November 2, 2007—More sheer and some plumbing
Here is the barn bathroom sink. Look familiar? How many times have you seen this sink in a public bathroom? There are about 6 to 8 sinks that are used all across this country in public restrooms built on a budget, and this is one of them. I bought it because, since there is no backsplash in this bathroom, I wanted a backsplash on the sink. You will notice that the bowl of the sink is lower on the sides and front than the back, creating a self-backsplash.

The faucet is the same one as I used in the guest cottage except this one has a 4" spread and the wrist paddles. It was a lot cheaper than the other one and came from Home Depot. I thought of moving the paddles from this sink to the cottage, but I think the scale of the other little levers works well with the vanity so I will leave well enough alone.

Another thing I found out about faucets is that they do not all have a “drain lifter.” This is the thing you pull on behind the faucet to open the sink drain.

Back to the framing. I include this photo because it gives you a fairly good view of the sheer-walls which have been installed so far.

Looking through the exterior framing, you can see the master bath and the laundry room sheer-walls plus the top of the wall along the master bedroom. That piece of OSB sticking up high covers the chase. This is a hollow vertical attic for wires and pipes to make the transition up from the lower attic of the utility wing to the higher attic over the kitchen/dining room/living room area—or what I call the public rooms.

Here is one of the crew on a scaffold behind the kitchen wall working on the framing. They have a really nice wheeled scaffold, of which I am very envious in anticipation of painting. I took all the painting out of the building contract and so will be hiring a painting contractor myself. I will probably be doing a lot of the work myself and my assistant will probably do even more. Having a good rolling scaffold would make life easier. I will have to rent one.

Standing in the still-unframed guest bath, I took this shot to show that our erosion control is in place. The straw will protect all the new soil, just graded around the house, from washing away when it starts to rain. I just which I had been able to put down cardboard first, but we can lift up the straw and do that when I get the cardboard for the rose garden, which should be soon.

I am shooting from the dining room toward the master bedroom one last time because I am guessing that the crew will have this wall sheered closed by the time I get back to the site.

They brought in a huge forklift at the end of the day, today, to lift the long rafters up to the top of these walls; so my guess is that they will have this area filled in by next Wednesday.

Kai’s assistant put in rock below the drain pipes in the gully and strawed the slope against erosion. I am not sure how much of this straw will end up in our pond. I hope not too much and I hope it doesn’t plug up our pipe from the silt-pond at the bottom of this gully.

These pipes won’t be used this year. They will carry water from the house and veranda roof once the downspouts are hooked up. But the thought was, that once the weeds grow up over these pipes, they would be forgotten and never get rocked, so we did it right away instead.

This is a hybrid tea rose that I got for my birthday. It is still in kind of a small pot, but is very happily blooming away. Hopefully before the end of the year, we can get this and the other roses into the ground in the rose garden.
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