The ipe wall goes up, board by board.
Difficult to capture in a photo, but the boards are fit together in a tongue and groove style and staggered in and out from the wall to add an additional element of texture and softness to this very hard wood.
The finished wall. Not bad, if we do say so ourselves. And we do.
You will have to imagine the fun we had putting the holes into the ipe and then fitting them together so that the holes would end up in the right spot. We did this by doing a test-fit first to be sure every board would be in the correct location. Drilling the holes was not easy, either. I think we broke 3 saw blades.
Towards the top, center is where the light fixture will go. Below that towards the bottow is where the tub spout will go (just a small 1-inch hole right now). And the gold knob sticking out is where the tub faucet valve will attach. It's a 2-way temperature control valve, which will turn on either the spout or a (yet to be installed) hand-shower for the tub.
Now that we know a little bit about working with ipe, we hope building the shower grating will be a little easier. That remains to be seen.
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