Monthly Archives May 2016

Today, the last Monday in May, is Memorial Day, the day America honors (or is supposed to honor) those who have died in military service to their country.

Every year I attend the Memorial Day ceremony at the Southern Arizona Veterans Memorial Cemetery near my home. I don’t do anything other than attend, but besides being physically present, I attend to the memory of the friends I have lost during my, and their, service:

• Chris Claudio. Two years ahead of me at the University of Colorado, we were both in the Air Force ROTC cadet corps there. Chris became a pilot and died in a training accident while flying an OV-10 aircraft in Germany.
• Joe Schewe. Joe was one of my classmates at Undergraduate Pilot Training at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma...

Week 1 of Cannon Wood’s work on the floors is done and all I have to say is, WOW! How wow? Let me show you, starting with the walk leading to the front door. Before, it was just plain concrete:

Notice the plain concrete of the entry porch too. But now it looks like this.

And this (and all of the other exterior pictures), are before the final sealer is put on, which will bring out the colors even more.

When Cannon’s wife Susan and son Jacob were working on the entry porch a few days ago, it looked like this.

The colors are being put on with sponges, not unlike the faux finishes that were so popular on interior walls a few years ago. In this case, the result is a faux slate. The darker color borders panels of lighter “stones.”

So how did they get those grout lines between the individual ...

On May 25th, my interior designer, Edith Villalobos-Zamora, was featured in a piece on one of Tucson’s TV stations. You can watch the video on KOLD-TV’s web site or click on it below. Unfortunately, the TV station’s web site seems to be awfully slow, so I’ve posted it under the link below, which will take you to a separate screen to view it.

Chamber to unveil solution to border banking problem

Congratulations, Edith!

Not exactly “lights, camera, action,” lacking only the camera, and I’ve provided that.

The last week-plus have felt like three steps forward, two sideways, one backward. Let’s start with one of the steps forward: the roof over the south patio. In one of my previous posts, I wrote about how we were working on figuring out just how the slats of the main part of this patio would be built, arranged and tilted. Well, Rick from Weatherguard came back late in the week before last with a new plan. When we put the template up against one of the sides that it will be mounted to, it was clear we’d found the right answer. Unfortunately, it’s not visible in the photos I took! D’oh! But it works! Really it does.

Then, this past week was supposed to be the big interior electrical week in which all of th...

Not that every week isn’t a “decision week,” but it seems this week has more to make than most. Bill sees the light at the end of the tunnel and, especially with another HOA deadline looming, wants to keep pushing to get this thing done. He’s not alone.

First up was the granite. Gage, our contact at Bedrosian’s Tile in Tucson, started pumping ideas for alternatives to the Blue Storm granite on Monday. My cousin Stephanie, who’s an interior designer in Dallas, also sent a few. And I poked around on the Bedrosian’s web site myself. A few were interesting but when we got to looking at what was actually in stock, as opposed to what the example picture showed, the “interesting” list headed toward “none of the above...

There’s been good news and bad (or, bad-ish) news on the counter-top front this week. The good news is that the counter tops in the kitchen and pantry were installed on Monday. Take a look! Here’s the kitchen.

And here’s the pantry.

The material we’ve used here goes by the brand name Curava® and this particular version is called Arctic Blue. It’s made of crushed white quartz and a binder, plus pieces of recycled clear, gray, and blue glass (which should get us a LEED point for using recycled materials). You can see the glass bits a little better in this close-up.

(And yes, the bowls of the sink are two different sizes. Different depths, too.)

The not-so-good news is that apparently that piece of Blue Storm granite was broken so badly in transit to Tucson that it was unusable...