Week 13

Lucky week 13!

On Monday, the ufer ground successfully passed inspection:

And then on Tuesday, the concrete truck arrived promptly at 7:00am. By 6pm, this is what things looked like:

Wow! So exciting!

The floor in the room has a smooth finish -- we'll be tinting the concrete a glossy brown & leaving it at that as far as flooring is concerned. We will be extending the tinting out into the Patio Pit area, as well, to help tie the indoor & outdoor spaces together. The area with the large drain hole will be set with brown pavers that will hide the drain, but still allow the water to flow in there.

The steps are taller & extend further into the yard than we had originally expected, so that will take some getting used to. The purpose of the steps being done this way is to create lots of light, air, & space to keep the room from feeling like a basement, & we like that. But it's not a big yard to begin with, so losing so much of the dirt area to concrete steps is disappointing. Here is the view of the now even tinier yard, taken from the Patio Pit:

There are things that can be done get some of that area back if we want to spend the time & money changing how the steps were built. Neither of us is inclined to add time & cost to this project at this point, though, so we're going to keep rolling along & see if we can learn to love it (or at least live with it...).

Step one will be brainstorming & seeing if we can change the way we think about the space & how we use it -- for example, what if we look at the steps as an element that adds multi-dimensionality to the yard, instead of something that takes space away? It's been nice this weekend, so we spent some time sitting on the steps in the sun, thinking of ways to make this work for us.

One thought: with the way the sliding French doors work, versus how the accordion doors would have worked, we'll be able to leave our Adirondack chairs out in the Patio Pit (versus in the dirt area). Being two feet down below grade gives a little more sense of privacy & coziness, so that would be nice. This is the view from where one of the chairs would be:

(I might put a hammock over there, where that stuff is stacked. It will be nice & shady for napping. The only problem is the spiders who live in those bushes. Ick.)

To enhance that sense of privacy, we could set long planters on the side walls, with something tall like bamboo in there:

To break up the visual angularity of the concrete, we also talked about putting a type of rosemary in that would grow down over the side of the planter & concrete (which would also be kind of nice conceptually, since it would recall that overgrown rosemary bush/tree that we took out). I doubt that we could put both in a planter that narrow (Arave Family Landscapers, your ideas will be appreciated!), but if we could, it might look something like this (with an idea of how the tinting & pavers may look):

The steps themselves may actually be good built-in seating for impromptu visitors (allowing us to use more of the dirt area of the yard for games with the dog, rather than having chairs always set up there). And we can also break up some of that expanse of concrete with more planters on the steps themselves. 

Either way, we have plenty of time to think about it. In the meantime, we also now finally have a way of getting the dog out to the yard that doesn't involve navigating piles of construction debris:

I didn't have my usual Friday chat with Mr. Bunkport, so I'm not positive what will be happening this week. Based on previous conversations, I would guess that they will start framing the walls & securing the house to the foundation, & then look at getting those Jenga puzzle cribs out of there.