landscaping tagged posts

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...

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 ...

OK, sorry, I couldn’t resist. It was either that or borrowing the lines or titles from one of these songs:

• Neil Diamond’s “Stones”
• Queen’s “We Will Rock You”
• Bob Dylan’s “Everybody must get stoned…”
• Of course, The Rolling Stones’ “Only Rock ‘n Roll”

I’m sure there were others I could have named too.

What’s this all about? You may remember sometime back I wrote that when Edith and I had selected granite slabs for counter tops in the house, we had NO idea it would take so long before the house was ready for them. As a result, we didn’t reserve them, and because of that, the suppliers sold the pieces we’d picked. D’oh!

So now that we’re finally ready for the slabs, we had to go back to the suppliers and see what they had. OK, no problem, right?

No. Problem.

One of the suppliers no longer ha...

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 t...

I’ll write more later this week on what’s happening on the inside of the house but for now it’s time to get caught up on what’s been going on outside.

For starters, the decorative stone work on the short walls at the front is almost done.

I’ve discovered one of stone-mason Ramon’s techniques, however. He doesn’t just grab a stone out of the box and place it on the wall, he plans his work.

Not sure exactly where those stones will all go, exactly (OK, OK, on that wall in the picture) but clearly he lays the stones out so he can see what he has to work with.

Speaking of stones, and moving around to the west and south sides of the house, the gravel and plants continue to go in. A cloudy day week before last lets the differences in color between the larger and smaller stones stand out.

The l...

I know it may not seem like a very interesting thing, but putting up the interior doors is one more step to making the house seem complete.

While right now most of the doors are still stacked up, waiting to be installed, like this,

that will start Monday.

While trim carpenter Lonnie or his assistant is doing that, the shelving in the office storage room, all three bedroom closets, the guest closet, linen closet, and another closet will go in as well. (That’s the “stores” in the title of this post–for storage.)

Another kind of storage got sorted out recently too. The original plan was to have an 1,100 gallon rainwater storage tank outside of my office, harvesting the water from the office roof and part of the shed roof.

To be honest, I never liked this option...

I know I’ve written about lighting before (like last time!) but this has been one of the biggest things to work on lately. The good news is that we’re now well on our way to having everything sorted out. Last week I approved one part of the order, for much of the decorative lighting, but then lighting expert Faith and I had to sort out some details regarding the under-cabinet lighting in the kitchen: would each bank have to be turned and off individually, how long could they be (these are LED light strips), what I might want besides outlets in the tracks between the light strips, etc. By using this kind of lighting system, we can mount the outlets, USB charging stations, and all sort of other gizmos (which I won’t be doing, but could) on the tracks...

Man, what a busy couple of weeks it’s been since my last post! One of the key things we’ve needed to finalize at this stage is all of the light fixtures and switches. You might think this would be a simple matter, but no, not in this house, anyway.

Take the lamp that’s going to hang over the table in the dining room. First of all it’s heavy: 35 pounds! Second of all, it’s going to hang from a high ceiling. Third of all, that ceiling is sloped. Can it hang from a sloped ceiling? One that’s that tall? How do we mount it to the joists? Are we going to have to redo the drywall? If so, we need to do that while the drywall guys are still on site.

Then there are the outdoor lights. Cochise County has a “dark skies” lighting code to keep the night-time skies, well, dark...