UPDATE on the progress on the Home

HI!

We might be jumping the gun just a bit, but we took the rug we just bought and laid it out in the great room ..... just to see how it looks.

The rug is 10' x 14', so you can get a pretty good idea of the size of that portion of the room.

In the background you see the carved "art" door - it's been installed and we're looking for lock sets that have an extension long enough to reach through the 2-1/4" door thickness. Next steps for the art door is a light sanding, then staining on the inside - a nice brown - and staining on the outside - a southwestern teal blue.

In other areas, the kitchen cabinetry is going in. Here's the main set of cabinets; all that's missing are the two glass front upper cabinets that are on either side of the three smaller windows and an upper cabinet to the right of the range arch. The upper cabinets on either side of the three windows will have a set of open shelves connecting the cabinets below the level of the windows.

Chris has been doing most of the cabinet installations. In addition to the kitchen cabinets, he's installed the upper cabinet and the sink base in the laundry room, the maple counter top in the upstairs powder room, the barn doors on the pantry and the laundry room, and he has hung the art door and the front main entry door.

Cory and Chris have made a good team. Cory's specialty - and the only thing he does - is putting in spiral stairways. He's quite a craftsman, spending quite a few hours with a mallet and chisel carving out the form of the handrails. He and Joel took the handrail system that I've described before and formed them to follow the downward spiral of the stairs.






I've posted pictures of the view from the party deck before, and they haven't changed - yet. It's past the start of Autumn now, so the trees are beginning to turn and a week ago we actually had a light snow in Roxborough Park. September 13th seems a little early in the year to have snow! The party deck material is all in and solid, the stairs to the roof are complete, and it's beautiful standing up there just looking around. The only thing left on the party deck is to install the fire pit. It's a 48" diameter pit and we'll paint the lower portion of the fire pit, and add an upper ledge to the top so that people can sit near it with their feet up or sit their with backs to the warming fire.

As for the outside, the driveway has been poured, the walls around the house are up and have at least the scratch (under) coat on it. In most places, the stucco guys have completed the top (colored) coat.

This week the downspouts went on; hopefully they'll help with the erosion issues we have right now. The next step is finishing the sandstone covering for the back patio areas, and final grading and re-seeding outside the walls. If we get that down soon enough, maybe some of the winter grass will sprout and help keep moisture in the soil.

We're starting to put together a "punch" list - a list of items that we'll want corrected as we get closer to move-in time. As an example, the stucco guys framed three large East wall windows all the way around, and left three small windows right next to them unframed. That combination looks funny, so we'll ask them to add the frame around the small windows too.

Today we sent notification to Moover's Inc. for them to schedule shipping our household goods stored in Antioch, CA to our new home. That's a pretty strong indication that we'll soon be in the home! Wish Steve the Builder good luck as he and the sub-contractors move through the last few weeks of construction!!

Starting on the Details for the Stairway

 HI!

We're starting on the details for the stairway now. Deb has been looking at balusters .... you know, the upright posts that support the handrail of the stairway. The balusters she's chosen are 1/2" square iron with one of three designs. There's a plain one, one with one twist, and one with to twists. Deb had to work out a pattern that works for each of the stair treads and as an overall pattern from top to bottom.

The details ...... all of the stair treads have to be replaced with hickory and sanded, three holes drilled per tread, balusters installed in each hole and the top rail attached.








There are three rails on the stairway. Two keep people who are on the main floor from falling into the stair well. The other one curves up from the entry level start of the stairway to the main floor, up the staircase.

Creating a curved handrail is like putting together a picture puzzle with 5,000 pieces ...... and no photo to help out! The rail has a profile - the way it's shaped. The profile is milled out of whatever wood one desires and it's continuous for the length of the stairway. Our handrail up from the lower floor is 28 feet long ..... about at the top end of the length range for a continuous rail. Then the milled profile is cut along the length into either 8 or 10 pieces depending on the radius of the curve that the rail needs to fit. Ours is 8 piece, and each piece is 28 feet long ..... the puzzle parts.

Next, the line of the rail is drawn on the stair treads; when complete, the handrail will be exactly above the lines drawn on the treads. On each tread, on the line, and l-shaped bracket is fastened to the stair tread. These are the braces that will hold the handrail while the glue dries. On a separate table, the 8 pieces are glued together. One end is clamped to the first L-bracket ..... the rail assembly is bent and attached to the next L-bracket ...... and so on to the last L-bracket. The individual pieces of rail move and flex as the assembly is bent and attached to the next L-bracket. Once all that is done, the glue dries and the assembly is complete ....... except for cleaning off the glue, sanding the assembly, staining it to the right color, and attaching it to the balusters.

So far, getting the three rails bent and glued has involved two guys for three days ........

Fixtures

Deb saw this and immediately wanted one so I guess we'll start by asking the plumbing supplier where to get one ...... or maybe we should be asking Artesa winery if they can source it for us?

Pinot? Cab? Zin?

The Gem, Fossil, and a lot of other Geologic Stuff Day at Denver Coliseum

HI!

We started looking for a coffee table for the Great Room a while ago, and as you might remember, Deb and the girls were shopping .... and found a slab table for $3,600 that they thought was beautiful. I was called to drive to Evergreen to look it over, and pointed out that we could make one for a lot less and end up with a lot more. Deb took me up on that offer!

So, a trip to CS Hardwoods was in order (again). This time specifically for mesquite about 50" long x 30" wide. No luck (again) as all of the really nice mesquite wide enough for what we wanted was spoken for by some local artist who uses CS Hardwoods' policy of "holding" a piece ...... for as long as the "owner" wants .... ad infinitum ........ to keep us from finding the perfect piece. So, being ever resourceful, we decided to find a piece we could stick in the middle of an existing slab that was very nice but too narrow. Searching through dimensioned lumber, we found two 4" x 6" book matched pieces of mesquite. Even though different from the original slab, but beautiful in it's own right, we told CS Hardwoods to split the slab and insert the two book matched pieces. They were skeptical.

