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The Project: A 2,163 square foot house utilizing dry stack concrete block construction with a central courtyard and based on the Spanish colonial-era missions in San Antonio. The Challenge: Can a forty-something married couple design and build an attractive, efficient and mostly paid-for house while remaining sane, solvent and married? With no actual prior construction experience? Hmmmmm - let's check in on our Contestants and see how they're doing... |
| We enter Year 3 of our DIY house project, so it's appropriate we begin this week with a good look at The Garage Mahal from across the moat, standing on the driveway. The barrel vault arch is the heart, as well as the balance point, of the house profile. Notice the window placement allows for breezes to flow all the way through the house. |  |
| Work continues this week on applying our own formulation of surface bonding cement to the walls to seal them in. Here you can see the black nylon mesh we're using as lath, the dried cement from yesterday's work and some fresh cement going in around the windows in the master bath. |  |
| From the roof, I unfurl a bolt of nylon mesh netting, cut it off at the foundation and then smooth it against the block walls. The mesh adheres to the wall but tends to lift itself a bit when the cement is troweled in, making for an ideal placement in the center of the 1/8" of cement in the cladding. We've finished the long east wall and continue working our way down the north wall. |  |
| We're standing on top of a ladder looking over the parapet across the roof in this shot. Notice the sheer flexibility of the "meshcrete" (as we call it) as we bring it up from the walls and over the top of the parapet. This will blend in the the cement roof giving us a monolithic, seamless barrier against rain. |  |
| The meshcrete wall cladding bends up and over the parapets, around these oddly-shapes windows and even seals in one of the apertures which drain the roof of rainwater. These apertures are called sepas in Southwest architecture. We close out this week with our game piece pushed a little further down the board and that's really all you can ask for in this life... |  |
| Want to see a rough floor plan?Want to be notified when we post new pictures? Just e-mail us! Want to see the rest of the story? Click on Gimme Shelter Home Page. |
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| Next installment: A New Year's Resolution Click HERE |
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