How do you finish dry wall that butts up to an adobe wall?
(That’s an Internet search we’d don!)
We found this J-corner bead to work well.
construction
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In case you were wondering…
Sunday, July 7th, 2013Adobe is done
Saturday, June 8th, 2013In the ongoing push on the house, we’ve finished the interior adobe. Here are some pics.
This is a heavy lot of brick. And much of it pretty high up.
And the exterior is done!
Sunday, May 26th, 2013
What we’ve been up to
Saturday, May 18th, 2013
Book nook
Monday, March 25th, 2013For a long time, I’ve had a plan to build a few built-in bench seats to be book nooks for reading. The first one is now (mostly) done.
As with most wood working projects, we started by carefully selecting the wood and preparing it. We glued these boards together the same way we did the new doors, with routed channels and small pieces of plywood to add strength. Here is the wood after it was glued and sanded, but before any finishing.
And here’s the (near) final product.
The windows here face the mountains in the west and offer a great view. There is storage under the seats. (Note the charging station plugs with USB and regular outlets.)
I think we’re going to cover the front of this with the same material we use for the kitchen bar…hopefully distressed corrugated metal if we can find some we like.
Oh, and we finally found that pesky electrical short. Fortunately, it was behind the part of the wall that is still just OSB, not behind the brick. Good news!
And then there were three
Thursday, January 10th, 2013Here’s a picture that shows the clerestory windows….
And this shows the whole height of the room (main entry in bottom right corner)…
Two more to go!
Upward
Sunday, January 6th, 2013#2 accomplishment for this week: we got the first viga up!
It’s always hard to imagine exactly how this stuff will look when it’s finally done.
You might remember that these large timbers have been sitting about five feet or so below the ceiling for the past 5 months. Now with the ceiling getting finished, it’s time to put them up. (And all of this needed to happen before adobe brick could go much higher, since the brick will sit under one end of the viga.)
We’ve both been worrying about this step quite a lot, me especially. The vigas are quite heavy — too heavy even for both of us to lift one end. Brad devised a way to jack these up into place, but I was wary. As it turns out, the whole thing was really quite easy. There were no scarey, death-threatening parts. (I mostly try not to write here about the scarier stuff we try, but there is some. :)
What we did is jack each side up a bit (e.g. 10 inches or so) and then put a header and trimmers (side studs) under it to secure it. Then we repeated on the other side, etc. etc. until the vigas were all the way up.
Of course, the vigas are quite high so we had to put the jack on the scaffolding at one end and on one of those big timbers at the other. Then we used a series of gradually taller 4x4s to reach the beam.
Quite clever. Good thinking, Brad.
Doors!
Saturday, January 5th, 2013We have had an eventful couple of days, construction-wise.
First, after months of work, we have the first set of doors complete and up!
It was a lot of work to build these, but I couldn’t be happier with the results!
All the steps to put these together are already fading into memory, but here are some pictures and notes from the process.
The Ponderosa pine was sourced locally through a sawmill up in the Gila Forest near Silver City. They let let us handpick all these boards and centerlined the boards to make the widths precise and the edges square.
After we cut the boards, we routed a groove out of each edge. Into this groove would be glued a piece of plywood to add strength to the joints. (This sounds easier than it was. It took a lot of testing and fiddling.) These are the smaller sections that go above and below the glass.
Then we glued in the plywood and put the parts together with pipe clamps. More weeks worth of work.
This is a door after it was glued (but not yet trimmed to size).
After this, Brad did a rough trim on the doors and then began hanging them. This involved many rounds of putting them up, trimming them, putting them back up, etc.
When they were finally perfect, I finished them. This involved the same 10 rounds of stain, sealer, and finish that we did on other timbers. There are many other details I’m leaving out like cutting the stop, but you get the idea.
There is one more set of doors to do, but they are already built and assembled so they just need to be hung and finished.
I think I’ll leave the other major feat of the week for another post. Until then.
Weird…and cold
Friday, January 4th, 2013Every once in a while, the whole thing we’re doing here seems surreal. Like today, when I was standing out at mid-day in a driving snow shower cutting boards.
It’s been very cold here. Low 20s at night, and not much out of the 40s during the day. New Years Day saw a lot of snow around us, but none to speak of here. We had pretty good snow showers today but no accumulation.
We have begun putting up ceiling boards in the house. They’re pretty much like in Tumbleweed, except we’re doing a slanting pattern between where the big vigas will eventually go.
December brick work
Friday, December 28th, 2012We have been putting the time this month to use, laying lots and lots of adobe brick. We’ve also got a couple lintels (big wood beams over the windows) up now. And we have the fireplace done (and working). We designed the brick arrangement ourselves and I’m really happy with how it turned out.
We put in a new half stepped wall in the main entryway. Here is a picture with that with the wall into which we incorporated some wine rack spaces.
And here are Brad and I, demonstrating that the lintel is indeed quite strong. (It will be holding up brick to the ceiling.)
These bricks weigh close to 40 pounds each. By now, we have moved several thousand pounds of brick each. (And the higher we get up the wall, the more exercise this provides.)