A second floor!

Hello again,

We’ve been vising Tepoz every Saturday to monitor process and to identify “things” we want changed or addressed.  Luckily both the foreman and architect are open to our fickleness on these things.

We now have ceilings in both the kitchen and the guest bedroom.  Your room has pine beams with “baro” (clay) ceiling tiles.  This treatment will be the same in the master bedroom.  

Once dry the tiles will be a uniform shade.  We’re debating on whether to have the beams stained a darker shade or just left to mellow with age.  Your thoughts?

The kitchen will have a plaster ceiling high enough for a ceiling fan over the work island. 

These guys installed the cinder blocks across the entire ceiling in the time Sergio visited the site two weeks ago.

In both cases these ceilings have since had a layer of concrete poured on them so we now have a second floor.

The south-facing staircase from the parking area is now completed.  It curves around a bit with another four or five steps.  At the very end the steps and risers will be covered in quarry stone (but not until the end – as the architect says – “Let’s not let them be wrecked by the workmen hauling things up and down”).

The adobe blocks are now being laid for the second floor walls.  One interior wall of the master bedroom will be adobe – the rest plaster.  

That’s me chatting with Antonio, our architect, and the foreman, Froylan (crazy name).  I love the ladder.  The workers carry a load of adobe bricks on their heads as they walk up the thing – I took the interior staircase.

The place is looking pretty much like an adobe box right now but remember the front and right hand side will be a covered terrace.  This will happen when the structure is finished - probably in two weeks.

I can't wait until all the primitive scaffolding is gone so we can really get a sense for what the place will look like.

We'll be back next week to see progress.