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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... |
| A visit by The Official In-Laws of Gimme Shelter provides a chance to get some more of the electrical system laid into place. My father-in-law being a retired electrician, your humble correspondent drops his cement tools and picks up his wire strippers, clippers and snipers. This photo of the West Wing shows our newly-wired chandelier shedding some light on the subject. We drill lots of holes, pull lots of wire and skin lots of knuckles... |  |
| Part of all this fecund jocularity includes the thrill of wiring the courtyard. You can see the conduit leading to an outdoor plug just to the right of the doorway. We're also running #12 UF wire underground to the far end of the courtyard to run the fountain and lighting fixtures. |  |
| Don wires up a receptacle on one side of the stove closet. This photo provides a good view of what we're doing for power distribution. Some of the wiring will obviously be running through external conduits, but if you look at the top of the stove closet, you'll see that some of our wiring is run down the inside of the block cores - the readymade internal wiring runs where the block cores line up are a nice feature of dry stack block construction. |  |
| Another view of the West Wing, with a member of the management team overseeing our work to the left in this photo. Note the scaffolding on wheels we have set up to make the ceiling work a little easier. Personally, I've spent too much time on shaky ladders during this project and am glad to have the stability of some nice metal scaffolding underfoot. |  |
| As long as we're up at the top of the barrel vault arch and mucking around with the chandelier, I take a quick photo through one of the ventilation blocks set into the roof. You can see a section of the roof through here that has been coated with our brilliant white sealant. As soon as this week's storms pass through, we'll be out there applying more... |  |
| 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: The Return of the Bling Click HERE |
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