Birds and nature

OK, so the house is going slooooow, so on our weekly visit to survey the progress (if we go more often there may be nothing to survey) we take a quick look around what's been done, and then we focus on the birds, the landscape, the beautiful weather, whatever. We're quickly becoming avid birdwatchers this way.

A bit about the house: it's complicated by Uruguayan building standards, as it involves 3 different construction methods. Wooden stilts (thick logs) on the barbeque area will support the living-room and kitchen, which in turn will be held together by steel-framing and clad in wood. The stilts, the wood and the steel-framing are non-traditional construction systems in Uruguay.

The bedrooms and bathrooms will be brick-and-mortar. That's the "easy" part, or at least the part the builders feel more comfortable with. And there will be lots of glass, in order to take in the ocean and forest views, and the sunlight, which mostly comes from the direction opposite the good views.

The design is, in my own words, "cute modernist." There is something soft and warm about it, despite the spare, modernist lines.