Constructing Bliss: Après le déluge, stucco

Over the last few weeks, Jenn has been spending a fair amount of time at the house and to make her more comfortable, we had to move the very first piece of furniture into the house:

It is a significant, if humble start, and we hope more furnishings would be moved in in the near future.

Before reporting on construction progress, your correspondent needs to respond to some reader feedback. The regular readers of this blog, all three of them, have complained about the lack of new entries in the last couple of weeks. While it is true that the last entry was back in late December, your correspondent's sloth is only one reason for this lack of output. The other convenient excuse was a week-long storm that lashed San Francisco and that brought the exterior work in the house to an abrupt halt and limited the interior work to trim and touch up.

Mind you, we are not talking about a little sprinkle here, this was a major torrential downpour. In fact, this was the only way I could get to the house during the storm:

Eventually, the storm subsided a bit and it was possible to get to the house using more conventional means:

Of course, since underwater stucco technology is still in its infancy,

the work on the outside of the house had to be stopped while the storm lashed the area. The good news is that despite the déluge, the house proved waterproof, except for one small leak in one of the sliding doors, and that turned out to the window manufacturer's fault, not the construction crew's.

Eventually, even the most persistent storm abates and this one was no exception. The rain stopped, the sun came out, and as the waters went down, the scaffolding went up for Stucco, part deux.

This may seem like deja stucco to the regular readers of this blog, but there is a good reason to re-apply stucco. In order to get uniform color, the tinted stucco layer for both sides of the house has to be applied at the same time, or at least in very rapid sequence. The previous attempt at applying tinted stucco was interrupted by the storm and if we simply finish the application at this point, we will end up with two different colors. The solution is to reapply tinted stucco to the entire house. The stucco being reapplied also includes an acrylic additive that repels moisture and provides better watertight integrity.

Once the waters parted outside, the work inside resumed as well.

The most dramatic change inside the house is the installation of the counter tops. The Quartz counter tops in the kitchen provide the perfect working surface for prepping and serving gourmet meals. Here is the kitchen before counter tops:

And here is the kitchen after:

In addition to its functional purpose, the quartz slab also serves an aesthetic function by reflecting the light of the under counter LED lights:

The under cabinet lighting in this kitchen comes not from lamps or tubes, but from panels of 28 LEDs that consume about the same amount of power as a very small night light, but produce the equivalent of a big fluorescent tube worth of light and produce absolutely no heat in the process.

The second full bath also received its marble counter top, but alas, no LED lighting:

The other bit of indoor work involved putting handles on doors. Normally, this is not particularly taxing, however, this being our house, even simple things tend to get complicated fairly quickly.

Many of the doors in the house are pocket doors and require fairly complex locks to operate. Installing these locks requires fairly precision cutting of the doors to accommodate the recessed handle and mortise. There are two ways to do this, the traditional, or Flintstones way which basically involves drilling a lot of holes with a hand drill, hoping that the end result is the right size and shape:

This is a bit like trying to build a Fabergé egg with stone tools. Here is an illustration of the process in action:

The second way, the right way, is to hire someone who has the right skills and equipment to rout a perfect lock-shaped hole in the pocket doors.

The process starts with a jig:

An absurdly complicated tool that looks like the love child of an oversized cordless drill and a hydraulic car jack is attached to the door:

The operator then cranks the crank and the router bit follows a complex three dimensional path that would put the Blue Angels in G-LOC to create the perfectly shaped cavity in the solid wood doors to receive the complex shape of the lock.

Here's a very short video of the rig in action (Warning: it's a bit loud). The beeping you hear at the end of the video is the smoke alarms going off from the wood and paint turned vaporized by the router bit.

After a few turns of the handle exactly the right amount of door material ends up as sawdust on the floor to allow the lock to be snugly nestled in the ensuing cavity.

While this was going on, the plumbers were busy -- plumbing. This includes the installation of the stainless steel kitchen sink:

and the approximately oil derrick sized kitchen faucet:

Another humble, yet important, bit of plumbing being installed is the toilets:

Speaking of toilets, the master throne is waiting for its turn to be installed:

And for the throne's wireless remote control to be powered up:

Looks like the Port-O-Potty's days are numbered.

Another development involves one of my favorite structural features of the house, you guessed it, the elevator shaft. With the date for the installation of the elevator fast approaching, the shaft gets an air vent and a smoke detector at the top. I have to give the shaft up on Monday and here are a few final shots of the empty shaft with its new features: