We moved the first three palms a few days ago. Today we moved the two largest ones, the tallest of which topped out at around 35 feet high, and the heaviest one (curiously, not the tallest one) topping out at 28,000 lbs. For this, they had to bring in a bigger crane, with an 80,000Read more about Moving the palms – moving day, part 2[…]
The crane showed up at around 6:30 this morning! All-in all it was a fascinating day of watching the tree service crew and the crane crew move three 17,000 – 20,000 lb. palm trees. Below are some nice shots. The process was to attach the crane pulling up and the backhoe pulling to the side,Read more about Moving the palms – moving day[…]
In order to dig one of the trenches around the palms, the tree company had to move some of the old building foundation out of the way. Turns out the skirt foundation wall wasn’t very impressive. That’s just three inches into the soil and absolutely no steel reinforcement in the concrete. compare that to theRead more about More history – sketchy foundation[…]
It’s been a busy day here at the project site. In preparation for the palm moving, a tree stump had to be extracted. It took a good 2-3 hours of digging with the backhoe to free that stump and it was quite a site to see it finally being moved. This is what the baseRead more about Moving the palms – prep, day 2[…]
We removed part of our house (part 1 and part 2) to make way for the new construction, leaving a large exposed wall and some chopped up roof area. Of course, we are going to live in the house still, so we needed to waterproof that section before the next rain storm. A small crewRead more about Waterproofing after demolition[…]
We have a total of 8 large Canary palm trees on our lot. We love them, but they are in pretty random locations, so we are going to move most of them into more aesthetically pleasing positions. In preparation to move them, they first tie up a bunch of the fronds to keep them outRead more about Moving the palms – prep, day 1[…]
A word about salvaging old materials for re-use. Charlie has a keen eye for what might be worthwhile to keep. Here is the pile of stuff we pulled out of the part of the house we pulled down: It’s all redwood, con-heart and some very very nice clear. Look at this piece: This is clearRead more about Re-using materials[…]
Our property came with quite a few trees that are less than desirable. Chief among them are Pittosporum. This is a very typical hedge plant, that, if you let it grow, will become a tree. The problem with them is that they are incredibly messy. It pretty much drops stuff like that year-round. Another treeRead more about Tree removal[…]
Part of what I was curious to see during the demolition is whether we could uncover any further clues as to the history of the house. What we found seems to just add more uncertainty. We believed that the part of the house being demolished was likely built in 1922 (whereas the original single-story partRead more about Clues in the demolition[…]
The crew continued on the demolition today, taking the part of the house being demolished all the way down to the foundation, which the guys doing the excavation of our basement will remove in a few weeks. Here is where we started this morning: And here it is at the end of the day: