Technical

I was going to call this posting “House Guts.”

Tony L. Curry, of TLC Plumbing, showed up in his former-ambulance-now-plumbing-truck to begin laying and connecting pipe for the waste lines for the kitchen, bathrooms, laundry room, and maintenance rooms. This pipe is white Schedule 40 PVC. The formerly desert-looking building site now sports pipes in the footings and coursing across and through the rooms. They stick up like periscopes in these crucial rooms. When I first arrived on the site this day, I was perturbed to see an ambulance parked smack dab in the middle of the building activity! I quickly discovered, though, that this was Tony’s special plumbing vehicle and my worries evaporated.

In addition to the plumbing, piles of adobe blocks had appeared overnight. As you can see, these blocks (or bricks) are laid on the perimeter of the footings to hold in the fill dirt of each room. Once laid, the interior of the perimeter is filled with the sifted dirt from the earth-moving project and then the entire area of each room is wetted and then tamped down. The interior fill of the house is growing to meet the floor level.

Personal

Suddenly I can see the rooms more clearly. The plumbing makes it evident where kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry room are situated. There is something anatomical about how the house is developing–bones and veins and gastro-intestinal tract are being methodically laid before becoming covered by the concrete skin of the foundation. I don’t know how far to carry this metaphor, but it does occur to me as I am watching the house grow.

And another sign of progress is the neon-colored string, which is only strung across the interior of the house now.

The Martini Shots offer some autumnal color (again) and a great example of the rugged terrain (actually at my next-door neighbor’s property and noticeable when I was walking Bella and Niles up the mountain).