The Eternity Plague tagged posts

The last couple of weeks have been crazy busy as we finished out most of the last of the construction details, got the final inspections done, and finished all of the paperwork. All before the HOA’s July 31st deadline. While Bill and the subs continue to work on the items on the punch list, I closed on the mortgage on July 26th and the Certificate of Occupancy was issued on the 27th. The house is now officially mine! (Well, my trust’s actually.)

GREAT! Now I can move in, right?

Uh, not really. It would be nice to have some furniture, maybe. So on August 1st, the new beds were delivered–and I managed to have the queen and the two twins put in the wrong rooms...

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...

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 ...

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...

Pete DeMaster.

LaKesha Levy.

Cartney McRaven.

165 others.

The 167 killed people killed in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, and the one person who died three days later when a piece of debris from the building fell on her while she worked to recover the bodies of the others.

Each is now memorialized by one of these chairs (this is my friend Pete’s) in the Field of Empty Chairs in the footprint of the Murrah Building on the grounds of the Oklahoma City National Memorial.

Over the weekend I was in Oklahoma City volunteering with the Memorial Marathon that’s put on each year to honor those killed and injured in the bombing, and those whose lives were changed forever. Including mine.

Each of the people who died had a story,...