We have been “in” the house now for two weeks. I put “in” in quotes for two reasons. First, just because we are in the house doesn’t mean the workmen are out. Although the house is officially inhabitable and complete, most days we share the house with workers of various trades who are fixing or completing small things. The second reason is that most of the time we are there, when we are not sleeping or eating, has been spent unpacking, organizing, etc., so we have not had the time we would like to enjoy what we have.
Already, however, we can see that the house will be a success. We still are figuring out how to live there, but this is difficult only because there are so many good options — wonderful spaces to sit, read, talk, and just be. Part of the success of the house is that it already feels comfortable, that the rooms are airy and full of light, and that from almost every room in the house there is a wonderful vista that helps bring our glorious outdoor spaces in. An example of this is the view in Picture 1, which is what one sees in the laundry room looking up after loading the washer: a piece of the the slope behind the house landscaped with rocks and succulents. This is certainly not the best view in the house, but it is better than I have ever seen from a laundry room.
Picture 1 – View from the laundry room window.
As we start to get more time we will share more images of the finished house. Today, I simply want to share photos of several projects that have been completed since the last post.
In order to get our fire-modification-plan approval, Nina and I put in what will eventually become the ground cover on the new slope beside the garage. The plants, which are currently so small that they are not visible in Picture 2, are Myoporum parvifolium – Pink Australian Racer. A mature plant, they quickly to spread to 8-9′ across but only grows 3-4″ high, as shown in Picture 3.
Picture 2 – Bank planted with Myoporum parvifolium. In this picture, the plants are all in the ground and the drip irrigation is in place, but we have only finished the mulch on the top half of the slope.
Picture 3 – Mature specimen of Myoporum parvifolium. Its common name comes from the pink flowers that form in clusters at the tips of the branches in the summer.
Another big development was the completion of the gabion wall on the west side of the house. Picture 4 shows the wall at an early stage in its construction. Picture 5 shows the completed wall.
Picture 4 – Gabion wall during its construction.Picture 5 – The completed gabion wall.
The gabion structure is meant to mirror in the house the gabions that help protect the property from the large amounts of water that can come down the hillside. Although not structural, this wall is functional, acting like a heat shield to protect the west side of the first floor of the house from the hot summer sun. There is an opening for a kitchen window through the gabion wall — this a a long, low window, that sits above the kitchen counter. Because it is low, the thickness of the gabion and the house wall block the direct sun. However, this wall covers a large, tall window in the dining room. Here, the rocks are more loosely laid, allowing light and, if the window is opened, air to filter through. Picture 6, shows this window from the inside, lit up at night to highlight rocks in the gabion.
Picture 6- The inside of the gabion wall, lit up at night, from the dining room.
Another project that was recently completed was the installation of the wood-burning stove in the great room and the flue for it running up the outside of the house on the west side. Picture 6 shows the wood stove itself and Picture 7 the flue.
We slept in the new house last night. The final inspection was approved on Thursday, January 30th. Yesterday, the contractor sent cleaners to clean the place; today they came and sealed most of the grout and started work on patching the nicks and other problems with the paint. Monday they will come and touch up the paint.
The guys building the gabion on the side of the house are almost done. They have taken time off to spread some gravel around the driveways and house. They think they will finish up on Tuesday. The electricians will be here this next week to put in some landscape lighting and to make all the fans work.
We, of course, are busy bringing things out from Irvine and trying to get settled. The grout sealing required moving all the furniture into one corner of each room, which we will have to undo tomorrow.
Well, it’s just short of two months since we last wrote the blog. I know I stopped writing, not sure about Ted, because it became clear that we were not going to be in the house for Christmas, and I was so disappointed that I just quit.
It is not that nothing has happened in the interim. Most of the projects in process have been completed. Sometime in December, we got the furniture in storage delivered as well as some new furniture we had bought for the living room. The painters finished painting, although they will come through one more time to touch up spots.
We finally got electricity this week on Wednesday. The Fire Authority vegetation inspectors came out yesterday and found a few small things that we have to finish before they can come back and approve out adherence to the plan. The main thing is putting down weed fabric on the slope by the stairs to the garage and then planting it with a low-growing groundcover. Ted & I will try to do that this weekend. We also want to get the first level of the west-side house gabion built, so we can see how the filtered light works and make sure the metal pieces we ordered fit, before one of the contractor’s guys (and crew) build it next week. Pete left in November and is staying in New Mexico.
Also, finally, next Thursday, the woodstove installer is coming to install our woodstove.
