After a couple of weeks of apparent lull, the house project is moving forward again, on two fronts.   We’re only 39 days from our next long Airstream trip, so this is really good news.   We need to get this house done before we go.
First, the kitchen and bath cabinets arrived.   That means something like 28 large boxes plus assorted flats and poles. I have no idea what most of them contain.   In many cases, the shape of the box in no way resembles anything that I remember ordering, so it will be interested when the installer comes and starts opening them.   That will begin on Monday, and probably continue all week.

We’ve staged the boxes strategically around the house, and now the entire place smells like cardboard.   That’s atop the faint odor of fresh latex paint.   Ahh, that new house smell.

Second, Chris and Sergio arrived to work on the master bedroom windows.   Our bedroom has two windows plus sliding glass doors, which means glass on three sides.   The east facing window is cheezy single-pane glass, leaks air like crazy, and lets in too much solar heat most of the year, so it needed replacement.   Since it has a view of a wall, we decided to replace it with glass block rather than an operable window.

It took no time at all to remove the   old window.   I liked the open-air look of things without the window in place, but it would be a little chilly at night.     In this photo you can see very clearly that our house is constructed of burnt adobe block.   No insulation.   No siding.   Nothing but blocks.   Simple, yet surprisingly effective against the heat of summer.

We chose Decora glass blocks 12″ square.   They’re four inches thick, which should yield some small amount of insulative value (quite a bit more than the useless window they replaced).   Just as importantly, they give the bedroom some privacy.   They are not frosted as they appear — that’s just leftover mortar that hasn’t been cleaned off.   They have a clear wavy look that distorts images.   We’ll also add a light-blocking window shade for light control, since the window faces east.   In the morning in April and May, sunlight arrives very early at this window!

The other task in the bedroom was to replace the giant 5×8 window that faces the mountains.   This window, like all the others in the house, was yet another leaky single-pane el-cheapo 1970s era junker.   It was permanently etched and fogged from who-knows-what, and you could feel the breeze blowing through it.

We bought a new double-pane “low E” window to replace it, and the guys managed to get that installed today as well.   The Santa Catalinas look even nicer through the new glass, and it’s nice that the room is now finally sealed against air infiltration properly.

Tomorrow the adobe repair specialist arrives to begin some repairs to the bedroom’s block walls.   That will take a few days. Once she’s done, the bedroom will be complete and we can begin to move our stuff into it, another major milestone on the project.

With luck we can really live in the house for two weeks before we hit the road again.   That’s not much time, but we’ll be able to go off on our next multi-month trip with the knowledge that our house will be ready and waiting for us to return.   Should be a nice feeling.