Home Construction Week 10....
August 7-13, 2006

This past week the walls for the bottom floor of our home have started to go up. The walls for the home are being constructed from a red brick. There will be 2 bedrooms, each with it's own bathroom and a television/recreation room on the lower floor.

The cement colored bricks are another foundation wall to support the upper floor of our home. The area where Sandra is standing will be filled in with rock and leveled and then the concrete floor will be poured. This floor, which will be the ceiling for the bottom level, and the floor for the top level will have the same steel reinforcement as used for the other floor that was poured last week. The upper floor will be leveled out, street level, so we will have no stairs to climb after parking our car and entering our house. Sandra and I thought that this would be a very good idea, just in case in our elderly years stairs would be hard for us to navigate. The upper level is approximately twice the size of the lower level. This upper level will include our master bedroom suite, family room, kitchen, dining room, service room, and office.
Sandra is standing on the future terrace off the television/recreation room. At the point she is standing a staircase will descend to the garden. This is the beautiful view from this terrace. We purchased our lot for these views.
View looking at the foundation wall of stone, with the red brick walls of the house beginning to arise. This view is from the garden level.
This final view is a picture taken from the street above our lot. You can see the walls arising from the foundation. This part of the house seems to be going extremely fast, after the time consuming building of the stone retaining walls and lower foundation. Architect, Arturo, tells us that in about 2 weeks the walls and floor for the upper level will be complete.