You might have heard about the fire we had this month, the Thomas Fire, now the largest fire in California history. Here is a great shot I took from my car on December 16th, the day we had the major wind driven flare-up in the fire.  The plume of smoke is about 10 miles away from the camera.

While the fire did have some negative effects on our progress, it helped us in an unexpected way.  For about 10 days, the area to the east of us, Montecito, was threatened by the fire, and was under mandatory evacuation.  As fate would have it, the company doing our carpentry work had all their other jobs suspended because of these evacuations, so the entire crew came to our house and worked, and got a lot done.  They’ve done the door and window casing for the entire first floor now, and have started on the basement.

Here is our kitchen bay window, which turned out quite nice.

One particular pair of doors gave us some more of that funky craftsman style.

They’ve got a substantial part of the basement done now too.  Here are the rec room light well windows.

And finally, the living room box beams.

They’ve started the dining room box beams as well.

Now that the fire is well contained in our area, and the evacuation orders have been lifted, I’m sure it is back to normal for the carpenters, so we will again move forward with a smaller team.