This entry will be an update on the work that was completed while we were gone. We realize that some folks are less interested in the details of the building process (who knew?!) and so we are also working on something we should have done before, a tour that shows the status of the entire house now. Perhaps we will post that tomorrow.
Friday, the day we got back from our trip, we went out to Modjeska in the afternoon but could not actually drive all the way to the house because SCE was replacing two of their utility poles: one at the base of one of our two driveways and the other about 100 yards away near the Tucker wildlife sanctuary. This is part of an effort by SCE to replace most, if not all of the poles in the canyon — good for us but very hard on the red-headed woodpeckers who use the poles as acorn storage facilities. There is meant to be another outage on Monday. Perhaps this will be the pole at the end of our second driveway. Picture 1 shows the work on the pole by our driveway.
The dry wall installers have completed all the joint taping and spackling in the house and the apartment. It looks very good, but there is nothing really to show in a photo. The stucco folks did not get as much done as we had hoped. We thought that we would see at least some of the final coat of stucco up, but they are still working on the base coat. As Picture 2 shows, they did get the sheathing installed underneath the eaves and the base coat on that. However, as shown in Picture 3, there is still one small piece of the wall that needs sheathing before this part of the process will be done.
There are two other small things that were done while we were away by the door installers. Picture 4 shows that they installed the door for the area under the deck where the water storage bag will go. Picture 5 shows the door frame for one of the two “people” doors into the garage.
Finally some pretty pictures. Picture 6 shows flowers of Humboldt’s Lily in our terrace beds. This is a species of lily endemic to California named after naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. It is native to the South High Cascade Range, High Sierra Nevada, south Outer South Coast Ranges, and Southwestern California, growing at elevations from 2,000 feet to 3,900 feet (so usually higher than our property which is at 1020 feet). Pictures 7-9 show that we did not miss our crops of apricots and plums while we were gone, and that one the peaches is ready to bear fruit!
