtyard side of the room—which will act as a corridor. I am worried that those lights are too close to the windows. I will talk to the electrician on Friday about that.
They needed to put a sprinkler in the front hall and because of the spray range, it had to be installed very close to the edge of the coffer. When the sprinklers are finished, all you see are just little plates on the ceiling, so—hopefully—this one won’t show very much.

Control central!

I thought I showed a picture of this before, but looking back through the pages, I don’t see one. Anyway, what you see here is the switch box for the storm shades and below that a regular light switch box. The white pipe is for the all-house vacuum. All this is on the wall just before you turn the corner out of the living room into the kitchen.

We have some very large termites!

Actually, those holes were bored by the electricians because a conduit had been buried in the studs. These holes will be used to wire into the courtyard for the fountain and courtyard electrical outlets.

Here is the exterior of the kitchen/family room. The piece of wood running along the building between the clerestory windows and the lower windows and doors, is the ledger which will hold up the corrugated steel of the veranda roof. It needed to be in placed and flashed before the stucco goes on.

Kai also told me that Thomas will be back next week to install the brackets that are sitting in the living and dining rooms over the windows.

Here are the 3 descending windows over the master tub from the outside. Notice the Tyvek flashing underneath them. There are all kinds of metal flashing and Tyvek flashing used around these windows because we are so exposed to the weather.
I showed this before, last week, but here is the plumbing for our future gray water system, plus a giant clean-out for the toilet. (Just in case.)

These cute little cupboard doors are standing on their side. They are the doors the cupboard above the closet in the guest room.

I can’t get over how much I love the color of the stained doors. This is good—since I will be living with them forever—but every time I go into the barn and see the doors sitting there, it makes me happy. They came out exactly as I had envisioned them—something so rare that it should be celebrated repeatedly!

I decided to leave the inside of the master bathroom door natural because the colors of the master bath are much softer than the rest of the house. We are currently planning to use a very pale, creamy-white, tumbled travertine stone tile in the master bath. I felt that large slabs of green would be too much with these softer colors.

The windows got stained inadvertently, but those frames are relatively small compared to the big slabs of the doors; and also, if the green frames look bad, we can paint them the same color as the trim.

The outside of the bathroom door is the same as all the rest of the doors in the house—our beautiful blue-green.
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