Today was a great work day. I’ve had Tavo working 6 days a week for a couple months now, but Saturdays are more exciting because I am at the house when he’s working. He always has great ideas and get’s me excited about the next steps. Today we had four additional workers at the house working on the stucco. There are two phases to the stucco application: the first is the foundation, the second is the texturing. I will have the second stage done next week or the week after.
I added a nice pop out to each of the windows (the border around the windows). It will look nice when we paint the exterior as I’ll use some sort of contrasting paint on the pop outs. The windows were installed last year. They are awesome – very secure. A sledge hammer could not break them. After all, this is Tucson. I don’t want anyone breaking into the house.
I spent a good part of the day at Lowes. I never seem to get tired of that place (or any other home-related store). I bought all of the recessed lighting for the house. Eight lights in the living room, four in the master bedroom, four in the office, and two in the hallway to the guest bathroom. I love recessed lighting.
I also had to buy another 250′ of electrical wire, electrical boxes, electrical ties, electrical connectors, and virtually everything else related to electricity. I bought a couple nice fluorescent lights for the enormous master closet, and a fluorescent light for a guest bedroom closet. The 10% off coupons I have been purchasing off of ebay have saved me a bundle – I would estimate close to a $1,000 at this point.
We still have yet to commit to a design on our kitchen. I had previously posted the picture below, but the part of highlited we’ve never liked too much:
It’s just too much counter space and looks weird. So I was looking through a design book we have on Friday night and came across this photo:
I like the idea of having a little bar area in the kitchen. So I was sharing this idea with Tavo today and he added some ideas I really liked a lot. It took the form of this draft:
It might be hard to discern the details of the idea from the photo above. The center portion is a bar (the Xs is a wine rack), the left and right of the bar area are pantries and the area on the far left is a little work station. I really like this idea and the plan is to adopt it going forward (subject to change on a pretty regular basis of course).
After working on the house, we stopped off at Don Pedro’s for some yummy Peruvian food. I had the Loma Saltado. It was really good.
On the way home from lunch, we stopped by a natural foods pet store. We make an effort to feed the dogs the healthiest things we can find. I found a new brand of dog food I was really impressed with and bought a snack for them too.
Apparently it was the hoof of a pig (or perhaps it was a javelina). Tila gets pretty in to these sort of snacks. Scout knows his place when she has claimed the treat.
