I am back from New Mexico and so much has been completed while I was gone. The cottage got its final coat of plaster. As you can see, it matches the barn and is quite brown.

While I was in New Mexico, I looked at a lot of buildings to compare those colors with ours. In Santa Fe, all the buildings are some iteration of brown plaster, although the variations of browns seem infinite. Most of the darker browns there are redder than this and our brown is still a little darker than most in the southwest. I don’t think the redder color would work with our surroundings as well as this, though.

The garage door was put in, but much to our dismay, it has a hideous fake wood-grain texture on the outside. Janver has told the company that they will have to replace it with the smooth one that I wanted.

Evidently, the fake wood-grain texture keeps the plastic from expanding and contracting in the heat and also hides dings better. When the correct new door gets hot, the panels will tend to bulge out as they expand with the heat. I don’t care—anything so I don’t have that fake wood look. It looks like some cheap plastic kid’s toy, ick. I don’t understand why they can’t put some attractive industrial-looking texture on the doors if they want texture. Oh well, at least it seals well.

I came up to the site on Tuesday, because the plumber and the radiant heat contractor had questions for me before they could do their work—particularly the radiant heat contractor. He had drawn a plan of the system, but somehow I had not gotten a copy of it and needed to approve where the thermostats and manifolds would go.

Here you see the situation when I got to the job. All that tubing is waiting to be installed. You can also see the tops of the completed grade-beams with the rebar sticking out of them.

Here is a better view of the finished grade-beams. This one runs along the east wall of the courtyard. I am standing in what will be Jim’s office and looking through his dressing room and my dressing room, toward the master bedroom.

The black pipes sticking up will be attached to one of the radiant heat manifolds which will live in one of my dressing room walls.

With the grade-beams poured and the ditches filled in, the house plan now starts to make better sense. We are looking down at the house from the east. The area directly in front is the laundry room/dressing room area, with the master bath going out of the picture to the left.

Directly behind the laundry room wing is the courtyard. They have formed up the footings for the courtyard sidewalks—although they won’t pour the sidewalks themselves until construction is much further along. Behind the courtyard is the living room/dining room wing.

This little square form will be the base for one of the columns. When the sidewalk footings are poured, the column bases will be part of them, sticking up like little cubes until the sidewalk is poured around them. The finished bases will protrude about 3" from the sidewalk.

The house slab concrete will be dyed a terra cotta color. This is called integral color (although all the contractors pronounce it in-TE-gral). The sidewalks will be a sandy yellow. Since they are pouring the sidewalk footings at the same time as the house slab, there was some concern about having to change concrete colors, however, I decided that it would look cool to have the column bases be a different color from the sidewalk, so they can use all the same color.