So a little more technical details. The ceiling in the Rumpus Room is 8ft high, with 4 steps going down into it. This gives it a nice womb-like potential. The back door to the Rumpus Room leads out onto the backyard lanai. I can't stress enough that with the plaster wall, it was very difficult to attach anything without a lot of extra work.
For the majority of bamboo, Kirby took apart a bamboo fence that was wired together. We had to try to sort the bamboo from the fence as the quality was variable. He also bought a dozen bamboo planks with nice finished edges, a few half-rounds and other bits at Oceanic Arts.
After we had our prime pieces selected, it was time to do some "aging" with a blow torch on the bamboo knuckles. This process can go very quickly with a good torch, and very slowly with a bad one. You have been warned.
I think here Kirby is toasting a muffin or something. After everything was aged, we cut a pile of 48" bamboo pieces to run along the bottom of the walls, since the lauhala matting was the upper half. The plan was to use a hefty (4"?) half-round as the divider between the lauhala matting and bamboo.
Again, the plastered wall was a pain! We didn't want to drill holes into the wall to attach each separate piece of bamboo, so we made a "frame" top and bottom, and slid the bamboo parts into place. We then stapled the bamboo pieces to the frame. Here you can see that this still took a long time to do, Kirby kept falling asleep.
Here's the finished results! the flash sort of washes everything out.
For a slight change in texture and to add some visual stimulus, we covered 4 closet doors with a reed matting (unsure of actual name), then framed these in with bamboo that we ripped to 5/8" wide. The end result is really great.
Making great progress, we deserved to move a few pieces of art back into the room and take a well deserved break.
