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  • Stucco and Stain – Part II

    Stucco and Stain – Part II

    Sixty-five windows. Two gallons of stain. Two gallons of Danish oil. Six sanding pads. A box of 100 rubber gloves. Hundreds of screws and hardware. Three tins of paint thinner and lacquer thinner. Two bags o’ rags. Two brushes, two gals, one husband and two professional Pella staining “teachers.” That’s what it took to complete […]

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  • Stucco and Stain – Part I

    Stucco and Stain – Part I

    Our first coat of stucco – the scratch coat – was completed Oct. 28, and for the next three days, we sprayed down the house to harden the base coat. On the second day of ‘house watering,’ the interior also saw some action as my mom and I began window staining. Wow … those windows […]

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  • Lath Complete

    Lath Complete

    Our house now has some color! Lath (tar paper and chicken-wire) was completed on Oct. 20, and the next step in the stucco process is the scratch-coat. Our giant pile of sand and Western One Kote (scratch coat) awaits! We’re applying stucco in a three-stage process that involves two week’s cure time in between each […]

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  • Porch Overhangs Ready! Next Step, Stucco.

    Porch Overhangs Ready! Next Step, Stucco.

    Our apologies for the temporary website unavailability. Unfortunately, though, we lost the entire Fry Ranch website, my brand new work website and my old website when our host’s servers were ‘hacked.’ The company then decided to go belly-up the next week, providing NO backups for any of our pages (or refunds!). So Steve has been […]

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  • Hello and Goodbye

    Hello and Goodbye

    It was with great anticipation that we awaited the arrival of the baby roadrunners that were soon to fledge from the nest they had built in the garage. Just walking into the garage sent them into serenade, hissing and eventually learning how to make their little “blurp,” “blurp” sounds. So we knew they were growing. […]

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  • Welcome to Roadie-Cam

    Welcome to Roadie-Cam

    With 110-degree and higher temperatures, our building progress has been on hold while we plan for concrete, porches/patios and stucco during cooler weather. However, construction hasn’t halted completely! Our new residents in the garage have been picking up the slack and building away throughout June. When we first discovered our new inhabitants, we thought rats […]

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  • Ummm…. White Castle

    Ummm…. White Castle

    Anyone who knows Steve knows that he is in love with White Castle sliders (mini-burgers popular on the East Coast). So – now that the house is wrapped in Tyvek and resembles a white castle due to the angular parapets, his eyes glass over, and he salivates every time he pulls in the driveway, murmuring […]

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  • Mad Dash to Beat the Monsoons

    Mad Dash to Beat the Monsoons

    As we inch closer and closer to Arizona’s official rainy “monsoon” season (mid-June), we have come to realize that trying to finish the roof install and parapets ourselves is too great a risk… Unless, of course, we want bucket loads of water falling on all our hard work. So – kicking and screaming – we […]

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  • Framing, Cranes & Muscle Pains

    Framing, Cranes & Muscle Pains

    Here we are into May already, with April’s whirlwind of activity behind us. Amid splinters and sore muscles, we worked throughout April on interior framing – finally seeing the rooms take shape. We even added a few vigas to the entryway! Toward the end of April, we rented a “Genie” lift to move the exposed […]

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  • Back in Business – Interior Framing Begins

    Back in Business – Interior Framing Begins

    Although it may not look like we’ve made much progress since our impressive six-day wall raising in February, the past three weeks have been spent completing the unglamorous tasks of framing all the window openings and adding headers and top plates. On March 28, we were able to dive in to a task that actually […]

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