Outside Upgrades

Once we started looking around at the house again, we realized we had pretty much neglected the outside, while we worked on the inside. Fortunately,we got a larger than normal tax return this time and put most of it into sprucing up the yard and stuff.
One of the things that I noticed was that the roof was growing a lot of weeds, so I cleared those off and completed covering it with indoor/outdoor carpet. I also put sheet plastic under the carpet to help keep the dirt dry, which is supposed to make it a better insulator. We also had to use a lot of big rocks to hold it down since the wind through this little valley can get serious at times.
Another thing we did was finish pouring the sidewalk around the house, and added a patio. I will show that later, but we were able to add a little parking pad for my trailer with the left over concrete.
When we first bought the property, I put in 2 garden boxes and filled them with asparagus, and then neglected them for 4 years. This year I moved the original 2 boxes, added another one, and replanted the aparagus.


The first box now has 4 blueberry bushes and snow peas, with a Fig Tree in the planter that will get moved later.The second one has the transplanted asparagus. I let it go to seed for a while to re-establish the roots, but I am ready to start harvesting again. We can harvest just about once a week, and since there are 13 plants, that turns into a decent side dish.
This third one is our summer box. It has multiple varieties of tomatoes, peppers, okra, and squash.
Other things we have been doing over the last few weeks are re-painting the shutters and doors to a softer grey. We didn't like the blue-grey we had.We added a fence around the utilities to cover them up.And one of the most dramatic changes has been putting red mulch in our tree ring and adding a couple of "small" rocks (I had to have a skid steer for this). Momma put a bunch of little knick-knacks in the ring. You can also see that we added more gravel around the house, and the patio and pergola are also visible in this picture.Speaking of the pergola, here are some in process shots, and some close-ups of the fancy details. Notice the yellow scaffold. It was invaluable in this project.
This picture shows part of the new sidewalk (lighter color) in front of the left module. It just happens to show 3 of the new kittens that are hanging out at our place. Last year a stray cat took up residence under a tarp we had over a bunch of stuff stored outside and dropped a load of 5 kittens. After a few weeks, she left them on their own and we took them to the Humane Society. We cleaned out the storage mess and put in a new shed (see next picture). Well, she is back living under the shed and this time dropped 7 kittens. I plan on making sure she is fixed this time before she runs off again.And lest we forget why we built this house in this place, see the view up the valley from our driveway. I look at this view every morning on my way to work.

Finishing Touches

Once most of the work was complete, we took a break for a few months. We need to refinance, if we can, so we looked around at how the house might look to an appraiser, and decided we needed to spruce up a bit.
These pictures show the tiles we added to the kitchen.
I chose a different pattern for the master bathroom. I still have other things to fix up, but I will show that later.

Ceiling-ology 101

Probably the most unique feature of a Terra-Dome style home is the domed, concrete ceiling. Concrete is not normally used for ceilings in a home, and there are probably good reasons for that. As you can see above, it leaves a lot of air bubbles, form lines, small cracks, and a bit of discoloration. I have to admit, I don't remember even looking at the finish on the ceilings of the other houses we toured before we built ours. I remember one builder telling us how he trowel finished the ceilings with a product called structo-lite. I tried to find it, but it was not locally available, and I didn't want to buy it over the Internet. Anyway, I knew I didn't want to spend my time hand troweling, or paying someone to do that much work. Unlike the walls, I did not want to make the ceilings smooth. I tried to find another way. Below are the results of my experiments.
The first attempt was made when we had a deadline for the 4th of July party last year. I was able to hire a crew of 2 to spray on a drywall mixture for about 1/2 of the house. It looks OK, but it did not fill in the air holes very well. It wasn't cheap either. I will eventually have to go back and fill in all of those holes by hand.
My next attempt was to stay on the floor and use a long pole to roll on Dry-Lock waterproofing paint. I put on 2 coats because the first coat was too thin to hide the color of the concrete. The truth is, I may need to put a third coat someday, but it looks pretty good otherwise. The problem is that it looks like I couldn't decide between a smooth and textured look, so it does neither very well. It also left a lot of air holes unfilled.
My final technique involved putting one coat of Dry-Lock to seal the concrete, and then getting on the scaffold to use a 4" brush to apply a textured ceiling paint. I like this the most. It fills in almost all of the little air holes, smooths out a lot of the form lines, and was not expensive. It was time consuming, but once I got into a rhythm, it moved along nicely. The hardest part was lifting my arm above my head for so long. I guess it really wasn't that much different from hand troweling after all.