Do it yourselfing…bigtime

Spent last Saturday tiling one of the bathroom floors in my sister’s new house. Spent Sunday discovering whole new ways to describe ’stiff and creaky.”

For those of you keeping track, my sister and brother-in-law are building a house up in the mountains well north of Vancouver, Washington. They bought the land long ago–gorgeous views of mountains and forests and deer and bear and probably Sasquatch if you wait around long enough.

My sister was in charge of designing the home, about a two-year process that involved befriending a member of the British royal family. They broke ground last year and the house–a three-story Georgianish brick home with a huge basement–has become an impressive sight. This is a still from video footage I shot about 6 weeks ago, right after they’d gotten all the different types of brickwork finished.

The thing to really understand about this house, though, is that they are not “having it built,” they are BUILDING it themselves. Brother-in-law Jerald, who does construction management in his dayjob, farms out some jobs to subcontractors and hires some day labor occasionally, but mostly it’s constructed by Jerald, my nephew Morgan and others in the family.

BTW, taking twice as long to design the house as to build it is apparently paying off–it’s gorgeous, lots of lovely detail that you’d expect to see in a far larger and more expensive property (a la Sarah Susanka, my favorite architect and author of the Not So Big House books and website).

They’re at the point where cabinetry, flooring and wall colors are going in, and I’m starting to plan some of the clerestory windows and other glass details I’ll be making as my part. I also promised (with Mom) to help with some of the tiling, and that time has come.

Suzanne (my sister), managed to salvage a load of creamy French limestone tile, complete with fossil shells and fish, that she’s putting in her daughters’ bathroom and in a few other places. Mom and I agreed to tile the bath floor with the limestone, and midway through the job I’m thinking I should have asked to roof the bloody house instead.

French limestone is wonderful, but it also stains like crazy and is soft and brittle. It’s also not perfectly even and it’s in 16×16 tiles, which means that getting it level is occasionally an issue. So far, not bad, but it’s slow, heavy going, the water source (and therefore the heavy buckets of mortar and thinset) are down a couple flights of stairs and outside.

OTOH, what’s really nice about this is that, by the time this house is finished–assuming there are no spouse-i-cides or divorces–it will contain contributions and collaborations from many friends and family members. What a wonderful thing to be surrounded by those memories every day.

BTW…after several hours of debate over how to position the tile, what spacing to use for grout lines, etc…this is what it looked like after the first day. Hopefully we’ll finish the tile setting tomorrow. Couple days later, we’ll grout.

Cheers–

–cynthia

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