The kiva hot tub project

      This is what gave me the idea. Both of these pictures were taken in Albuquerque, but not by me. I first saw this thing on the left at a store called Bien Mur that's pretty famous in those parts for Native American art. I encountered the other one in Old Town, during a visit a couple of years later. I snatched these pictures off the net - hope nobody minds. Other than these two (I don't even know what you call them) I've never seen any more. I liked the idea of these things and wanted to build one on my property as kind of an outdoor social area away from the house. I like sitting by a fire outside and I like love Southwest design, so I HAD to have one of these. I can't remember if I had originally intended to put a hot tub in it, but when we decided to get a hot tub, it just made way too much sense.

Here is a model I made out of styrofoam. Everybody laughed at me, but I was having a hard time visualizing what I wanted. I even changed the design a little as I was making the model. I removed the benches from two of the walls to get the spa away from the fire a little bit, and made the walls step down at the entrance. My original plan was to build a wall out of concrete blocks and stucco it. A neighbor told me that most adobe walls nowadays are framed with wood and stuccoed, but I wanted to try my hand at masonry. But then later I got to thinking that a sound system and lights around the inside would be cool, so I went with the wood idea.

And here's the tub. I made the pad big enough to fit the project and planned for footers big enough to accomodate a concrete block wall (because that was the plan at the time). All I had time to do before I went off to Iraq was to build the concrete form and get started on digging the footers. Kathie had to finish and boy did I hear about it - it was a lot of digging. She also had to dig the trench to the house for the electrical wiring and I heard about that too (it's not the first time she had to finish a project I started). My neighbor did the wiring for me - thanks Pat - and Kathie's brother, Brandon brought some guys out to pour the concrete while I was away. Thanks Brandon - it turned out great.

I spent five months in Iraq thinking about the project, researching, planning, coming up with new ideas, drawing pictures, and finally came up with a plan. I found this audio system called DeckTunes and thought it would be a good idea for out there, but I didn't like the big ugly box it came in or the speakers that came with it. So I used their idea and planned to make my own outdoor marine audio sound system. I also thought some lighting might be a nice touch so I planned for low-voltage step lighting around the inside.

So when I got home on vacation I got started. I used pressure treated 2x6 boards for the frame. I almost used 2x8's for a thicker wall, but decided with the other layers of materials the smaller boards would be sufficient. The framing went faster than I expected. The first picture is at the end of the first day, and the other one is the next day or so. All I had to work with was a circular saw and one section-8 homemade sawhorse. I had other things going on since I was home on vacation and all, so there were days when I didn't do much work on it. The last part of this step was to run wiring for the lights, stereo, and speakers.

The next step was the sheathing. I used 7/16-inch OSB - I hope that was a good choice as I don't know much about it. This step was really quite a pain with the circular saw and the one crappy sawhorse, especially making all of the small cuts for the step-down walls and the step-up parts on the corners...and all the holes for the lights, stereo, and speakers. Mounting the stereo splash shield was interesting too - Kathie was able to fashion a workable spacer out of styrofoam. I got the spacers for the speakers at Car Toys. Here is a closeup of the stereo in the splash enclosure.

Next came a layer of roofing felt to help keep moisture out, and the lath for the stucco to stick to. This was the hardest part for me. The lath has sharp edges and Kathie and I both got lots of cuts on our fingers. I stapled it with these heavy air-gun staples about an inch and a quarter long. They come out of the gun hard and fast; ask Kathie, I got her in the finger with one of them. I also used wood screws in a few places - I hope it's enough to hold all the stucco on ok.

With that done, we were ready for the first coat of stucco. Stucco is usually applied in three coats: a scratch coat, a brown coat, and the finish coat. I hadn't ever done this before so I didn't know what to expect. It went ok. The hardest part was probably mixing it in the wheelbarrow - I think next time I might rent a small mixer. One problem I had was that there were some ripples in the roofing tar which were passed on to the lath. I had to go around and put a bunch more staples in a few spots. The reason this happened is because I tried to use one continuous length of felt around the inside, and again on the outside. This would have been straightforward had the frame been level and square, but I've never built anything level and square.

The brown coat. This was a little bit harder because I had to sculpt all of the angles everywhere. I bought an angle trowel thinking that would make it easier, but it didn't really work well on all of the small angles. After some practice, the angles became a litte bit easier. But next time I think I might hire some guys from outside Home Depot to do the brown coat - maybe the whole thing. I guess I had scratched the scratch coat good enough, because I didn't have any problem with the stucco sticking.

Then the finish coat. Unfortunately, these were taken on my last day of vacation so this was as far as I got. I really tried to get it done, but I've once again left Kathie to finish a project of mine. I decided early on to wait until next vacation to do the fireplace because I knew it would be too big of a bite to swallow. There's a company called Adobelite that makes pre-fab kiva fireplaces. They're really nice and I almost bought one, but they cost like, $2,500 plus $500 for delivery and for what they are, I don't think it's worth it. I mean, it's basically just a firebox and a metal frame and lath that you have to stucco yourself. So I'm going to use this 5 months in Iraq to plan one of my own (using thier basic design).