Life At Villa Boswell

Stucco work begins toward the end of March, not with actual stucco but with black stucco paper placed over every exterior surface. Then, it’s all covered with chicken wire.

By the beginning April, the stucco is applied, by hand, plastering each surface.

A good bit of layer one is complete on the front. There are two base layers of stucco, with drying time in between each layer. The color doesn’t get applied until the third and final layer. Notice here that the fascia boards beneath the roof tiles are white. That will change too.

I think this photo shows a good sense of how involved the stucco application was. To the right is the one part of the scaffold that we made ourselves with left-over lumber from the concrete forms.

Layer one complete, with our main stucco guy, Denilson Reis, in the foreground. He’s from Brazil.

Layer 2 is now complete. The fascia boards are all painted. All that’s left is the color coat.

Do you know that joke about the guy’s mom who gets up on the roof? Lora got pretty comfortable with being on the scaffold and the roof. Here she is, 75 years old and climbing around. I want to grow up to be just like her.

Another view of the completed stucco job in the very pretty April sunshine on the coast.

Now the color coat begins. We spent a LOT of time going over getting just the right color. We used Stucco Supply Co in San Jose and initially we asked them if they could do the same color coat as the Hotel Los Gatos. The guy there said, "Sure, I do that color all the time." So, initially we got a couple of different stucco samples that we could apply to boards and test against our tile. I quickly realized that the color for the Hotel Los Gatos had far too much yellow in it, and that we needed something with a lot more red. We ended up trying 3 other samples, each time increasing the amount of red and black in the mix, until there was about 50% more red than in the original blend and 50% more black. The result is below, and you can see how it works much better with our tile.

Here’s a photo of the Hotel Los Gatos that we took some time back, for comparison. You can see to the left that the roof tile for the hotel was much more brown in color than our tile.

Stucco is almost complete here. The stucco work a little over one month to complete, and that does not include all the trim and clean up work, so stay tuned for that.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 8:47 am and is filed under El Granada, Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.