A large hole in the sand

Gosh, building a house takes a long time. Even longer if you decide to include a basement. Seven months after we moved out of Casa Del Sol, and five months after we tore it down, we are now the proud owners of a large hole in the sand.

What took so long?

Three months of that was spent waiting for the permit. So we didn't really get started till the middle of February. Digging out all that sand to create retaining walls - to hold everything together while we complete the basement and pour the foundation - took a couple of weeks. The walls of the basement were done by early March. Since then it's mainly been prep for the pouring of the foundation, with drainage and power lines being put in. 

Meanwhile down in the bottom of the basement the concrete floor was poured and polished. This will be the floor of the wine room and the den. If we like the concrete, we'll do it exactly the same on the ground floor - where the foundation will make up the floor of the living/ dining room. If we don't like the way it looks in the basement, we'll put a rug over it and figure out how to get it right for the ground floor.

Watching that concrete be poured, and seeing it cure, and then be polished, and now finally sealed, has been a bit of a nail-biter. We chose the colour based on a 3" square sample. Visualizing it on a large scale, speckled with little pebbles (the aggregate that is part of the mix), and polished to a shine, was really hard. 

Here are the samples we got to choose from:

And here are the four we whittled it down to:

We chose 'Mesa Bluff' which is the palest one. This is just the coloured powder, which gets mixed with pebbles and sand, and then after it's been poured it gets ground down. The further it gets ground, the more pebbles show and the bigger the speckles - so it looks more like terrazzo and less like concrete - and the more it costs. Our clever concrete guy Ignacio sprinkled some extra rocks in after he poured, so he wouldn't have to grind down so far to see the big speckles. 

Here's how it looked a couple of days after it was poured. It didn't really look very different to the walls, at this point, but I saw some glimmers of promise in the paler dry bits.

And here's how it looks after several goes over with the grinder, a coat of sealant, and a thorough buffing.

We like it. I think Mesa Bluff was the right choice. We could stand it to be a little lighter, so Ignacio's going to put more, and paler, rocks in the ground floor. 

So there it is. Our big, shiny-floored, hole in the sand. All we have to show for seven months. In another week the foundation will be poured and the framing can begin. Then, fingers crossed, the pace will pick up.