Mike and Jeff's New House

Over the past 3 weekends Jeff has been busy with the garden shed....He has installed the treated 2x12's that will be the base for the walls, he notched the top of the 4x6's, he has crafted the headers that tie the system together and he has started to attach the top pieces that will serve as the point of attachment for the roof...one weekend at a time, we're getting there.

Tree Care Incorporated delivered 5 yards of their nicely ground wood chips a couple of weeks ago. Mike spent a Saturday morning making the front of the yard look a little more cohesive.....It has dramatically cut down on the amount of watering that has been required.

This is the `before' look......The chain link fence separates us from our neighbors....We are replacing that fence with a wooden fence that will do double duty as a fence/garden shed. Here is the `After' look.....It was a nice view into our old garden next door.... And this is what it looked like at the end of the weekend....We put in the 6 posts that will be the support posts for our new garden shed. It will have two sets of double doors that open to the driveway.....

The final drawer pulls (16 of them) were installed by Jeff this past weekend......The Laundry area finally looks `done'.

One does not want to rush into some things, that's why it took us almost two years to locate and install the perfect house numbers....but this past weekend they were installed and they look great.... Here is the finished product.... Here is the mock-up just prior to installation and down on the ground is the house sign that has been there ever since construction.....

We were going to rent a laser level but discovered that Home Depot sold one that cost less than the one-day rental.... This thing is very helpful in making sure that the posts are all set at the same depth.... This weekend is Jeff's birthday, our friend Mike Fuhr came up from Irvine to help us celebrate and to get a lesson in the careful art of precision post hole installation......We had a lot of fun and are VERY grateful for Mike's help.... Here Mike and Jeff are using the laser level to check the depth of one of the holes before we placed the post... Here is the laser and the tripod that it sits on.... Once the hole was about an inch deeper than the target depth, we put gravel into the bottom of the hole.... After the gravel is poured in, we put the post in the hole and then re-checked the depth with the laser level and then used a level to make sure it was going in vertically (on both sides). We put in the two end poles first (and used a little geometry to figure out the e...

On Sunday we put our first posts into the ground. These 4 will be the frame for a screen between our house and the neighbors. The `filler' will be made of Lexan, the double-walled rigid plastic panels used in commercial greenhouses. Privacy and good light at the same time. Direct View Jeff cut the tops of the posts to mimic the roofline of our house. On Sunday we put our first posts into the ground....

On Saturday we rented a two-man auger with a 10 inch bit and used it to dig 21 holes...It took lot less time than it would have taken to do it by hand.....It looked like this, except without the hard hats.... Here is where our utility storage area will be...... This is the other end of the patio area....It's sort of a mindfield out there...

After talking with a friend who is an arborist, we decided to take out the redwood that was damaged in the January storm. As long as we were doing that, we decided to have two other redwoods removed so that we would have more room for a patio and a hot tub. Here's our tree guy taking out the tree just outside our kitchen window. Don't do this at home....

Good soil is comprised of three primary building blocks: Sand, silt, and clay. One of the challenges of post-construction soil building is getting rid of the rock and concrete chunks that inevitably end up scattered around the site. Here is what the `soil' looks like in our front courtyard. This area was the primary site for stucco mixing and a large load of gravel was dumped here when they installed the foundation. In addition to that, the area had a LOT of compaction. What to do? I knew that in order to get anything other than weeds to grow here, I was going to have to get some of the gravel and concrete and stucco layers out of the soil. One shovel at a time, I screened the soil in the planting bed on the freeway side of the sidewalk. I'm not sure what this steel grate was originally used for, but today it was a gravel screen. After removing five 5-gallon buckets of gravel from the right side of the sidewalk, I added some compost and it is starting to look like garde...

Spring Fever hit hard this week in Sacramento...It was 70+ degrees all weekend and it was a zoo over at Green Acres Nursery on Saturday. We picked up this Magnolia stellata for our front courtyard...

The Steam generator has been installed for over a year but was not hooked up, we finally finished some connections and it is up and running..... It works great.... The steam emitter has a depression on the top for oils like Eucalyptus or Lavender...

One of the challenges that we had when we first installed our audio system was that we couldn't afford the fancy Russound media server that goes with our Russound amplifier. A solution that we could afford was to install a mac mini from Apple Computer and hook it to our amplifier via the Russound iBridge Bay kit. It allows us to wirelessly access the system and change the music from anywhere in the house via laptop. Our friends Mike and Jeff came from Chicago this past weekend and hooked it all up, they also programmed an RTI universal remote control for our TV room so that we could get rid of the 5 remote controls that we had been fighting with and use only one. It's an amazingly elegant solution and we are very grateful for their help with this project. Here it is: http://www.rticorp.com/products/T2plus.html

Guest Bathroom 3rd Floor Bathroom We liked the wall-to-wall mirror in the master bathroom so much that we had the mirror people come back and install mirrors over the sinks in the guest bathroom and in the 3rd floor bathroom. If you live in the Sacramento area and need custom glass or mirrors installed, we HIGHLY recommend `Accent Shower Door', they do great work.

Low Voltage wiring, hooked to light switch. The finished product The heating mat duct-taped to the mirror just before installation. The shower now sports a shaving mirror with a low voltage heating pad mounted to the back, it's supposed to keep it from fogging up, we'll see... UPDATE: The heating mat works OK if one turns it on just before going into the shower, but it works great if one turns it on 5 minutes before taking a shower and it warms up a bit.

Our master bath is just about done....The glass shelves, main mirror and shower mirror were all installed this week.... We like it.......

One of the last things we did before putting on sheet rock was to pull speaker cable from where our TV was planned to be over to two location flanking the back of the sofa. This year Santa Claus brought a set of surround sound speakers from Aperion Audio. They sound great and we've been watching LOTS of movies. The installation looks very clean thanks to the already installed cables. Are you remodeling? Don't forget to pull some wires if you even THINK you might buy surround sound speakers one day. Mounting the TV onto the wall also helped to make it seem more like a movie house experience.....

Our next step in the master bathroom is to take off the round mirrors above each sink and replace it with a complete wall of mirror. Hopefully it will be installed within the next week or so. The same glass company is cutting glass shelves for the upper portion of the shelf `box' on both sides of the sinks.... And finally, we are installing the anti-fogging electric mat behind an 18x30 shaving mirror in the shower....

We had one HECK of a storm hit northern California in early January. Over 200,000 people were without power for up to a week...This pic shows the view of our redwoods from the third story windows as the wind was whipping them around....The wind gusts were measured at 70 miles per hour....It was kind of scary, we lost lots of trees and large branches in the neighborhood..

The answer to the question: `Are Redwood Trees brittle? is a resounding YES. The top 15-18 feet of one of our redwoods snapped off in the storm. Mike planted these trees 15 years ago and they were in one gallon pots....