Dealing with Mud

They're busy putting mud on the drywall in the house (the white kind at least!) and we're figuring out how to deal with the mud in the front yard!

The walls now have texture. Apparently smooth drywall is not common out here like it is on the east coast. We chose the rounded drywall corners and the 80/20 texture. This is about as smooth as they like to make it out here (it's harder and more expensive the smoother you go).

 

 

 

 A view from the stairs makes the great room ceiling look very tall!

They've been working on finishing up the rock work.

The corner on the back of the house is still in progress. 

The chimney is done and the front corner just needs a top cap.

The next big decision is tile. We're working on the master bath design. We are going to use Kashmir White granite (there's a little square in the photo) for 3 walls and tile the 4th wall. We like the glass and rock tile mixture shown on the left, with some of the little red tiles mixed in. The large cream tile below will be the floor. Does it all go together?

We've been talking with a landscaper to figure out what to do with the front yard. We would like to get some hardscape done before winter since the muddy front yard will only get worse with the wet weather. The landscaper is quite a character, but he seems to do great work and comes highly recommended. He showed us several yards that he has landscaped. They were all pretty impressive.

 Stairs made of malapai

A river trough with granite rip rap like what we will need on the sides of the house to help with drainage. 

 

 

A beautiful malapai wall with various size rocks and plants intermixed. This is what we are hoping to do along the front yard of our house. 

 

 More stairs made of flagstone. The yard is covered in half inch cinnamon colored stone.

 

More stairs and rocky river on a steep lot.

 

 Malapai rock and plants make the yard look fairly natural.

Paint Colors

 

The big decision now is what color we should paint the house? The chimney is almost finished and the rest of the rock work is in progress. The drywall is going quickly. They are done taping and the first two coats of mudding, the finish coat should happen this week.

 The painters painted two test colors that we chose. The trim will be the dark brown color to match the gutters (we had limited choices for gutter colors). We wanted to keep the house a lighter color to be more friendly with the brutal sun here in Arizona. The two tan colors that we picked are pretty similar. If you look closely, the top three siding pieces are painted in a lighter brown which is called dormer brown, and the bottom three pieces are dry dock. Which do you like better? It has to match the malapai rock below, the brown trim, the red windows and the rusty metal siding.

Quite a job to reach the top of the chimney!

We bought the rigid foam (XPS) to use as insulation under the driveway.  

A few photos of the drywall progress...

And some exterior progress photos from last week...

Smooth white walls

The walls look quite different with all of the wires and pipes covered up. The rooms definitely feel more closed in without the see-through walk-through walls but everything seems to be okay size-wise at least! The guys doing the drywall work quickly and make moving those huge sheets of drywall around look pretty easy. I can barely pick up one end of the drywall to help move it around the room not to mention hold it over my head and screw it to the ceiling!

Master bedroom - one exterior wall left to drywall

Master bath and closet

Great room from the stairs - you can see that drywall is a messy process...the floors are pretty much covered in white dust and there's scrap everywhere.

Great room from the kitchen (skylight above still needs drywall)

The collar ties are trimmed out with douglas fir on the sides but not the bottoms yet.

The front entryway - the plant shelf on the top of the closet makes the wall seem less harsh. (No it's not a midget closet, they just haven't trimmed the drywall for the closet door!)

Laundry room

Front bedroom

Jack and jill bath

Back bedroom

Game room/shop downstairs

We spent the weekend fixing up the insulation. As Steve warned us, insulators are sort of the bottom of the building food chain, it's nasty work dealing with fiberglass so nobody wants to do it, they don't get paid much, so watch them closely and don't expect too much from them. His warnings were right on based on our experiences. While fiberglass isn't fun to work with, it doesn't take too much effort to put it in correctly...so we made sure everything was fixed properly. It wasn't a camera friendly weekend, although it would have been a good shot of Andy and the drywall ceiling falling as his board slipped in the attic and the drywall screws came out, whoops! At least it was an easy one to fix since they haven't taped and textured the drywall yet.