Ted and I spent many days clearing out the garage so we could put stuff that had been stored under the solar panels away. We moved some large slabs of oak from a tree that died that Pete cut up into the garage. We moved a lot of wood planks up to beyond the 170 foot marker, which runs right behind the solar panels, and is where the Fire Authority no longer has concerns. Of course, it is only behind the house that our property even extends more than 170 feet.
Over Christmas, Taylor, Matt, Haywood, and Curtis made several trips out to the new house with us and helped to put some order to things. They helped put together the bed in the apartment and to measure the slopes for the plants that are about to be planted. After the men flew home, the girls helped rearrange the furniture in the great room. The furniture is still covered with plastic, and the floors are quite dirty. There will be another round of cleaning and paint touch-ups.
Because we finally had electricity, the AV guys who install the Control-4 panel lighting and TVs etc, arrived yesterday. Monday is a holiday but the HVAC people should arrive next Tuesday to turn on the heaters, which will be a blessing. The house has been chilly but not unbearable; then again, the weather has been unusually warm and pleasant. The apartment, on the other hand, has been quite chilly since it is over the unheated garage.
We will try to take some new photos of the outside this weekend, but that may not happen. The contractor is anxious for us to tidy the guest bedroom, where the beds have not been put together, so that he can have the final electrical inspection. The plugs must be visible. And right now, pieces of bed are piled around, making it difficult to walk around and check plugs.
One of us has been out most days this week, and we have both taken photos, but it’s been hard to think of what to write. And most of the photos are full of drop cloths or trash.
It rained last week, which was useful because the skylight in the guest bathroom no longer leaked, but the two epoxy decks had puddles on them. The big one over the master bedroom had quite a few big puddles; the little one off the office had one small one.
Unfortunately, before they can work on that, it’s going to rain a lot, 2-3 inches starting on Tuesday night and continuing through Friday.
The electricians have been at the house every day. They are almost done with the fixtures (fans & lights) that we ordered. A different person is wiring the garage and apartment, and he hasn’t been around much.
Kitchen pendants
Powder room light with marks where mirror was put up and then taken down
The cabinet maker has been busy–he has put some of the cabinet knobs on as well as some of the drawer pulls. But we ordered 110 knobs and 80 drawer pulls, so there are still a lot to do. To simplify things, all of them are the same in the house and apartment except for the powder room bathroom and the guest bathroom.
The picture below is the TV room with the new cabinet doors on top and knobs. We are trying to choose a TV for that large space you see. It will hold a 65″ TV. Ted will have a small one in the kitchen, and our old TV will go in the apartment living room. The carpenter has also finished the master bedroom closet, which is made from some melamine closet system.
TV room with upper cabinet doors added and knobs on all cabinet doors.
One of the bi-fold doors going into the office.
They have installed the doors (3) on the office and the one sliding door in the kitchen. They are different kinds of opaque glass. The picture to the right shows one of the doors going into the office. The photo below is of the pocket door going from the great room into the kitchen. The door is wider than normal so that, when it is open there will be a generous passage between these rooms. The workman is prepping it to be stained. The blue edging is not part of the glass; it is the blue tape on the other side of the glass that he has put on to protect the glass from the stain.
Sliding door in the opening between the great room and the kitchen. The blue edging on the glass is blue tape on the other side put up temporarily to protect the glass while the door is being stained. To the right is the opening to the hallway to the bedroom with the door to the powder room visible.
Before Pete left until Dec 1, he got most of one side of the back slope planted and rocked. The picture below gives a sense of how this mixture of stone and arid plantings — cactus, agave, etc. will eventually look. He will need to finish that and then begin on the gabions on the side of the house after his return. Apparently, we can get a certificate of occupancy without the gabions being finished since they are separate from the house.
One of our big holdups is the electric company. We are waiting for them to run a wire down the utility pole in our neighbor’s side yard into the conduit that now runs from the pole to the house. Without the electricity, we cannot have a test of the interior sprinklers, and without that test, we cannot get the fire people out to check out the yard and outside sprinklers.
They have completed about 1/2 of the driveway with the gravelpave. What you see in the picture below is simply the gravel on top of the forms. Presumably, it will sink some and will be compressed some.
Gravel on top of the gravelpave form.
They also finished the wall next to the front walk on Thursday.
Front walk wall
The picture below is of the back of the house looking towards the west. The door you can see is to the utility room where the electrical and plumbing are housed. The door will have a lock that the electric company (and perhaps the firefighters) can open. It is not open to the house inside. Looking across the gravel, you can see the 2 compressors for the house that were installed last week. The second picture below shows one of the car chargers, which is just out of the picture in the first photo below.
Utility room door and compressors.Juicebox car charger.
