Sparky's Been Here!

HI!

Sparky's been here for the last week or so ...... why is it that they call electricians "Sparky?" Seems like they all answer to that moniker regardless of their given name. A mystery for sure!

There's an absolute maze of wiring in the house. As we worked through the remodels in our home in Alameda, we found that we were always short an electrical receptacle or had to walk clear across the room to get to the switch for a light.

We've corrected those problems here. We have about doubled the number of receptacles, placed lights everywhere, set up all the switches as dimmers, and added switches on each wall for each light! It'll take us years to understand how to turn on or shut off each light!

And still, there are troubles. The junction boxes above the dining table are supposed to be can lights; the sconces on the stairway are too high and too far left; the bulbs should all be LED ..........

But, we'll get all that straightened out! Right after the decisions about what fixtures to put where have been straightened out!

Cheers!

Retaining Walls

The rains that come to the Denver area in the afternoons in the Summer have taught us a lesson - one needs a way of retaining the dirt in the yard so it doesn't end up in the neighbor's yard or, worse yet, in the neighbor's garage!

We've installed rock retaining walls around the sides of the house and in the front to control the loss of dirt. As an aside, the rock walls also provide areas to plant trees, annual flowers, native xeriscape plants (plants that thrive at higher altitude with little or no water), and succulents.

The walls are around three feet high and are constructed of granite rocks. The crew building the wall are truly amazing ...... they brought in a dump truck full of rocks, dumped them in the driveway, started the cement mixer going, stood there looking at the rocks for about 15 minutes, walked over to the pile and picked up a rock / hit it with a hammer a couple of times to shape it / put it in place / slapped some cement in back of it ...... went back to the pile and did it all over again.

The wall grew from a single course of rock at the bottom to a tapered wall several feet long and then to a full-height wall extending the full length of the driveway. I'll guess that there's no more than a half-inch between rocks at any point - they fit together very tightly. The wall in the foreground here was completed in one day by two members of the crew!

This view, along the East side of the house, has 4 walls, two more nearer the back of the house, another in the front of the house, and yet another to the south of the corner of the garage.

The walls signal a couple of things - there's detail work going on now, so we've moved out of the "rough" phase and into a more detailed phase of construction (that's good!) and we're getting closer to being able to add a few plants to the area around the house!

Cheers!

Glass Bottle Wall

HI!

We've been planning to build a glass bottle wall in our home ever since we came back from Alaska. We spent some time in Sadie Cove, across Kachemak Bay from Homer, Alaska. The owners had a wood fired sauna with a glass bottle wall between the seating area and the fireplace. When sitting in the sauna with the fire going, the flickering light on the bottle wall made really interesting patterns.

Deb ran across a video on the internet that talked the viewer through building a glass bottle wall for an outhouse. We didn't particularly care about anything except the technique of creating the glass bottle bricks and placing them into the open space to create the wall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6egFulKim4

We've been collecting colored glass bottles since we decided to build the home. I want to personally thank each and every one of you who, in the evenings after a hard day at work, made the sacrifice to help empty the full bottles and save them for us! We have quite a collection of beer, wine, vodka, and specialty liquors in all colors of the rainbow. If you feel the need to continue to contribute ...... we need red and blue especially!

Sunday Deb and I spent most of the afternoon cutting the bottles - at 2-1/2" from the bottom, washing them, cutting off a piece of duck tape (that's the brand name!) and butting the two bottle pieces together to form a brick. At last count I think Deb said we had about 100 bricks. I don't think that's quite enough, so .......... let us know when you've emptied some bottles for us!

Cheers!

UPDATE: The wall is complete ......

A couple of days ago we spent 7 hours or so building the glass bottle wall. Going in, we were pretty sure we had enough bottle bricks made; we had nearly 150. We started by mixing up Type S mortar - the stuff used to glue bricks together in a wall. It was a pretty dry mix because we wanted to be able to build a vertical wall without all the mortar oozing out as the wall rises. The mortar was hand mixed in small batches so that it wouldn't dry before we got it into the wall. Dirty job!

I wish I had a picture of Deb working at installing the bricks. She is a wonder! She chooses a brick (to randomize the pattern), applies mud to the lower layer of bottles, styles the new bottle in place and places mud around it. Over and over again, until the batch of mud is gone. While I'm mixing the mud, she's cleaning the surface by patting it with a sponge to fill the cracks, remove excess mud, and smooth the surface. I managed to get in about 20 glass bottle blocks in place before she recognized that her talent at installation was much, much greater than mine!

Up and up and up, 3 bags of mortar mix and we're at the top of the wall space. Here's the final product ....... it's at the base of the stairs near the entry door on the main level. We'll backlight it with floods hidden in the mechanical room, and it should look great. It'll switch on when the front porch light and hall light switches are on.

Cheers!