I'm working on the front door right now. This picture is a sketch of what I'm trying for with a darker (mahogany) wood. I'm going to do the stained glass myself along the lines of what is shown.

Rough Idea


By the way, the rain is coming again next week. We should get another 2 inches which will push L.A. up to the second rainiest ever. I guess I was just lucky to start building this year during this monsoon season. Maybe we can be number one soon. UGH!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Modified on 1/23/08
Here is a picture of the actual door at the mill and with the final stained glass. If you look closely at the raw door, you can see the three plugs at the base of the window frame. These remove to allow me to remove the frame and swap out the glass at anytime.

Today's GOTCHA. I was at the house looking around at the framing on the second floor and noticed that the master bath window seemed much larger than what I had remembered so I pulled the drawings and measured it. It says the window should be 4 feet wide with a 4 foot wide shower. Then I looked at the window schedule and saw that 2, 2'-6" windows were to be ordered for the spot. Now my shower would be quite narrow. I decided to swap the shower with the counter at the opposite corner of the room. This will not only give me a larger shower but will move all of that plumbing to the outer wall of the house between the tub and toilet. A win-win in my opinion.

Well we got about 10 inches out of that storm. The job was shut down for over a week. This makes for about 6 weeks of delay due to rain so far. A lot of water came in on the remaining wood floor. Let's see what's left of it when the masonite is removed. The tarps couldn't handle all of the water and the ceiling fell down in one of the downstairs bedrooms. Second floor framing work starts today.

It's raining again! This is getting ridiculous. It's supposed to start again on Tuesday and go at least through next Sunday. Also, I have given up on the server downtime and moved the whole web site to a real company.

Some pictures of the web server set up during the construction. I'm going to move it out of here real soon as it is difficult to keep it running.

The web server is under the tarp.


The phone box was moved onto the tree to keep this site going.


The workers broke the DSL connection so I had to splice it. There's another one about 20 feet down the wire.

It's raining again! The tarp on the roof started to blow off so Rich went onto the wet, shake roof with muddy shoes. Needless to say, he slid all the way off. He said he is just fine but probably used up one of his nine lives.

Major issues today. The city building inspector came by and said that we can't build a second story on a foundation wall that is only 6" wide (six inches is standard for one-story houses here). So he decided to stop the concrete pour before we started. Rich had to run to the city engineer to have all of the calculations reverified per the city. That apparently was not good enough so luckily we got the engineer to come out to the house and visually inspect the footings. Everything was OK and we got to pour on Monday. That cost us a few days.

Loewen windows and doors were ordered today. They will be push-out, french casements in a cranberry color.

On a completely unrelated note, I was told that the concrete for the foundation under the house will be poured on Friday, 1/21/05.

Much of the large timber frames from the demolition were saved for reuse during the project. For example, several 2 x 6's were used to reinforce the floor joists. Rich Wright prides himself on being able to save the wood and reuse it whenever possible. Several very large beams from the living room will most likely be reused in the new living room.

Today we drove around Pasadena to look at various color combinations on Craftsman and Bungalow houses. Click here to see them.