Primarily I have been working on the floor, and in part that accounts for my blogging silence in that it's really not all that picture-worthy. As always, though, there have been other tasks in-between. I'm in such a work work work induced brain fog that I can't really remember what they have been. I thought I'd share a little illustration of the challenges of laying floor over radiant heat tubes. For the most part the two are perpendicular to each other, so it's straightforward how not to penetrate the water filled pipes. (Even that's not as easy as it sounds given the monotony of hitting the nailer and once I grazed a tube but THANK THE GODDESS did not puncture it.)
But where the tubes turn they are a little trickier to keep track of. For example this layout: 
looks like this when you place the next board:
and given that you nail on an angle into the tongue of the board, you'd hit the tube in the "no zone."
Other on- goings include that Jennifer has taken on mixing colors for the lime-wash we will use on the plaster walls. (A watered down version of the same material that's in the plaster. It's the same as the whitewash you might have seen in greece or spain, except we are pigmenting it.) This has been a lot of color sampling and counting buckets of this and tablespoons of that. 
A painter will come and apply it all next week. Yes, we want to move in and I 'm happy to report that we're having some subcontractors come in to paint and finish floors and such so that I can get to work on cabinets soon so we can MOVE IN!
The other major project has been replacing the long ago thrown together temporary stair with the final one. There are metal elements to my design, so I've been on the computer and shuttling to my neighbor the metal worker. (Only the structure is finished -- there is a whole other side that gets more metal, but that's a little later) .
I had a nice day of volunteer help from friend Stephen -- long island fellow I bonded with over contruction -- to cut these stringers. THey really did turn out very well, and that's the basis of the whole thing. 
Then all the noodling of getting the thick and wavy and imprecise wood to meet the very unforgiving metal:
The treads are slotted in a dovetail shape and the attaching wood slides in so that they are free to expand an contract without -- I hope-- cracking.
Here's how it turned out so far: 
With the lovely bonus that the components of the old stair were available to recut and form into a stair to the basement AT LAST. We have been climbing the teetery wooden step ladder that I used to build the saugerties house 20 years ago and it as gotten old just as we have!
Hasta pronto, espero anyway!