There will be two more chargers in the garage. We only have two electric cars, but it will be convenient to leave a car up by the front door often enough that we thought we’d get a charger up there too.
The picture below shows the wall that continues from the stairway running up to the apartment and the house.
Wall at the bottom of the slope down to the garage. Because this slope is fairly steep, this will help keep any water or erosion from running directly onto the driveway.
The last picture that we will leave you with is one that Ted likes because really shows something of the style of the house and what it eventually will look like.
Looking at the stairway from the garage, past the apartment and the deck, to the house.
Ted was out at the house on Saturday and took these pictures. He was going to weed-whack a hill that has some tall grass growing on it, but there were Santa Ana winds and it was very hot and dry. It was too dangerous to use even the plastic cord because if you struck a rock, it could spark and start a fire.
The first picture is of the new bluestone front walk with the wall of local rock mostly built beside it. The wall divides the front door from a little area outside our bedroom sliding door. What will go in that area other than a couple of chairs is uncertain right now.
Picture 1: Front walk with short wall to the right.
The roofers have been at the house for several days and have still not finished all the roofs.
Picture 2: Metal pretty much finished on the top roof and just sitting in piles on the lower one.Picture 3: The apartment roof on Thursday afternoon with some tools still on it.
The gabion structure posts outside the western house wall have been an issue since they were put up. The architect expected the posts to be slender, but the structural engineer said they had to be very large so that they could support the gabions without having any effect on the house, in, for instance, an earthquake. But the posts that were in front of the dining room window were huge and would spoil the effect of light coming through the rocks.
Picture 4 – August view of the gabion posts.
So the structural engineer said we could cut down those two posts and replace them with horizontal bars. There were also some additional bars in the design that had to be added: a bar across the wide gap, a bar across the width where the kitchen window is, and bars across the roof posts for roof supports. They also built a box around the kitchen window, which will allow the kitchen window to have an unimpeded view.
Picture 5: Saturday’s transformation
Picture 6: Back door roof supports.
Picture 7: Apartment soffit for range fan
They started working on the soffit for the range fan for the apartment.
On Monday, they will put the bamboo on the staircase. On Tuesday morning, Nina will meet the wood stove installer who is coming out to see what he needs to bring to install the stove. Sometime soon, the stucco people will return to stucco/paint the wall next to the kitchen door. Ted and I thought we could do it ourselves (someday), but the contractor offered to split the cost because he thinks it looks so awful.
Picture 8: Repeat of kitchen bench picture with the cement wall behind it.
A lot of finishing work has been done in the last 10 days.
Two of the three shower doors have been installed. The contractor assumed we would want clear glass since that is what modern houses usually have. We were both opposed although for different reasons. Ted doesn’t like the problems of hard water streaking on the glass, and Nina doesn’t like being able to see in. So we got some acid-etched glass, which turns out to be sort of greenish in color, which matches the apartment and master baths perfectly. It may not be perfect in the guest bathroom, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Picture 1: Master bath shower door
Ted laid out the front walk last week. It leads from the top of the bluestone staircase to the front door and then on to the deck stairs. It was given a layer of concrete during the last pour on Friday. The bluestone to cover it and the front steps will be delivered this week.
Picture 2: Front walk
They have installed all the faucets in the bathrooms and kitchens except the guest bathroom.
Picture 3: faucets in master bathPicture 4: Kitchen sinks last week.
They delivered the gravel and the plastic holders for the left-hand driveway a couple of weeks ago, but the contractor didn’t want to finish the drive until the final heavy concrete truck was gone. We are using a system called GravelPave2 for the new driveway. The plastic circles will be filled with gravel and any water that flows down the driveway will filter thru the gravel. The picture on the right is from the internet and shows people unrolling the spools of plastic.
Picture 5: Structure to hold gravel on new driveway.
Picture 6: From the internet: unrolling gravelpave rolls.
Some of the railings for the various decks have been installed.
Picture 7: The railing surrounding the top deck next to the green roof. It has a gate to allow maintenance on the green roof.Picture 8: Railing on the apartment deck
They finished all the bamboo flooring on the second floor and our master closet. The only undone floor is the interior staircase and the rug in our bedroom.
Picture 9: Bamboo flooring in the guest bedroom
Once the flooring was in, the carpenters arrived to cut the floor moulding.
Picture 10: carpenters fitting in the floor moulding.
We have been a bit worried about people putting hands on the top of the stairwell wall. Although there will be a handrail to hold on to, the wall in many parts is a bit too easy to put your hand on. So the carpenters came up with a piece of wood on top of another piece of wood, which will mimic the look of the floor moulding. The bottom layer will be painted, and the top layer stained to match the mahogany doors.
Picture 11: Wood cap to stairwell wall.
Sometime in the last two weeks, the tile guys finished putting the stone on the wall of the great room behind the woodstove. It’s kind of an off-white color, but it looks more colored on my monitor.
Picture 12: Stone on great room wall
As part of the last cement pour, they created a concrete bench by the kitchen door. This would be a place to remove your shoes before heading in.
We’ve had Santa Ana winds this week and they turned the power off Wednesday afternoon and didn’t turn it back on until early Thursday morning. Fortunately, the people working on the earth moving were able to keep working.
The counter people have been busy this week. We have full counters in both kitchens and the bathrooms. The first picture below is of Ted’s prep sink in the foreground and Nina’s washing sink on the lower level in the background. As you can see in the second picture, the counter is two heights, so that we have the high counter for Ted to work on and to have stools at the far end, and a lower height on the side with the dishwasher and large sink for Nina.
Picture 2: Two heights of kitchen counter
Picture 1: Prep sink closest to front
In the apartment, they finished the kitchen counters there too. The apartment bathroom counter has the same dark grey counter.
Picture 3: Apt kitchen sink wall.
Picture 4: Apt kitchen island with plastic on most of the surface
The concrete staircases have dried and lightened in color. The long one that goes from the garage to the apartment and then on up to the deck has lights in it.
Picture 5: Looking down towards the apartment landing
Picture 6: One of the lights on the staircase.
Picture 7: Looking up the staircase from the garage.
There are a couple of pictures of the bridge to the backyard as well. The staircase at the end of it is at the same height as the backyard, but there is currently still a ditch between them. There will be a bridge to connect the bridge to the backyard.
Picture 9: Looking back towards the house.
Picture 8: Looking from the house along the bridge
We have been having trouble at the house because the left-hand driveway has been being rebuilt and the parking area off of it is unavailable. We have had a lot of different tradespeople out there and our street is very narrow. It is also a Fire Watch time when you’re not supposed to park on the street. So the trucks have been parking in front of our neighbors or in their driveways. Some of them turned up this morning (loudly) at 5:45AM in preparation for what was supposed to be the last cement pour but wasn’t. Sigh. Unhappy neighbors.
Today they poured colored concrete for the long staircase from the garage up to the apartment and on to the deck, a short staircase from the other driveway up to the backyard, the bridge to the backyard, and the front steps. After they poured the cement, they coated it was some blue liquid that keeps it from drying out too much. Tomorrow they will scratch the surface and the aggregate to show some of the stones and make it rougher. The contractor sent photos of the brown concrete, by the time Nina was out in the afternoon, it was all blue.
The main staircase from the garage
The same staircase covered in blue liquid
Bridge with stairs at the end
Stair on east driveway to backyard
Meanwhile, work has been progressing inside the house. The carpenter has been working on the TV room cabinets and in the kitchen.
Picture of the TV room cabinets on Friday.They were finally hanging the cabinets on the north wall of the kitchen.
At the same time, the tilers have been busy putting in counters in the master bathroom and guest bathroom. The apartment has been closed up while the staircase was being built.
Guest bathroom counterGuest bathroom shower seat with same marble on it as on the counter.
I forgot to take a picture in the master bathroom. Tomorrow we count drawers and cabinets to order handles and knobs.
A man crashed his car into a telephone pole this morning around 3AM, and the car caught fire starting a vegetation fire on the main road into our canyon. The road was closed except to residents from then until 2PM. Fortunately, they let our workers who were coming from the South in. Those from the North could not get through.
Nina was out there in the early afternoon and found people working on the West driveway and one electrician who was working on the apartment. The fire took so long to put out because we are facing Santa Ana winds this week, and it was windy and very hot.
She watered the new green roofs and as much of the rest of the yard as she could. Sometime between the time we were there yesterday and this afternoon, counters were installed along the walls in the kitchen and in the laundry room. For various reasons, the sinks for the kitchen island will arrive next Tuesday. The picture below shows one side of the kitchen.
Picture 1: The kitchen corner that will have the stovetop with the two-level island in the foreground.
The laundry room sink was installed because it was here.
Picture 2: Laundry room sink and counter.
Pete has been working on a two-tiered set of gabions along the upper driveway. The following 4 pictures show the gabions from left (lower) to right (higher).
Picture 3: Bottom (downhill) beginning of gabion.Picture 4: Beginning of 2nd tier behind a flat area.Picture 5: Further alongPicture 6: Far right near top of driveway.
