Did I mention we are having a very large fire in the area? The Thomas Fire has been burning for more than a week now. Here is what the sky looked like a couple of days ago.
Despite the fire, and the associated bad air quality, we continue to make progress on the house, albeit at a slightly slower pace. Because many of the folks working on our house come from Ventura, where the Thomas Fire started, we’ve had some work disruptions as people have to deal with their own situations. For example, school was unexpectedly cancelled for two days last week and this entire week due to the poor air quality. I’m sure many other parents are having to get creative with child care.
Take a look at all this ash.
Painting
The painters have just about finished painting the exterior of the house.
The first floor siding was the last major element that needed painting outside. Now there is just a little bit of trim work left to do. They have now shifted to the inside and have just about completed a primer coat on all the newly plastered walls.
That’s the large rec room in our basement. Note how the plaster goes all the way nicely to the floor. After we decided to keep the concrete floor in the basement (I sure hope it cleans up nicely), we thought that leaving the baseboard off would also create more of a nice basement feel. But to do so, we had to make sure the plaster was done all the way to the floor. On the first and second floor, which will get baseboard, the bottom of the plaster is not finished, as it will be covered. Here is our guest room, and you can see a small unfinished strip at the bottom of the drywall.
Window & door casing
The carpenters have finished the second floor window and door casing and have moved to the first floor.
Once the painters do their magic, the casing will look tight and fabulous.
Tile & stone
The tile team has been working in fits and starts on the showers and tub, due to the aforementioned fire issues. They’ve put up the metal lath on most of the showers and the tub and have put in teh scratch coat of float on a couple of them.
Cabinets
We are a week and a half into our cabinet install. They’ve installed perhaps 25% of them so far.
Building permits
Lastly, but certainly not least, we finally received our revised building permit for our landscape, and some house, changes. It only took 4 submissions and about 6 months. I’m not sure why it needs to be this difficult to obtain a permit, especially when we have a housing crisis in California, and especially in Santa Barbara. One of the particularly frustrating aspects of this process was the building departments tendency to add new corrections to each additional set of responses. Had we had all corrections up front, we might have done this in 2 or 3 submissions.
We also received our first correction set on our accessory dwelling unit permit application, and it is a doozy, more than 5 pages of issues. Unfortunately, it seems that our city has chosen a position of maximum opposition against allowing these very efficient solutions to increasing the housing supply. I consider it my civic duty to push through the challenges and make it to the other side of this. Given that we don’t initially (or perhaps never) intend to actually rent out the unit for which we are getting a permit, this is more about preserving our right to have such a unit and setting a good example for others that want to do the same. Plus, I’m learning a lot through this process.
Landscape walls
We finally have our bids in for the landscape walls and an agreement on the work with our neighbor. Work should start next week. Here are our story poles along the line of the wall.
