Life is too short. Why spend time cleaning under beds, maintaining painted moldings, sopping up water around sinks and showers, etc? Why not apply the resourceful human mind to our living spaces, scrutinize and compare every type of house: European, Asian, Native American, etc. and invent ones that cut such work to a minimal - and stop devoting most of our lives to paying for a house and most of our waking hours to cleaning and repairing it?
The first floor is the concrete slab polished & sealed. The plush wool rugs that I designed & had custom made in Thailand & the antique baby grand sit on the concrete floor for a relaxed but elegant combination. Concrete, if sealed is already dirt colored and easy to maintain.
For construction costs, future maintenance, and visual simplicity, as much had to be eliminated as possible. So architectual elements became the decorative elements. The polished concrete slab was the floor downstairs. The inside of the exterior concrete blockwalls didn't get firing strips and dryway with a texture sprayed on for interest, but were simply painted. Concrete block is an interesting texture of itself. Foam insulation was blown into the block. The TJI's are the ceiling and give more height & substantiallity to the living space. The concrete floor was to contain pipes for solar hot water to heat the slab and thus the house, but were left out because of lack of familiarity among local craftsmen, & because Southern building inspectors wouldn't accept that this would heat the upstairs, even though the firm in Wisconsin assured that such a system worked for two stories in their cold and that they had been installing these systems for decades.
