With all the Holiday festivities, there has been little time to work on the house. We did however start on building the interior walls around the guest bedroom.

We had hoped to get the North wall foamed in, (filling the voids between the metal studs with spray foam) but when the foam guys came with their big trailer, they couldn’t get up the driveway.  Unfortunately that was the last day of a long beautiful dry spell.  We will now have to wait until we have several non rainy days before they can attempt doing the job. Our usual winter weather is now back with a vengeance with driving rain and 60 – 80 mph wind gusts.

At least Christmas Eve was glorious and we had a wonderful party up in the house with the fire blazing and great friends, family & food.

It was very exciting to start laying out interior walls this weekend.   The main wall between the kitchen and guest bathroom was a bit of a challenge as there are 6 different pipes and conduit coming up through the floor into the wall. I had to make a template to get all the holes in the right place.  On Friday, Jeff and I headed to the Valley to check out bathtubs.  We needed to pick one out so we would know what the rough-in space needed to be.  We found a gorgeous soaking tub that is long enough for Jeff to lay in comfortably.  This is what we based our wall dimensions on.

In this picture you can see that the wall takes an interesting bend.  That’s where the bathtub ends and the bedroom starts. The white pipes are part of our air exchange system and have to be placed inside our walls. This picture on the right shows the copper pipes that go up through the North wall cavity and then exit through the concrete shell.  This is for our future solar hot water heater. We also placed electrical conduit up through this wall for potential solar and/or wind power.

As Winter progresses and there is less that we can do outside, it will be fun to get working on the interior elements.

We love to get comments about our project on our blog but you are also encouraged to send any comments taped to the side of a Hydro Systems Inc, Model 66-32 “Sydney” soaking tub with seamless front apron, side and back tile flange, right hand drain with the optional Thermal-Air bubble massage system and heated back.

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Our last two blog entries have been about Holiday festivities but I don’t want you all to think we have shut down the building process.  Fortunately we have had several days of dry, sunny weather.  We took this opportunity to button up the face of our South wall.  Although much of it is windows and a door, there is still some framing that has been exposed to the elements.

We decided to use cement based Hardy Plank with a stucco relief to fill in the exposed areas.  It comes in 4’ X 8’ panels and is very dusty to cut. I made a paper pattern first and then carefully cut the pieces to fit around the windows and up against the arches.  It was very “fiddly” and took many trims with the saw and a plane to get it just right.  But the effort was worth it to have as few seams as possible. These were then sealed up with a generous application of Vulkem caulking.

By the end of the weekend we had it pretty much done.  There are just a few pieces under the door and window that we need to get but we ran out of material. It was a hard days work and we were rewarded by a visit from our friend Nolle who brought an amazing meal for us.  Thanks Nolle!

Let the winter storms roar now….

Though we are happy to take as many dry days as we can get.

P.S. In this picture, you can just see the lights on our Christmas Tree through the window.  When it gets dark, the lights are visible even from the road.

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Here’s a holiday quiz. If you have a 12 foot high ceiling, how tall of a Christmas tree can you have?

This weekend, Karen, Meredith & Beckett stopped by to find out (and to have some of my famous Polenta Pizza).

We found the perfect Douglas Fir just a few feet from our front patio area.  It was starting to block the view so now was time to cut it down.

The tree was actually much taller than our ceiling so we trimmed a bit off the top and the bottom for just the perfect fit.

Good thing we have such a large sliding glass (window). It would have been tough to squeeze this through the door.

The tree fits in our living room area quite nicely.  Add a few lights and voila!

We already have next years Christmas Tree picked out and we are going to start grooming other trees on our property for future picks.

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