| Interior |
| The first step towards finishing the interior was finishing the interior walls! Here, the bathroom wall is being built. We included the blue bottles in this wall as we did in the planter walls. At the top of the wall we also added a few glass blocks to allow some light to pass through. We also finished the planter walls, and the framing for the utility room and inverter closet. After the insulation was in the ceiling, we put up a vapor barrier. We paid an insulation installer and he had it done in one day. I figure he gets paid to go home covered head to toe in fiberglass, so why not let him? I hate being itchy! The vapor barrier is simply 6mil plastic. It is supposed to, as the name implies, stop water vapor from condensing on the underside of the roof and raining back into the room. Most houses accomplish this by venting the ceiling space with outside air, which is probably a better method. Oh well, hope this way works! After the vapor barrier we put up the ceiling. We used the cheapest pine tongue and groove that we could find and got a result that we love. I wanted to use broken pallets (like I did for the cabinet doors, pics forthcoming) but decided that it would take me far to long to collect and but the pallets. I've seen ceilings done with pallets and they can turn out great. |
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| Once the ceiling was up, I made the tops of the rooms round. The framing was made on 45 degree angles because it's hard to frame in a circle. We could have just sheeted over the framing, and had round rooms with angled tops, but I thought I could round out the corners. I took 1/8" masonite, reffered to around here as "bendy board", cut it to fit the taper of the ceilings, covered it with lath and attached it to the framing members. I used a string from the center of the room to make a radius to ensure that the bendy board matched the radius of the tire walls. If you compare the picture above with the one below, you can make out how the framing was done, and how the end product was different. In the bottom picture, you can see the string. |
| In this picture, the scratch coat is finished. I think I skipped all descriptions and we don't really have any pictures of the process. We used the same mud mixture as before, but we screened the dirt to get out the large rocks. We used plaster scratchers to get a pretty deep scratch, so that the finish mud would stick well. This was a long job, but the house is really starting to come together now. We kept all of the tongue and groove cut-offs and used them above the kitchen. We cut them |
| This is the two end walls where the doors are, the planters, the bathroom and hallway walls, and the space beneath the windows. The stucco crew was not to pleased with our bottle details, as it made a lot more work for them but I didn't appologize. It looks great! |
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| into matching lengths and then nailed them in no particular order. With the ceiling up, we worked on some of the finish electrical, changing temporary fixtures for permanent ones and so on. The finish electrical for the outlets and switches has to wait until the finish mud is on of course, but trying to get each of the outlets to be in plane with a coat of finish mud that isn't there was pretty tough. After the interior walls were all finished and the ceiling was up, we had the the stucco guy return and stucco any wall that was not going to be finished with mud. |
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| These pictures show the floor cleaned and ready for the final flooring, but there was on step in between: I had to rewire the refrigerator and the light swithes in the great room. The original blueprints put the frigde in the kitchen, which makes sense, but when we measured the space for it, it was going to take up A LOT of kitchen space. So instead we decided to put the fridge CLOSE to the kitchen, but in the great room, and build a pantry in the place where the fridge was supposed to go. Also, the kitchen area is in the sun all of the time, in the great room the fridge will not be in the sun and not have to work as hard. Fine. But the fridge uses DC power and the only place that I had run DC to was in the kitchen. Also, the electrician had put the light switches for the great room in a really dumb place, which turned out to be exactly where we wanted to put the fridge. So, I cut a trench in the concrete (!) from the inverter closet to the wall where the fridege was going to go, then I cut grooves in the mud on the wall to accomodate the new wires and switch box. I was a lot of extra, messy work, but it had |
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| to be done. In this picture you can see the inverter room, the trench in the concrete from the inverter room to the wall, and the grooves cut into the mud. To make the grooves in the mud I just used a circular saw. BAD NEWS for the blade, but worked! The blue box on top is the new DC outlet for the fridge. The white plate on the right is where the switches used to be (see, stupid place!) and the silver box on the left is the new switch position. We swept up all of the mud from making the grooves, added some water and stuck it back in the holes to cover the wire. We mixed new cement to patch the floor, then we were ready for the finish floor. |
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