drywall

August disappeared in a flurry of moving and vacation. After a couple weeks of packing, sorting, and tossing, we moved most of our stuff from our rental into storage and some of our stuff into new rental house for the final portion of construction. On our moving day, we did this in the morning:

and then our block party in the afternoon:

and then flew the next day to Seattle to give our architect a break:

and finally spent a week at the magical ranch in MT.

Before we left, the drywallers were busy getting all the walls in. The light and shapes are all pretty glorious, don't you think?

 The bedroom and the exposed beam

 the kitchen

We took the mini-clients through before we left to get their reaction. Here they are standing in the kitchen with the island cabinets in place. They love it! The kitchen ceiling is lower than the rest of the main room, which created a design opportunity when we integrated the kitchen into the main space. The architects designed a system using Ikea kitchen cabinetry panels to clad the ceiling. A great Ikea hack: it delineates the kitchen and makes what felt odd before feel intentional.

:

from the kitchen in to the living and dining area

A coat of primer and paint has gone on the walls now. The rooms are glowing.

penny tile cloud

We did a lot of thinking about what kind of tile to use in the bathrooms. We had a tiny budget for tile and I wanted something that felt handmade. Glass tile was going to be too contemporary for our house. Our master bathroom is small, only 6' across, so we wanted something that would make it feel spacious and modern. Penny tile comes with a dark clay base, which adds a nice depth to the tile. It also allows a variation in the tone of the glaze that you only get with more expensive hand glazed tile (think Heath, which we did, for a long time). I knew I wanted to do some kind of modern patterning with the pennies. After looking at some preliminary sketches mostly involving different colored lines of tile, our architect suggested we do a cloud of pennies. The cloud ended up being most elegant idea. Using Illustrator and Photoshop I did a whole bunch of studies:

And then we worked out a process with Paul, the tile artist on the WB dream team. He set the field tile,  I marked the tiles with stickers for each accent color and he would remove and replace with the accents. The color in the photos is pretty terrible: this work was done and photographed with one bright incandescent shop light. The color palette in the rendering above is closer to the actual tile color: sky blue field tile, light blue/white and bronze accents.

Doing the first half of the cloud, with dot stickers from the drug store.

the final wall cloud. It is about five feet across.

the floor cloud phase one

the floor cloud, halfway done.

The grout should be going in pretty soon. I had to buy three bags of grout and test the colors (just rub a bit of dry grout powder over the tiles and see what you think). It had to be just right! We ended up with pewter, a medium dark grey that will make all the tile pop but/and feel unified.

 I can't wait to see the clouds with all the final finishes in the bathroom in place.

insulation

I have been pretty remiss in my posting! I have been busy buying things like this:

from tomdixon.net

and this:

from ikea.com

and appliances and the sink. Money has been flying out the into the ether and big heavy boxes arrive at our house and get in the carpenters' way. In the meantime the house is getting all buttoned up and ready for finishes: last week was insulation.

We used foam insulation, which has a certain finality to it!

It is sprayed in to the walls and then carved away to produce the flat surface ready for drywall application. I am liking the way the window openings change as the walls get more solid. They make beautiful glowing green frames on the walls.