Notice that there are lots of "defects" in the piece in the form of worm holes, cracks, lines, and knots. We see these as opportunities ..... to learn about how to inlay these defects with turquoise. We've seen pictures of beautiful bowls, furniture, doors, etc. that have been inlaid and they are stunning!

We haven't done inlay before, and we checked .... many of the finest (read as "costly") furniture and art objects are inlaid with turquoise. In its natural state, turquoise comes in chunks - rocks - anywhere from a few ounces to many pounds. When it's ready for inlay, the turquoise is in very small chunks or slices, sized down to a powder that will go through a flour sieve. So, we have to learn how to take the rocks to chunks to dust without wasting any and still having useful pieces for the table.

Today we went to the Gem, Rock and Fossil show at Denver Coliseum to see if we could find turquoise for the table.

Denver Coliseum is a full-on music and show venue seating around 10,000 people. This show took up the whole concourse level, the whole floor level of the coliseum and spilled out into the parking lot with vendors in a hundred or so tents. Table after table after table of precious, semi-precious gems, tools, lapidary materials, imported specialty items, fossils, skulls with teeth, shark teeth from Megladon as big as you hand, ...... and necklaces made of coral, ivory, lapis, opals from Egypt, tourmaline, turquoise, peridot, amber with imbedded insects, ...... Amazing the diversity of materials!

Deb was looking and I was following. She stopped and was having a conversation with a lady about her "old pawn" Native American silver / turquoise jewelry, and I butted in, asking about how one knows which turquoise is "good" and which is "lower grade." The lady said to talk to her husband so I wandered over and struck up a conversation. The conversation got around to me asking him if he has any "seconds," shorts," chards," or the like for sale. He said he had a shoe box that had been in his garage for two years that he'd brought with him. He called it a "close-out" box and wanted $50 for two quart baggies full of turquoise rocks, a quart jar full of 1/4" minus turquoise rocks, and a medicine bottle full of small pieces that had been saw cut off of bigger chunks. I bargained him down to $40 for the box and we went on our way.

Later on, we were talking to a couple from Medford, OR and he was saying how hard it was to find good turquoise. He said it used to be easy, but now the mines were played out and closing down, so the supply was drying up. I told him about the box of turquoise, and he offers me $40 for one of the baggies that he said contain "good" turquoise. How nice for us ..... by a box full for $40, sell about a third of the contents for $40 .......

So we now have the turquoise. We just need to know how to place it in the table ....... more to come!

Cheers!

Random thoughts about where we are now

HI!

Just some random thoughts - as an aid to me as we move down the home stretch - about where we are now and what's happening in the next few weeks.

The stucco outside is complete, the roof's on, the decks (except for the party deck) are complete, garage doors are on, interior doors have been hung and removed (to avoid damage), and the wall texturing has been completed. The interior is ready .....

Here's looking at the great room from the southeast corner of the kitchen. It looks pretty nasty yet, but the floors have been scraped and some of the dust has been removed so that our hardwood floors can be installed (next three days). I personally don't agree with installing a hardwood floor unfinished and then returning to sand and seal at a later date, but the contractor chooses to do it that way.

The living level is all hardwood floor except for the master bath shower and sauna area. We're going to install the sauna on Tuesday next week even though the tile for the shower and sauna won't be in. The sauna guy will complete the whole thing with the exception of the bottom foot or so of boards so that whenever the tile guy comes in, the sauna floor can be laid. The sauna guy will come back and finish up.

Along with the hardwood floors, the painting has started. We asked for a smooth finish on the walls, so the first coat will be a primer in Navaho White. As soon as that's done, Deb can come in and put up sample patches of paint already chosen, and we can have the painter start on the room scheme picked out. I don't know the timing, but some where along the way the painter will stain the overhead beams in the great room and the kitchen - a darker brown - as well as the window, door and baseboard trim.

Here's the view from the great room looking back at the kitchen and dining room. The front of the range and the niche above the refrigerator have been completed, so they are ready for the installation of cabinets and granite counter tops. Steve the Builder says that the cabinets will begin arriving on the 12th of September. By then, the tile backsplash above the range and the two other areas on that wall have to be tiled with the yellow field tiles and the randomly placed Mexican accent tiles. We're running into minor coordination issues every now and again. For instance, the floors are in but unfinished when the cabinets arrive for installation. That means that the floor installers have to finish only the areas under the cabinets - we don't want to end up with partially finished and partially unfinished floors! As soon as the cabinets and countertops are in, the appliances can be delivered and installed.

Deb's vision of bottle walls has been fulfilled. She's done a great job, taking the idea she got from our Alaska trip to Sadie Cove, researching how to actually build one through YouTube - the video about putting a bottle wall in a outdoor privy was her favorite - and executing it flawlessly! This one is in the guest powder room upstairs. It will absolutely compliment the natural edge Maple slab counter top and the hammered copper sink also going into that bathroom!

CS Hardwoods supplied us with the slab of maple, and cut the hole for the sink and faucet, finished the top and made it look great! So good in fact that they asked if they could display their work at the recent Home and Bath show in Denver. We're very pleased!

So ... floors, paint, wood trim and the sauna go in this coming week.

Past that ...... tile all over everywhere, "flatwork" - the pouring of the foundation for the sandstone courtyard footpaths and the front driveway, and a couple of other odds and ends along with the acid etching and staining of the concrete floor downstairs - happens after that.

The shell of the house is done; now just the finishing details left!

Cheers!