Since we will have a crew of plasterers coming next week, we thought it would be great to get one side of the framed walls (guest room and bathroom) plastered as well. We can’t totally enclose the walls because we still have to run wiring for plugs and switches.

Last Friday we drove down to Eugene to pick up the special Plaster board for the walls.  It is very similar to sheets of drywall but has a fuzzy surface to help the plaster stick.  There was over 600 pounds of material on top of our Subaru using our homemade carrier rack.  With the first sheet in place, the walls are finally taking shape.But before we could put up the plasterboard we needed to finish roughing in the ceiling over the guest bathroom an plumb the venting. The platform above the ceiling will give us a great storage area or as Jeff suggested, a nice cozy reading nook.

We have been getting a lot of queries as to how we are doing.  While there has not been much building progress since before Thanksgiving, we are sleeping in the house.  You can see in the picture above that we have moved our trailer up the hill because we don’t have kitchen or bathroom facilities built yet. The little green building is our pump house and temporary laundry room. You can also see the ramp that we used to get fill up onto the house is still in place.  We have left it so that we will be able to add more fill next year after all the settling occurs.  Space up top is a little tight with just enough room for our two cars and a lot of mud.  There will be much more room after we dig out the ramp and construct a retaining wall along the North side.

The big news is that on January 7th, we have a crew coming to plaster the interior wall surfaces.  You might recall from a previous post that we were experimenting with doing it ourselves.  We determined that we would be much better off hiring professionals on this one.  They will be able to get the whole job done in 4 or 5 days versus the months it would take us to do it.  In preparation and to save some money on the cost, we are doing as much as we can to get ready for the crew.  Jeff has been applying a rust preventative on all the little pieces of rebar tie wire that are sticking through the shell (from the forming).  This will prevent little rust spots from showing up on the plastered surface.  We will also be laying down floor protection and the painting the entire interior concrete surface with a bonding agent.  We have been clearing out as much stuff from inside the house (which will include us moving back into the trailer:-(. Everything else is on wheels so that we can move it out of the way of the plasterers.

Here is a “before” shot. It will be exciting to see the transformation in the coming weeks.

It’s been a while since our last post.  Between a trip to Anchorage Alaska over Thanksgiving and major storm activity every weekend, we have not progressed on the house much.  I did have fun cutting up pipe to use for wine storage in our root/wine cellar.  It seemed appropriate to use sewer pipe considering that our cellar (which is partially buried into the berm of our house), is made from an old septic tank. Because it maintains a constant cool temperature, our cellar is just perfect for storing wine as well as apples from our trees.