Southern California Edison has been trimming my palm tree every few months for the last 8 years. During that time, I have been trying to get them to underground the power lines before my tree reached them. The last trimming was one too many as they topped off the palm tree resulting in its quick demise. Here are some photos I took of the removal.

 
 

 
 

As many of you have noticed there has not been too much activity on the house lately. The reason is that it is mostly complete with minor projects and ongoing maintenance tasks in it's future.With that being said, my plan is to continue to document any upgrade and maintenance tasks as they occur, but my primary focus is to evolve this web site into something that everyone finds extremely useful with how-to tips, shopping for books, Arts & Crafts style items, products to finish your home, tools you might find useful on the job, and a Woodworkers' Corner for you do-it-yourselfers out there. Most importantly, a Home Remodeling Forum where everyone can exchange pictures and ideas, has just been created. Please drop by and show off your remodel, ask questions, and help others with your lessons learned. Be sure to add your remodeling horror stories.

Just remember that this site is for you and together we can make this a great community for both the Arts & Crafts community and Home Remodeling in general. All I need is your help to tell me what you would like to see on the site or how I can make something better and easier for you to use.

Thanks for all your kind words and questions so far.

Regards,
Mike

P.S. I am still uploading the construction pictures in the Photo Gallery. It is just taking a ton of time to keyword tag them all. Over the next couple of months this will hopefully be done.

P.P.S. Please vote in our poll on the Home page. This will help steer me in the direction of which sections to update first.

I can't believe it but another magazine called asking for pictures and saying that they may want to possibly use the house in a future issue. This is quite exciting for us. I don't want to mention the name unless something is official but it is a major magazine. Keep your fingers crossed!

I want to streamline my hot water system setup to hopefully save electricity and money. Let me first explain my hot water setup.

I have a Takagi Mobius TM-1 tankless water heater that receives cold water and outputs hot water on demand. The initial problem I had with water being on demand was I would have to let the shower run for 3 minutes just to get hot water. To remedy this, I had a 10 gallon electric heater hooked up to the hot outlet of the tankless water heater to maintain a reservoir of hot water that I would recirculate through the house every 30 minutes through the use of a recirculating pump.

The problem I have with this setup is my electrical bills have been really high and I'm sure the electric heater is not helping matters so I'm trying to find ways to lower that expense. I'm not sure how much I'll save but I think it may be as high as $50 per month.

The following pictures show the tankless heater and recirculating pump right after the electric heater was removed. The plan is to bypass the electric heater and go straight from the tankless water heater to the recirculating pump.

Since the system is open, I decided to flush the tankless water heater. You are supposed to do this every year but it has been two years since I installed it and haven't done it yet. We are using two bottles of white vinegar.

A small pump is connected to the cold water line entering the tankless water heater and a return line from the hot side is fed back into the bucket.

Here you can see the whole setup in action.

I still don't have any way to get into my garage and have been wondering about a fingerprint scanner mechanism so the kids won't have to remember a code. Well, I just found one that's made by Craftsman. According to info I have read, it can store up to four unique fingerprints and takes about a minute to program it. You can read more about it here.

What I like about it is that you can program a contractor's fingerprint into it for the one or two days he needs access without giving a numeric code. When he's done working, remove the fingerprint from the system and he's locked out!

I have a problem sleeping when it's light out. Now that summer is coming the sun is rising earlier and as a result I'm waking up now at around 5:30AM. Some of you may have noticed in looking at the pictures that there are no shades, blinds, or shutters anywhere to be seen. It's not that we don't want any but we need to get a specialist in here that works with Arts & Crafts style shades and figure out how to incorporate them into the house without covering up all of the great woodwork.

In the meantime, I wanted to share with all of you that I just purchased some eyeshades which are extremely comfortable, soft, and they block out 100% of light.
Click here for more information.

Exterior

Last week the central vacuum would not turn off. It is a Modern Day Silent Master S5. I couldn't figure out what was wrong so I unplugged the unit. I called the installer, All Makes Vacuum and Sewing Machine Co., who I also purchased it from, to see what they could do. The owner, Carl Tice, came out yesterday and in two minutes he removed the vacuum and put it in his truck. He thinks something went wrong with the circuit board. Today he returned with a new circuit board already installed in the vacuum and put it up in 30 seconds. No questions asked, it works great, and I got great service!!!

The koi pond has been entered into a pond landscaping contest for the LA area during June 6th to June 8th. Due to its size, the pond was entered in the small category of under $10,000.

In preparation, Cor van Diepen of Paradise Landscaping, came over with his assistant Cesar (see April 16 blog post) for one last touch up before the judges come over this weekend. They spent time on details like making sure no rubber trim was showing and that every rock was in its place. There were a few bubbles showing at the waterfall that he called 'foam' and said we would lose some points if that was there when they came by. I'm going to see if I can find something to get rid of it tonight.

Cor thinks we have a really good shot at first place! I'll let you know next week. Maybe I'll get to stick a sign in my front yard. :)

A magazine I had emailed a few months ago just contacted me and said they would be interested in featuring the house. I'll let you know who it is when it's a done deal. Keep your fingers crossed. :)

Today I had the koi pond cleaned out. There was a bunch of muck on the rocks and it just seemed like the time since it has been 2 years since it was installed. They started draining the water before taking the fish out. Once there was only a few inches of water left, they started to catch the fish and move them to their temporary house; a large trash can. After Cesar caught all fish he could, he drained the pond completely and even sopped up the remaining water with a sponge. The troubling part to me was that 4 fish were in the rocks flopping around. I could here them but there was no way to get to them. I was told not to worry.

While Cesar scrubbed the rocks, Cor cleaned out the biotic filters. The picture below shows the lava rocks that sit in a bag at the top of the waterfall. There is bacteria living in those rocks so they get a superficial cleaning.

You are probably wondering what happened to the four fish. Well, after about 30 minutes of no water, the pond was refilled and the fish swam out of their holes. Amazing!