September 8, 2007
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STUCCO HAS BEGUN.
Okay, this blog has always meant to be "slow" (two or three posts per month, max) but I've been so busy IRL that the blogging glacier has frozen to a complete stop.
But something has happened that calved a fresh posting off this glacial blog: THE STUCCO HAS BEGUN.
It has already felt like the final stretch this past several weeks, with hardwood floors mostly done, cabinetry and tile in process, painting/patching/catch-up stuff really happening. But with the loooong delays on exterior stuff, from roofing to insulation cladding to lathing the whole beast, it felt like half the project still languished in the "rough trades" phase. Not any more! Now we really HAVE turned the corner toward completion.
Feast thine eyes on wondrous things:
First the doors and windows and front porch trellis and fascia boards are taped off with plastic to protect them from the stucco...
The stucco crew uses a hose to blow the stucco onto the lath, and it gets everywhere.
And it fills the lath nicely too.
Here is the stucco pump (noisy!), and its hose (twitchy!).
The stucco guys use plastic sheeting to protect the neighbors too. That pressure hose really does shoot flecks of stucco everywhere.
This first layer of concrete is called the "scratch coat". It fills the mesh and any voids, and is left intentionally rough so the next layer of concrete stucco will adhere to it. For that reason, when there's a lot of it, it gets troweled like this, with long deep "scratches" in it.
Stick around, you'll learn something here.
Here is the noble crew that is doing our stucco. They would have finished the entire scratch coat on both structures in a single day except that their boss noticed that certain bullnosed corners weren't turning out perfectly straight. More on that later...As for the inside progress you've missed till now (which I hope to fill in later: I have a lot of half-finished draft posts in June, July and August that you can't see yet), we now have:
Hardwood floors! Here is one Terramai floor, in the master bedroom.
Tile floors! This is the guest bathroom, the only bathroom that's fully tiled so far (more on that later!)
Linoleum floors! This is the real stuff: jute fiber backing, made of natural linseed oil and fine-ground cork bark, all natural colorants. Thick! Sustainably harvested, no offgassing.
Cabinetry! This is the guest bathroom countertop (the only one that's finished so far). But a lot of the other cabinetry is done, including the other bathroom vanities and the kitchen cabinets:
As for me, I'm in the final throes of finishing my last intensive block of classes in my master's program, so you won't be getting another blog post for a while. Not unless something earthshattering calves off a post from this glacier-paced blog...
