Another 3 am post. You probably think I stay up this late every night. Partially true, but I have been sleeping in this chair since midnight, I just woke up and remembered to charge my iPhone, which leads to a sync, which leads to the pictures downloading, etc. Yes, I often do stay up this late anyway, and when I do work, this is child's play.
OK, already rambling...
Stucco guys were there again today in full force. Maybe a few of you remember WAY back in my original posts about how I obsessed over recessing the windows away from the face of the stucco. Makes the wall look thick and rugged. Over the weekend, the stucco crew worked hard and put on the first of 3 coats of stucco. Here is how it works...
1. Prep. Flashing, water proofing, tyvek, building paper, and then the application of the metal lath. In our case we are using rounded corners, so they put on a rounded wire mesh on the corners. Here is a pic.
2. Scratch coat, this coat forms the base layer that grips to the house and metal lath. They "scratch" it with a notched trowel to make it rough so the next coat will stick to it. Here are some pics...
3. Brown coat. This coat adds more thickness and rigidity to the whole thing. Our stucco has little bitty fibers in it to give it strength. In hot weather, they have to be careful to work in the shade so the sun doesn't dry out the mix too fast and prevent a good cure. Right now, our temps are swinging from about 60 in the night to low 80's, which is pretty good. The brown coat also defines the texture pretty much of what the final product will look like without the color....brown. These guys are made out of steel, by the way, and I shocked them the other day when I picked up a trowel and started putting on scratch coat with them. I stopped after about 5 square feet because I was slowing them down, but they appreciated the effort. Pictures...
4. Finish coat. Normally they would apply the finish coat of color and that would be a uniform color you select from a color chart or color match just like paint. These finishes are very advanced in terms of their chemical composition, which I think is basically an acrylic polymer mixed with color and sand. The finish coat is available in different textures, where some have larger sand particles and rough up the surface as they are applied to give different looks, but ours should be fairly smooth, with some trowel marks here and there. Where ours differs, though, is that they will be "burnishing" in different colors over the top of the original to create a deeper color look. So the combination of texture and colors leads to a more 3 dimensional look.
We're not there yet.
House from the front.
Oh, and inside, the cantera continues to go up. As of tonight they had 6 interior columns up of the 6, and they were looking good. They are also preparing the base for the cantera hearth in the living room. A messy task. I spared you a pic of that.
Personally, I have spent the last few days cleaning up after my trim and cabinet guy. We spent the entire weekend sanding, all four of us. Just the little corners of the doors and drawers were sharp. Pulling nails, mounting the missing door fronts, reworking the pull out trash bins, adding missing hinges, sanding under the drawer dividers, which were left rough (would snag a sweater or give you a splinter if you pulled the drawer out and it caught you). In addition, I had to remount the garage/attic door because it was out of square and the bore holes didn't line up, door didn't seal. Everything had to be cased again, and sorting through boards to be returned to the mill work vendor. Today, in addition to all that, we went and picked up the copper top vanity cabinet we had custom built several months ago, and did a little sashay with a light fixture purchase, and bought a light from our local furniture guy to replace a light that a certain brown parcel company just couldn't resist repetitively smashing to bits.
OH, the tile guys brought the travertine tile (12 x 24 inch) that goes into the master shower. Dang, it was a whole pallet of tile, 260 square feet. We had already purchased the floor tile for that shower, which is hexagon shaped travertine. It's gorgeous together, though, and we played with all the grout samples today to select the grout color... No, I'm not kidding, you have to select that too, there are about 30 to choose from... The other showers look great, and they also put the concrete in them today that defines the shape of the floor. The tile guys work from about 7 in the morning, till about 8 at night.
OK, I'm off to bed.
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