Circle B Ranch: POOL PARTY!

Howdy Y'all!

When we last left you, things were starting to slow down as the interior portion of the house was 'taped and floated', (contractor-speak for taping and mudding the drywall seams). Given the number of seams and screws in the walls, it took three guys five days to complete the work. That officially ended today, and a separate team of people are here to apply the final 'mud' texturing to each of the walls in the house.

Great Room final taping before texturing.
(Notice the OSHA approved scaffolding.)

We selected four textures - Four Seasons, Texas Trowel, Standard Trowel, and Orange Peel for the entire house. 90% will be in Four Seasons, and the rest is a mixed bag of textures. You might ask why all of the different textures? (I did.) That's because of how paint and faux staining is applied, and how the different textures reflect depth of the finish. A bit complicated for me, but Jan understands it all.

Jan's texturing instructions to the Builder.

Jan also selected the granite for the counters in the house (she's making me do this), which is a final relief to have this behind us. She selected Amore Italiano, Santa Cecilia, Absolute Black and two others which I have absolutely no idea of the name - probably Expensiosa and Cantafordia.

We also had a bit of a 'do over' on the niches in the Motor Court wall, and some finish work on the front doors. The original niches were formed with a six degree slope in the bottom portion for water runoff, which meant anything like a big vase would simply fall out of the niche. Not good, so the stucco guys came back and flattened the niche base to a 1/2" slope, and added some 'chins' while they were at it. Looks better, and certainly works better.

Do-Over to fix the niches and add chins to the base.

Before final painting. Much better!

The other big change this week is that the Pool Guys arrived to start digging and framing. The pool design we created with Austintatious Pools (yup, that's their name) has a negative, or infinity, edge, and it took us roughly four meetings to get the pool design, decking and equipment finalized, which has to be a record. Michael Hurosky is one of those guys where no moss grows under his feet. We also did not want the pool deck to be appreciably lower than the patio level. To achieve both goals, they will be building up, as well as, digging down. So far we are blessed with pretty good soil, rather than the rocks that are so prevalent in this area that can make pool building a nightmare.

Michael (owner) and Brian (PM) getting some free advertising.

The shallow end will be about 3 1/2 feet transitioning down to 6 feet at the infinity edge. In this way we still enjoy the benefit of the negative edge, but not detract or lose any of the view from beyond the pool. (This also helps the folks that aren't Michael Phelps-level swimmers from drowning after a few toddies.) The other goal will also be to build the pool, and fence around the perimeter edge, before the cattle and deer figure out where the water is. Cattle like nothing better than a nice, large water basin to slurp from (as attested to by one of our ranch neighbors).