September 12, 2008—We are topped with corrugated

Kai had called me on Thursday to let me know that he had installed the corrugated steel roof in the courtyard, and that it looked really terrific, so I wasn’t surprised to see it when I arrived this morning. But he was right, it does look terrific.

The porch will get gutter across the front and there will be a ridge cap along the top of the steel you see here, but this is pretty much the finished look.

Inside the courtyard, it was even more wonderful—and a little bit startling since the space now does look like it is straight out of New Mexico. I guess if you use the same materials and build the in the same style, it will look the same. (Duh.) But I really didn’t expect that this space would look so much like the southwest.

 

I took this photo from the living room through the somewhat dirty window, which is why the left side of the photo looks blurry. Here, you get a sense of what the walkways around the courtyard look like from underneath. There will be one more hanging light on this side, in front of the kitchen’s French door.

From the east side of the courtyard looking toward the living room, you can now get a feel of it will look when it’s finished.

I want the courtyard to seem bright and warm in the winter, but shady and cool in the summer. The addition of the roof on the walkway makes the open space cozier and adds some much-needed shade. Imagine it planted with a lot of plants and the fountain in the middle. I think it will be very appealing.

Looking toward the front gate, you can see the shadows cast by the arbor section on the east wall. We are still trying to decide what to grow on our arbor. Grapes, bougainvillea, and roses are still on the list of possibles.

We had a full house today because the electricians were here and also the sheet metal contractor and his crew. It’s hard to get a picture of all the trucks without getting so far away that everything appears insignificant, though.

There really are a lot of parking spaces. We were required by the fire department to have a certain amount of room so they could turn a fire engine around if need be, and that dictated the huge gravel area in front of the house. I hope it doesn’t end up looking too desolate because of all the gravel.

Our wonderful gate guy thinks he got the gate controller fixed—finally. The company had to hand-build a custom motherboard for our gate because the phone lines up the hill are so rotten.

Here you can see him and his helper in the distance putting the new motherboard in the gate. We should be able to program in individual gate codes with their own parameters from a computer now. I will have to download the software and learn to do this.

The sheet metal guys are just amazing. For some reason, I didn’t take any photos of the gutter they built for the carport while they had it in pieces on the ground. This gutter—which I think is made in 6 sections—drains the whole roof, running along the middle to either side. The front and back roof sections are tilted to run off into this central gutter so we won’t have to drive through a waterfall into the carport.

There wasn’t a lot of detail on the plans for the gutter, so the sheet metal contractor had to work out a lot of the practicalities on his own. For instance, he designed it so each end of the gutter slopes away from the middle of the carport to direct the water to the ends, where it will drain into area drains.

Here is the view from my office in the barn of the carport and the corrugated roofs of the courtyard and porch. By the time I return next week, the carport will be roofed as well.
For more on the corrugated steel roofs, click here  
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