• The rough plumbing is going well. Only about 4 more days until it's done.
• The master bathroom shower, sink, and tub fixtures were picked today. They are made by Phylrich - Carrara Beige Model Series. The finish is oil rubbed bronze with the beige marble handles.
• Chose Mr. Steam MS-400T for the master bath steam shower. I purchased it and then found it for about $150 less. Oh well, maybe I'll save next time. This site has everything!

• The electrician started today and mounted electrical boxes around the house. It seems the code of a box every 6 feet is excessive.
• The garage was torn down today due to wood rot and termites in preparation for the new garage framing and roof. This was not part of the original plan.

• Hired John Bauman, landscape designer and former owner of the Begonia Farm Nursery.

Pete Ramage of Ramage Masonry has started the fireplaces and the plumber, Jaime, is putting in the gas lines to them.

The eaves and rafters were stained today using Cabot Stain's Bark color. I had everything brushed so it would reveal the grain better and give it an older look. It worked!!! When the painters first started, they were spraying and we had to stop that fast. Instead of seeing the grain like in this picture, everything looked solid brown.

• Today we finally picked the actual colors of the house. The shingle siding is a clear-coated natural cedar. The window and door trim, rafters, and eaves are Cabot Semi-Transparent redwood stain. The balcony railings and trim are Passion Vine, an olive-green color. All colors except for the siding were actually choices I made after the Art Jury told me what they liked. It was easier that way since it gave me fewer choices.

• Gave Joe Madden of Madden Millworks in San Pedro the go-ahead to start construction of the front door.

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!
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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.