Category SunSpots blog

As I expected, this past week has been a busy one as construction work wraps up. The mirrors went in, the last of the bamboo flooring went down, and almost the last of the tile backsplashes went in.

Mirrors

Mirror-maker Mo was back on Tuesday with the mirrors for the master and guest baths, plus a repaired antique mirror that will go in the master bedroom. He uses this way-cool laser device that guarantees a level mirror.

Once he locates the horizontal and vertical centers on the wall, he uses the laser to show them along the full width of the space. By raising or lowering the height of the horizontal laser line, he can identify exactly where the mounting holes should go.

And the end results are…

…in the master bath, and…

…in the guest bath.

Office floor

Kurtis is back from vacation, a...

Not much has happened this week. With the bamboo for the office floor needing the week to acclimate, tile and flooring setter Kurtis took the week off. Pretty much everything else depends on that floor getting done. The final push to finish everything will resume on Monday.

“Monsoon” has arrived in this part of Arizona, though, which is a good thing. This literally is a monsoon–which just means a change of the prevailing wind direction–in our case from west or southwest to southeast. With the monsoon comes lots of moisture all the way from the Gulf of Mexico, which means thunderstorms and the bulk of our average 14″ of annual rain. The storms tend to be very spotty: raining like crazy at one spot, bone dry five miles away.

Saturday was a good rain day, with 0...

We’re getting into the home stretch–no pun intended: the whole process of building this home has been a stretch! While there’s been some touch-up painting done this week, the biggest news has been regarding the floors.

I’ve written before about how there was moisture coming up through the concrete in one of the guest bedrooms, the master bedroom, and the office. Not a lot, but enough in a couple of the rooms to be “out of tolerances” for the bamboo flooring we wanted to put in. The final decision was to lay down a sealer coat on the concrete and put in a whole-house humidifier, since bamboo is so sensitive to humidity, or the lack of it...

It’s been a long time coming but the shade over the south patio finally got installed on Thursday and Friday. This was the last major thing to be done on the exterior of the house. (Some of the cabling for the railing on that patio still needs to be run–more on that later–but by comparison, that’s a small thing.) So what does it look like?

Let’s go back and take a look at the big hole that was. This was one side…

And this was the other.

(It’s harder taking a picture of a hole than you might think! )

With that portion of the roof wide open, the patio below was very bright.

But now that the slats are in, things are A LOT different. This photo captures how different they appear, even though they’re all installed at the same angle relative to horizontal...

One task that might not seem obvious at first when it comes to building a new home, green or otherwise, is deciding what to do with the old place. For me, that’s been an easy decision with this house: sell it! I HATED this house for the first couple years I was in it–a long, sad story I don’t need to repeat–and yet, to my amazement, I’ve now been here for almost 10 years, longer in one continuous stretch than any other location in my adult life! But before it can go on the market, certain things need to be fixed, especially the rotting exposed wood “vigas” and beams.

The current house is a Santa Fe-style place, which means it has a flat roof, parapet walls, and these round wooden things sticking out of the walls that are supposed to look like the tree trunks “Native” peoples used to suppor...

The big push this past week, and coming up this week, is flooring. Tile-setter extraordinaire Kurtis continues to make progress on getting tile up on the walls and down on the floors, and the results continue to be spectacular.

The tile in the master bath’s shower is smaller pieces of the tile that floors the rest of the room. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the master bath, the storage cabinet “towers” are now up on their granite pedestals.

There’s still some trim and electrical work to be done, and the lights will have to be raised for better clearance above the yet to be installed mirror, but placing the towers marks another step completed. The faucets look good with the granite, even though we selected them months apart. “Blind squirrel finds nut,” as the saying goes.

The same is true for th...

I know I’ve been silent for the last couple of weeks. Stress had me out of it for the week before last, and then this past week, while the stress is under better control, it was just a very busy week. That’s not to say that nothing has been happening at the house; lots has! Let’s talk counter tops first, then the walls above them (and elsewhere).

We’ll start with the master bath. Wherever there were windows, I had a hard time getting a shot that wasn’t half washed out by reflected glare. This was the one shot here that worked.

Unfortunately, the shots in the laundry didn’t come out so well. This is the best one.

I really wanted this green stone to go in the guest bath...

“…Paint your palette blue and gray / Look out on a summer’s day…”

When it comes to the floor in my house, I can’t help thinking of Don McLean’s song “Vincent,” which starts out with the title of the post and those next two lines. It’s an homage to Vincent van Gogh, and there certainly has been artwork committed on my house. No face on the barroom floor, this.

You may remember that I had this idea to embed the white quartz that’s all over my property in dark-blue-stained concrete and then have both polished. And I wrote about how that dream turned out not to be possible in reality. Well, what happened in its place is done and it’s nothing short of beautiful. For example, the great room went from this…

…to this…

…to this.

And the kitchen went from this…

…to this…

…to this.

And somethin...

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 ...