The Petulant Gods

Well another month has passed since I last posted.  Are you frustrated that you haven't seen any progress?  We are actually delighted with the changes occurring.  Most of them are on the inside and are happening in a piecemeal fashion, so that really no one space is finished yet.  Plus to protect those things that are already installed we have cardboard coverings on the floors and countertops.  So pictures won't be very impressive right now.

The construction gods have seen fit to smite us numerous times on this project.  But after having battled the many tentacled bureaucracy beast and the devilish icy snow demons, we feel pretty good about where the project stands.  Certainly we're anxious to move in to a completed home, but it looks like we might move in to a finished inside while the outside structures (parapet wall, conservatory and of course garden area) are still being worked on.  Right now the move-in date is about the first week of March.

To give you an idea of some of the complexities our team has faced, take a look at the the photo below.  It's a view of the panel of pumps and tubing that connects the radiant floor heating system to the geothermal HVAC system.  Scary, huh?

The tubing and pumps needed to circulate water through the radiant floor system.  

After some clean up, this system gets hooked into the geothermal HVAC system.

The other dramatic thing that happened recently was the pouring of the concrete into the forms put up to define the garden courtyards we mentioned earlier.  The machine in the photos below has a long boom that extended across the yard to fill the forms. 

These two photos show the extendable boom that pumped concrete into the garden courtyard wall forms.

After the forms were removed, the result was the raw concrete walls.  Impressive looking, but not yet finished.  The last three major steps to complete these courtyard walls is to cover the whole thing in stucco, install shutters on the 3 front windows and put wooden frames into the doorways (there won't be any doors, just a nice framed structure).  As time moves on we will add plants, pathways and other features to the courtyards.  They have already been wired up for electricity.

A view from the front of the walled garden courtyard.  The retaining wall out front will get completed and soil will be put in.  Shutters will be added to the window cutouts.

This is a shot of the walled garden courtyards.  The picture above is a picture of the right hand, front wall in this picture.

This perspective gives a view of the house, courtyards and the liberalarium (conservatory!)

Onward and upward,

Mark, Mark and Isabel