Sprinklers and Other Rough Plumbing in the Casita

Adrian the plumber has been hard at work in the casita putting in the sprinklers and the gas lines. The Menlo Park fire department is making us put sprinklers in the casita because of the front room, thus adding several thousand dollars to the cost of the building. In these pictures you can see the separate water line for the sprinklers and the orange pipe in the ceilings leading to the sprinkler heads. Adrian also put in the gas line for the wall heater in the front room and for the water heater.




They have also installed the outside doors -- I think that the windows in the doors both add a lot of light to the spaces and look great. The stucco guys have gotten started as well. They have wrapped about half the building in paper and chicken wire. Jake wants to put some decorative tiles on either side of the sliding glass door and the windows on the other side, so we need to get them soon before the stucco guys get started with the actual stucco.

Wide Open Spaces

The complete removal of the garage makes a huge difference in the backyard. As you can see, it really opens the space up. Now, when you stand on the sidewalk you can see the casita all the way at the back of the lot -- as long as you look to the side of the dumpster. You can see from the picture below that the view into the backyard is going to be great from the family room. The Japanese Maple is beautiful, and now it isn't hidden behind the terrible garage. Of course, we still have some stuff to get rid of back there!

Garage or Kindling -- You be the judge!

Matt and Todd knocked down the garage today. Yes, that big pile of wood in the above picture is in fact the garage. Todd told me that after removing a few of the supports the whole garage just fell over. The big posts on either side of the garage came out pretty easily as well. In fact, the only part of the garage that didn't fall right apart was the roof that we rebuilt. You can see below that the girls tested it for structural stability by climbing on it.



You can see how rotten all the wood was in the picture below. It is going to be quite a mess to clean up.

Demo Continues

Jim and Matt worked hard this week deconstructing the back of the house. It was hard, messy work, but by the end of the week they had filled two dumpsters and gotten the whole back of the house ready for the foundation crew to come in next week. They even had time to start deconstructing the garage. They don't want to come in with a big machine to crunch the garage because it is so close to the fence that they can't predict what will happen and they don't want it wreck the fence.



We also hired a couple of guys to pull out the bricks in the patio and stack them in a big pile. In five hours, these guys stacked up all the bricks in the patio and started down the path. They were really fast and worked really hard. In the photo below, you can see the sand that was underneath the patio and hiding behind the cage you can see the huge pile of bricks that they gathered for us. We donated the bricks to Whole House Salvage and they sold them already, so all we need to do is get a situation where it is possible for a truck to get to the backyard and get the bricks. It's a great deal for us -- we don't need to pay to recycle the bricks, we get a tax deduction for the value of the bricks and we get a receipt to show the city that we recycled them so that we can get our "recycling deposit" back.

The Box is Down!!!!

Break out the champagne -- I'm sure all our neighbors are doing so. We officially have a one story house now. After carefully removing all the roof tiles to save for later, the contractor started taking down the box. Here is the series of pictures to show how it progressed over just 3 days:

Friday (if you look closely you can see the roof tiles piled on the roof of the back bedroom):


Monday:


Tuesday:


Of course, we got the roof off just in time for the next round of rain, but it is a real relief to have that gone. The house looks really nice from the front, now, without that ugly box on it (as long as you ignore the dumpster).

Demo Has Started!

While we were gone on Friday, the contractors started demo of the main house. In a day they demolished the kitchen and the back room and started on the box. They took all the tiles off the roof to save them for one of the porch roofs (either on the casita or on the back of the house.) A picture is worth 1,000 words, so here are a couple of them to show the devastation.





Our contractor sure doesn't believe in nepotism -- he's got his son working for him, but Matt doesn't get the easy jobs. When they started demo, there was no dumpster on site, so for the past two days Matt has been loading the dumpster with all the stuff in the picture below as well as all the stuff that accumulated over the past few days.



Also, I have been worried about the condition of the walls in the back bedroom. I was mostly worried about termites, but it seems instead that I should have been worried about water damage. The exterior wall by the patio is completely rotten. If you scrape it with your finger, the plywood just crumbles, as you can see in the picture below. The black stuff is the back of the felt paper under the stucco -- the sheathing has completely disintegrated. The good news is that the exterior wall closest to the property line, which we can't rebuild, is in good shape. It has redwood siding on it instead of plywood. We might have some termites up in the box, but if we take it off and there aren't any in the wood below, we might be able to avoid tenting the house.

Windows and Rough Plumbing in the Casita

Our plumber Adrian of Panther Plumbing worked hard during the rain to put in the rough plumbing for the casita. We spent a few minutes following all the pipes and it looks good. The plumbing is up in the ceiling, so since it will be all covered with expanding foam we will have to take good measurements and pictures so that we can find it again if we need to!




The framers put in the windows and the sliding door -- the doors to the garage and the front room are on order. The windows are simple vinyl windows, but they move nicely and look okay. The girls had fun peeking through them!