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 cuts 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, I wanted to reduce as many elements in this house as possible. So architectual elements became decorative elements. The concrete slab was polished and sealed for the finished floors downstairs. The concrete block became the wall surfaces, sealed outside, painted inside. It is an interesting texture inside without the need for firring strips, then drywall, then a texture blown on for interest. Foam insulation was blown into the block. The TJI's are the ceiling itself. This gives more height & (I think) substantiallity to the living space. My main regret was not putting in pipes for solar hot water to heat the slab and thus the house. This was left out at the last because of lack of familiarity among local craftsmen, & because I couldn't convince Southern building inspectors it would heat the upstairs, even though I had specs from a firm in Wisconsin who assured that such a system worked for two stories in their cold and that they had been installing these systems for decades. (The prints on the wall are mine, the mats water damaged in storage - I've changed them now)
