Today, roughly Day 13 of work days since ground breaking, our contractor stained our concrete slab. He had us select a stain from Concrete Camouflage, in their artist grade color group. We chose Island Sand.
Brian (our contractor) used a small garden pump to spray the stain on the slab. He said the company says it is a one coat product, but he has always found it needs two coats. There wasn't enough for him to do two coats. We also ran into an unexpected issue. While laying plastic over the slab that first day seemed a good idea to slow the cure and protect it from heavy rainfall creating marks on it, we found that when stained lines appeared that matched the folds in the plastic.
So, now we have some lines that need to be somehow camouflaged. This product leaves a residue that needs to be hosed and scrubbed off. The residue left the slab looking a horrid orange. The bottle the product comes in warns to not panic, that that will not be the color you end up with.
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| Orange looking slab due to residue. |
Day 14 was pouring the cement for the porches. That was done August 1st. Nothing was done from that Thursday (after the porch pour) until yesterday, August 9th (Friday) and Day 15. We had quite a few days where things just sat - we were waiting for lumber deliveries and
Brian got selected for jury duty.
Last week was a lot of going back and forth with Pella in El Paso, where we are ordering our exterior doors and our windows. I think we finally have that sorted out and back in Brian's hands. We also needed to get a valve for the shower ordered. As those are often quite specific to which shower faucets they work with, we also needed to make that choice. Brent spent some time online and put together a shower system suited to our needs out of parts available at Build.com and saved us quite a bit of money going that route.
Day 15 saw Brian and Robin building our south facing stick frame walls. They got the guest room and master bedroom south walls built and upright! (Guest room is on left/west and master is on right/east.)
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| August 9th, Day 15: Looking from southeast to northwest. |
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| August 9th, Day 15: Looking head on at front of house, to the north. |
Brian hasn't gone back to the staining yet, other than Robin did hose and scrub off the residue. It looks better (not orange), but I can see the lines and I'm not really happy with how it is looking. Hopefully putting more on there will erase the lines or at least blend them better and will make things look better than it does now. Brian said there's a product available in Tucson that he prefers, but the company won't ship it, so he started using Concrete Camouflage.
