Our friend Sergio Palleroni and his design/build studio from the UT-Austin School of Architecture came into town on Friday to spend the weekend at Patty’s house, lending a hand with construction and studying the landscape in order to go back to Austin and build some structures to complement Patty’s garden. After getting oriented on Friday, everybody spent most of the day Saturday laying slate tile in the living room, bathroom, and laundry room. The tile is beautiful; it is also quite varied, both in coloration and thickness, which means we will need to chisel down the uneven joints. Sunday we …

As promised, some photos of the finished products of the past 2-3 weeks of work. As the Mississippi State students are working at the house on Fridays, we’re continuing to make progress with trim, and we’re working on choosing materials for the floors, cabinets, stairs, etc. The finished railing! The finished mosaic! Emily working on trimming out the ceiling. Patty chose a rusty orange color for the beams. Very striking now but it will look great with the cabinets (which may also become orange) and the slate floors.

The past two and a half weeks have seen Patty’s treehouse come much closer to looking like a finished house. This post is an attempt to document the process; I will get some more finished photos soon. The key to our progress was the serendipitous arrival of Fran Halperin and Eric Christ, partner architects from San Anselmo, California, who have been traveling the country in Hank, their VW van, over the past four or five months. Fran and Eric originally planned to stay for a week or so, but — upon seeing, I think, the extent to which we could …

The inside of Patty’s house is starting to take its finished form, as the first wall and ceiling materials were installed over the holidays. Brian Stewart somehow coordinated up to 30-40 volunteers at a time to make great progress on installing the tongue-and-groove pine board that we chose for the ceilings, walls, and most of the floor. Although the material is nothing fancy — standard No.2 Southern Yellow Pine — it gives the room a very warm look, especially when the sun shines on it, and it should look great when finished: By itself, it looks a little overwhelmingly uniform. …