There is still no roof and we had to order more battens, but my house is starting to look like a real house (Photos 1, 2 and 3). There are windows and doors, an insulated attic, and a ceiling inside. The base coat of clay plaster is drying and the interior walls are being framed with metal studs (Photo 4).
As work moved to the interior of the house we had to revisit the fragrance issue. The contract is for a house made with fragrance-free products, by a fragrance-free crew. The contractor was surprised to learn that I could detect and was bothered by the fragrance in the orange safety fence, the garbage bags, the on-site hand sanitizer, the porta-potty, and some of the crew’s laundry and grooming products. I didn’t make an issue of this when everyone was working outside because I could stand upwind or out of range. But inside the house it is critical that everyone and everything be fragrance-free. Some fragrances are designed to bond to everything they encounter and they don’t dissipate. It would only take one person wearing fragrance that lodged in the damp plaster walls to ruin my house.
To his immense credit the contractor is taking my concern seriously. He had bigger signs made on his own initiative (Photo 5), he distributed the fragrance-free products I purchased for folks who were not already fragrance-free, and he is enforcing this standard.
