The upper and lower cabinet carcasses have been installed. Cory built the range hood and we put on metal lathe and plastered it with gypsum plaster, as we did with the sheetrock behind it.
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On the left are photos of house features at stages of completion. The right column shows the completed result.
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The kitchen is an excellent workplace and a source of unique beauty. Wormy maple drawer and door faces are both elegant and primitive. We shaped our own cabinet pulls from 3/8 inch copper tubing, then flame burnished them and dipped them in lacquer. On the range hood, David repeated in natural slate tile the hand-carved sunbursts found throughout the house on the woodwork. We poured concrete counter tops, simply making forms right on top of the cabinets, installing steel reinforcement, pigmenting the mix and pouring the concrete just like we would a sidewalk. A nice finishing touch was to impress leaves from various trees in the neighborhood into the freshly poured concrete.
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On the left: I told visitors during this construction phase that the beer cans were donated by many people over a long period of time. Cory and Don laid them up four courses at a time (the wall would begin to slump if you tried five). Then I used a bottle cutter to cut wine and sparkling water bottles in half. At first, I meticulously glued the bottoms together with epoxy, but soon realized that duct tape would do fine and would be invisible. The juniper ends were installed to give the impression of vigas. In the middle photo, you can see a vertical 2x2. That's the center of the circular wall -- we stretched a measurement string from the 2x2 to build a consistent semi-circle. Kathy found the doors at the Santa Fe Flea Market. They are east Indian and very old, a crowning touch to our dining room. Again, our base coat was fibered gypsum plaster. Through the doorway, you can see one of many petroglyph replicas my brother, Ron, created for the house. They were mounted and plastered right into the wall.
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Above, our completed dining room. Kathy found the light fixture before we even excavated for footings on the house. The dining room was literally designed around the fixture. Upper left, you can see what I call a picture strip that was attached to the bond beam form atop the straw bales. The hand-carved strip runs throughout the house so that we can hang art without putting holes in the plaster.
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We framed the shower stall by cutting a crescent shape out of one side of our 2x6's and screwing them onto the other side, creating a pottery-shaped stall. The uneven top of the wall was made reminiscent of the Ancestral Puebloan ruins plentiful in our area. There are nichos built inside the shower stall to hold shampoos and soap.
After plaster, the guest bathroom was furnished with Mexican hutches and tables rather than built-in cabinets.
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Here, we have just framed our helical staircase. Cory and I started by first taking the landing-and-return plans and tossing them out the window. Then we spend a day designing a new staircase on paper and then plotting it out on the concrete slab, making sure we had required headroom, tread depth, etc. All the horizontal members are notched, screwed and glued into the vertical members. The underlying treads are laminated veneer lumber ends from our roof framing leftovers. No creaking on this staircase, except for my knees coming down in the mornings.
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The finished product, all clad with wormy maple and plastered in. The straw was covered with natural clay while the framing was base-coated with fibered gypsum plaster on diamond lath. The spiral on the wall was made with cob -- mud and long straw -- shaped by hand. Great fun! Then a koelin and casein based clay plaster color coat finished the job.
The handrail is a branch cut from a juniper tree on the land. The first third of the 16-foot branch had a natural curve. We had to "train" the rest of the curve into the branch by installing it green and letting it cure to the shape. Then we removed it, sanded and finished it, and put it back up.
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