Updated 6-29-02
Outside Shower
Here are some pictures of our outside shower. Jim put it in as
my - hmmm - 1999 birthday gift, and we finally finished it in May. Jim did the
tiling and I painted the trim. I love it, and use it maybe 6 days out of 7. We
usually turn on the outside water in late March/early April. In 2001, in April,
we got a late snowstorm and I showered one morning with perhaps 6 inches of
fresh snow on the ground, and more falling. It was wonderful! In summer, of
course, it's fabulous.
House History
In summer, 1986, Jim and I bought our property in Alta, sharing and then
splitting a 9.5 acre parcel with my brother, George, and his wife, Dee. They
now have about 3 acres, and we have about 6.5.
That fall, Jim and I were married. He sold his house in Flagstaff and moved to Sacramento. While I continued to work at KVIE, Jim hit the library and learned the additional skills he needed to build our house. He already knew electrical work, and worked on plumbing, framing, heating (we have a hydronic system, which pumps heated water through baseboard radiators), and energy efficient design.
After designing what we wanted on a couple of sheets of graph paper - two stories with open rooms and lots of big windows - we bought a kit home designed to match our specs. The company delivered our home on flatbed trucks, unloaded pieces of it by crane, and Jim and helpers put it together like a big jigsaw puzzle. I'll be adding pictures of this project in the future.
