More Bathroom Pix

Okay, so now there is a LIGHT inside the bathroom...soon to be some phabulous red or pink sculpture thingy but in the meatime still beams crazy light around the room...hence the obsession with photographing the bathroom continues!!! More finish plaster to be done tomorrow inside the bathroom by lovely Claire. More banking next week needed to wrap this puppy up! Eeeee...scary, good, must get done! What a long strange trip....

Flush Toilet

I pooped in my house this morning! Something virtually all of y'all ('cept you homesteaders in Spain, some people in the Gravel Pit, and folks across the street) do every day! Or every other day or a few times a day...whatever. Alix kept telling me that it would be REALLY WEIRD to poop inside my house and I have to agree it kinda is. After living in dirt and construction chaos for years, slowly carving and scupting and then finishing methodically with love and cleaning, cleaning always cleaning neart the end...then you defecate in this perfect white, porcelain bowl full of CLEAN WATER (gray water not hooked up yet)....it's just very odd. And reminds me just how many aspects of "modern living" we don't understand, take for granted, never question and just make no sense...like cars, automated customer service phone hell, puggles...

So I've spared you a photo of the toilet "in use" and subsituted shots of the bathroom and my desk at night. Basically the whole experience feels like I'm living in someone else's house. House is very Spartan right now as I do not really own furniture and is still being worked on... Is beautiful tho'! An awesome space to MAKE STUFF!

Bathtub

Here's my baby blue bathtub on my "capri teal" floor of the crazy bottle brick bathroom... Plaster still needs to be finished and plumbing hooked up but you get the idea of the bathroom...the theme is water...DUH.

Hot and Cold H20

First running water, out of a faucet in the house as of 4 hrs ago. Kitchen sink is hooked up to the Aqua Star and as you can see I even have a sprayer. Countertop is done and installed. All stainless steel...no hippie chick here.

Bedroom FINISHED!!!

Soooo...the master bedroom is now the first official finished room in the house. On Saturday, Claire, myself and Ron did the work of six people and finish mudded the upper half of the bedroom wall, then peeled back all the protective layers and revealed the bamboo floor. As you can see, the bottom half of the bathroom wall still needs finish plaster and I do not have an furniture really, just a foam mat on the floor. The mud will dry evenly and all the same light color. The 8 throughout-the-house speakers are hooked up in the ceiling and all morning I rocked the strangest group of tunes: Kraftwerk, Joni Mitchell, Tribe Called Quest and Metallica! Had crumpets and ground my own coffee fresh this morning for breakfast (cream from fridge, honey, the works, civilized amost). Next up: countertop for kitchen to pick up and install...more on bathroom... So am still at least a month away from being done but am now sleeping in the new bedroom which is huge. No more climbing the ladder to the loft!

Floors FINISHED!!!

My oh, my! What a whirlwind the past two weeks have been! Floors are DONE, acid etched with Lithochrome and sealed with two coats of sealer. This process turned out to be labor intensive and EXPENSIVE. Also involved a fair amount of stress as after the first coat it looked AWFUL...but pulled it off after another coat and the sealer and now it looks AMAZING...PHEW!!!

Still going...

So I'm two weeks past my official deadline to finish my house...this only matters in financial sense as the bank charges a higher interest rate on the construction loan than the mortgage for the finished house. Feeling pain in most parts of my body as the past few days have been dedicated to plastering, much of it on ceilings, bathroom and hut. Major changes this week as I moved everything out of the dome that I've been living in for the past five years. Yesterday got a hit of plaster on the entire interior of the dome, ceiling and walls. It looks much more shapely and contiguous now. This is a project that I was going to leave until later as in the eyes of the Taos County Planning office, the dome is a "storage unit" and would not need to be super finished for the oh-so-crucial Certificate of Occupancy. But the timing was right, the materials were cheap and hot damn it looks GOOOOOD...getting to be 'spectable...

Tomorrow am going to Santa Fe to pick up the kitchen countertop from Southwest Metal who wrapped the whole custom thing in stainless steel. Once this is in we can put in the sink and faucet for the kitchen which will enable me to, good God, WASH DISHES in my house!!! Have all the materials to acid etch the bathroom floor (teal) and the rest of the floors throughout the house, minus the bamboo in the bedroom, ("antique amber"). This project will be a massive four day push, painful and messy and methodical...knee pads and buckets and buckets of water and respirators...will not be able to stay in the house at all during this time. Finish plastered the bathroom ceiling on Friday and Claire finished the bedroom ceiling on Saturday...still plugging away on slick troweling around the zillion bottles on the bathroom. Bathtub finally arrived!! The second one. Am not sure about the color but think it will look great in the finished bathroom. Basically I own all the appliances now, just need to get them in place. Much of that involving a plumber. That being kinda a sore subject after my first plumber went crazy, bailed to Cali and left me in the lurch.

Am so close now. As Mike Reynolds said, "You're there. No one gets to this point and doesn't finish." Good to hear from him but whole scene is still kinda sketchy as I STILL do not have enough $$ to finish...this after doing 4 cost breakdowns over the past year. (Advice to potential Earthship builders: Double your estimate. Then double it again and then add 25% for unforseen expenses and overages.) On the plus side, the Hybrid Earthship just to the south of me just sold for $355K, potentially doing wonders for my next appraisal...huh...we'll see...after my experiences with the official Centinel Bank appraiser...well, we'll see...

The upshot of all of this is that I feel so good about the progress and product that for the first time ever, I am going to offer my home to be on the tour for this month's Earthship Seminar. Anyhoo...here's a couple pix!!!