Yeah, OK, I couldn’t resist the pun, but there’s been some important work on surfaces inside and out this week. Let’s get right to it.
Last weekend Bill asked me if I could come down to the house so we could lay out the final plan for the asphalt part of the driveway, and of course I said yes. You may remember that we’d done this once before, but with all the construction traffic, the lines we’d painted on the dirt were long gone. This time, though, the paving company was going to be out the next day.
This is a very exacting process: “Let’s start here, go straight to about there, curve it around to there, then there, and then straight again to there.”
“Here?”
“No, over to your right a little… yeah, there.”
Put down some rocks to mark the spots, and then paint them.
Anybody who’s been in the military will find that activity all too familiar, but you have to paint rocks because the soil is so dusty it just blows away when the spray paint hits it.
But short lines turn into long lines…
… and long lines turn into an outline…
(sorry, Bill, I didn’t mean to keep shooting you that way!) and then outlines turn into paving…
…including some guest parking space. It’s magic!
Meanwhile, around back, there’s now a path from the edge of the future grassy area down to the wash.
And we made good use of more of the dead trees on the property.
There’s been progress inside too. Tile-setter extraordinaire Kurtis has gotten most of the master bath and closet floor tile down and it looks pretty awesome, if I do say so myself.
Some of this slate has fossil plants in it. Not these tiles, but one piece in particular, which was cracked and unusable anyway, got put aside because the fossil’s so visible. (Unfortunately, I haven’t taken a picture of it.) We’ll use it for something–I just don’t know what yet.
The carpenters have been hard at work in the office too. A couple posts back I wrote about how they just barely got some pieces in. Well, now it’s time to put in the big piece behind where the desk will be. Kids, don’t try this at home!
That’s hard work! (And thanks to YouTube for stabilizing the video. The original was a lot shakier.)
But then… uh-oh. The top is just a little too big! It blocks part of the vent for the air-conditioning duct.
It’s hard to see, just a matter of a few inches, but it’s got to be dealt with. The good news is that the cabinet won’t have to be rebuilt. The bad news is that it had to be taken out so the drywall guys can come in and put in a piece to seal up the space. The vent cover will probably have to be remade to fit the new, smaller hole. Ah, well. This is a normal part of the process: adjust here, tweak there, and eventually it all comes together. And if I hadn’t been there to see it, I probably would never have known.
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