Breeze Blocks

The house is moving right along. Cinder blocks are called breeze blocks in Britain and so this is my homage to Britain (since I like things British and we now have cinder blocks on our house). I hope though that it is not TOO BREEZY having those cinder blocks as a solid wall. Although I thought it was 9 billion degrees in Austin today and 10 billion degrees looking at the house in Agave.

See breeze blocks in living room, 2 small windows are the bathroom and utility room on the lower level. Big foundation is evident and gets bigger the further you go back.

Looking out the front doors before they are installed.

Car port, dining room window and side walkway.

I like the little walkway to the kitchen from the carport. It even has a cover due to the overhang of the roof. I can wave at the nieghbors from here as I am sure a house will be build right close to ours!

I do want to appologize the neighbors across the street that we may be blocking your view of trees. Hopefully our house will be cool and you wont mind seeing that and there will still be some trees to the side.

Batteries not included

This weekend we went out to check on the progress of our house and things are moving a long quite nicely. They have started framing the second floor and we can now see the height of the house. It looks like our bedroom windows will be looking out to trees. We won’t get the downtown view since ironically the foundation is not high enough to make the top floor rise above the tree tops. The whole building really is taking shape. Just check out the pictures to see what I mean!

Nice picture isn’t it? Well I wish I had some of them on Saturday. When I went to take some pics this weekend all I heard was an electrical sucking sound from the camera and a tiny voice that said “feed me”. The camera was out of juice… so no pictures this week.

To help drown our sorrows due to the technical snafu we decided to check out a “local” restaurant near Agave. About four miles or so from Agave was a place I have heard of but never ate at. It’s called East Side Café and it’s been an Austin establishment for years. The food is really good and we learned the origin of Chess Pie which is a southern tradition.

Walk a mile in my shoes…

Everyone knows that walking on hard surfaces (like concrete) is uncomfortable when compared to carpet. What‘s worse is that pounding stone can also be bad for you knees. This leads to a problem with a house that has concrete and wood floors. The floors look great but they are not the most comfortable thing and they may even cause some issue over time. We were thinking about getting rugs for certain rooms not only do rugs add color and warmth to a room they are nicer to walk on. The other option is walking in slipper all the time but I prefer to walk barefoot when possible. I never really understood why.

Post has been updated and most content removed... significant other could not stand the shoes in this post.

The Shape of Things to Come

We saw that Alana had posted on our hijacked blog that we had framing! Thank you Alana for letting us know. We drove out and saw we had a bit so it is easier to tell the size and shape of things to come.

We stopped by Alana and Alex’s house and knocked but no one answered, perhaps they saw us and said “we don’t want those neighbors!” Seriously though they looked pretty busy.

We have 3 pictures from the front, the path back to the kitchen and me standing in front of the kitchen windows. I can almost see the future of the kitchen with someone else doing all the cooking.

Hijacking Good Karma

I still have green machines on the brain. When I made my previous post I totally forgot about the Fisker Karma. They are trying to be a competitor for Tesla’s Whitestar (which has a great B5 Reference for a name). The styling of this vehicle is REALLY nice and you have to love that Sci-fi interior.
Random Update I: The Car Talk Guys talk about Cars of the Future in this Episode of Nova.

Random Update II: It looks like someone took some "spy" photos and a video of the Karma in action. You can check them out here.

We’ve been stoned!

After our weekly trek out to Agave to our surprise we saw someone working on out foundation. After chatting with him for a bit he told us he was using diamonds to grind the foundation out and he was on his second pass. After be bummed last week about the lack of aggregate this week was a 180. We have Stone:

This pic is what I was talking about last week when I said we have a pit in our living room. It goes down in to where the two spare bedrooms are located. The rebar with the orange caps on the side is where cinderblocks are going to go. When we saw the 2D plans this not what we envisioned but it makes an interesting separation from the rest of the house.

This shot is looking at the height difference from the front of the house to the back.

I took this pic in the living room look at back. This is also one other thing we noticed is that the living rooms seems small than it was on paper. It kind hard to tell since the placement of the stairs up is still a bit vague but we will have to wait until the walls are up to get a real feeling for the space.

As a side note Audi announced that it is working on Electric Cars and will have them ready 5-10 year. I guess it’s better late than never.