House Stuff

[cjsmith]

I haven't mentioned the current round of house improvement stuff much. Rob's doing most of the coordinating and I'm all busy with other schtuff. (Quote of the week: you know you're busy when you just plain don't have the time to have someone else paint your house.)

ROOF fragment was fixed a week or two ago (when the roof was replaced they missed a piece! Weeds were growing on the old shake)
ROOF VENTS went in last week-ish
GUTTERS are removed and will not be replaced until after PAINTING
SIDING is repaired (we left PAINTING almost too long; there was damage to the siding but not to the framing)
PAINTING prep is done, colors have finally been chosen and paint will go on soon
PLUMBING begins today - no water and no gas all day today & all day tomorrow
WINDOWS also go in today - cats are confined

Did I miss anything, Rob? :-)

This is going to be WAY cool when we're done. It's going to be even better when the inside is fixed up as well, but we wisely decided to do the outside now while the weather's good and the inside later on while it's raining. I'm not sure when the landscaping will get done; that costs real money, so it may have to wait. But soon this place will look like a house somebody cares about. Woohoo!

Comments

[ambar.livejournal.com]

It actually took five weeks, but was done by two teams. The first was Julio Lucero, who did the fences, all the demolition (bricks and walkways and decks and the patio) and the back-yard cleanout. It took him three weeks, but he's a small operator and wasn't working on our job full-time.

Alrie Middlebrook's crew took two weeks, although one of those overlapped Labor Day so it wasn't actually 10 working days. They are at http://www.middlebrook-gardens.com. They put in the patio, repaired and stained the arbor, removed unwanted shrubs from the front yard, and installed the raised beds, berms, drip watering system, planted, mulched, etc. They would have done the work done by Julio, but he was considerably cheaper and it's not their specialty.

Alrie designs in California natives, and she has a specialist knowledge of edible natives (many of the natives in the design, like the prickly pear, are edible). The non-native edibles are there because we wanted them. Overall we are really delighted with the results and the whole experience, and I would happily recommend them to anyone.

Come down and visit in the daylight sometime?