the archway

All of our rooms sort of seem like your on a train, no hallways and narrow doors going through. Each of our eight rooms are all about 13 to 14 wide, the length in which folks could get vigas across for the roofs.  The door from the kitchen to the living room was falling apart after we were chipping plaster and discovered that there was a mud smoke hole in the wall.  The adobe was all brittle and black, so this gave us a good reason to just knock it down.  It wasn't a load bearing wall and is single adobe (8-10 inches thick).  I made the corbels myself with my saws all, I wanted them to look like whale tails.  We got some big posts which were knocked down from a twister north of us.  The lintel is western cedar from my grandfathers old work bench.   It was probably milled at the Westside Lumber Company in Tuolumne, CA where he used to work.  After he died my Father asked me what I wanted from Grandpa's old shed, I told him the wood from his bench... he just sighed and said, "figures".  It was quite difficult to take it apart and I drove it back to New mexico tied to the car.  When I sanded it I was amazed that it looked like the Sierra Nevada foothills where I grew up and where it was from.  My husband really wanted a moorish window next the archway, so I built it for him.  It really looks nice with a candle in it.

the boys room mural

I have painted murals for years in the Sierra Nevada of California and in Rhode Island.  I have always had a detailed realistic style for painting.  I decided that the boys room should be simple and left to the imagination, plus faster to paint with little time.  Soft color with silhouettes were perfect.  I painted with small brushes right over the top of the gypsum plaster.  We started with a tree and a owl and will add on later as the furniture finds it's place.  I purchased the paint from a Santa Fe, NM based company, 'Bio Shield'.  It is called Kinder paint and has no VOCs (volatile organic compounds), also this paint was made to be washed off easily.

www.bioshieldpaint.com

Master bedroom

Our bedroom opened up many opportunities to voice it's own opinion to what it wanted to look like when one morning the south wall of it just fell in, taking the roof/ceiling down with it.  The ceiling in this room was the shortest

 ceiling and I had said many times, "wouldn't it be cool if we could make it a cathedral ceiling?".  Well, I don't know if the house was listening to my thought or I the house, but now it was possible.  We did get a small insurance settlement that helped.  I think that the insurance guy felt sorry for us, seeing how hard we had worked on the rest of the house.  Also, he was sentimental about an old adobe being saved.

Sometimes because of moisture, no bond beam, lack of foundation, and not being "tied" in to the other walls causes them to just collapse.  I had also had folks tell me that mice burrowing into the walls making tunnels can weaken a wall.  Good thing that we had built that rock buttress on the southeast corner years earlier or maybe more walls would have fell.  I don't think I'll forget sitting on the portal with my father, husband and son drinking my morning coffee and watching the dust pour out of the doorway and windows for at least 20 minutes.  Good thing my Dad was visiting because he helped brace the beams so we could get under there and start cleaning up.   We filled in a doorway and were able to put a nicho shelf there more easily.

This collapse also made us realize that the wall next to it would probably fall as well, so the roof was braced with post and car jack then the wall was knocked down with backhoe.  

Our Hearth

January 1st, 2005

The first thing we constructed after all the cleanup was our hearth in the living room.

I lathed the adobe wall with chicken wire, using masonry nails so the concrete wouldn't separate from the adobe.  With collected river rock I stacked up the sides.  The base was filled in with pea gravel and a watery mix of concrete with flagstone on top.  Got a good deal on a Lopi liberty wood stove and then had warmth for working in winter.  The photo of the whole family was December 2008.