Life At Villa Boswell

Once the stucco was finished, there was all the trim work to be done.  We hired Jesus Garcia Painting to do some of the painting, especially the fascia boards beneath the gutters.  It was nice to see the color all match.  Then, after a lot of debate, I decided that the windows, from Marvin Integrity, be painted as well to match the trim, rather than be left white.  The windows are made of fiberglass, so they are designed to be painted.  I felt it was in keeping with the general trim and design of the house that the windows be painted bronze.  Guess who did this all? Lora and Chris’ son, Brian.  This first photo shows what the windows looked like after the stucco was all finished, where the masking was still partially remaining and the stucco was slopped all over the place.  There was a lot of manual cleanup done by Brian just to make it possible to put on the window trim and to paint the windows.

Here you can see some of the window frames painted bronze while Lora finishes painting all the molding trim that Chris mitred and cut to place around the house. With the exception of the really high places out of easy reach of a scaffold, Lora painted every window, filled the joints in the molding with bondo, painted all the trim with base coat and then with the finish color for the trim that you see here.

Chris on the backside of the house, the steep part, putting on more trim around the windows and putting up the "belly" band.

Here’s a shot of one of the windows after the stucco, still with sheeting to protect the glass and lots of tape which had to be scraped off and smoothed by scraping and scraping and scraping.

And here it is, all finished after Lora painted the trim and the windows.  Lovely, huh? Marvin is the #1 rated window manufacturer, and these windows are the Integrity Ultrex and Ultrex wood series.  The link takes you to the website if you’re curious about the windows.

Bucky comes to visit Grandma.  Bucky is Lora’s "grand dog" and had no end to enjoying hugs from her.

Another view of the back side of the house; it’s so steep!  The porthole opening in the back is a venting for the turret attic space.  Later, Chris would create from scratch a really cool vent that Lora would paint to fit in with the overall scheme.

Here’s the turret, scaffolding gone and looking lovely with the porthole vent and back railing. Rather than spend literally many thousands of dollars on custom wrought iron, we found some iron railing sections from Home Depot that were flat.  This piece that you see here was made by Chris cutting out between each vertical and bending each section slightly to get the specific radius needed.  Then, I went in with the TIG welder and welded up the joints.  Of course, my welding is not professional, so some grinding and bondo and painting followed, and voila! Curved railing.

A close-up of the back balcony and railing.  This view will look over the garden and my little pond/waterfall.

A shot of the beautiful trim work that Lora and Chris did, with the faux railings modified by Chris.

This is the 3-part window looking out from the parlor.  This was created by ordering special trim and cutting and mitring each piece just so, with Lora carefully filling in the voids and sanding it all smooth, followed by 2 coats of paint.  Just lovely.  The deck is made out of a product called Luxrae Elite that uses rice hulls rather than sawdust or wood fiber and is not supposed to suffer from the same breakdown as other composite decking.  The color and grain is designed to look like tropical wood.  The "forepeak" of the deck is pretty spacious, enough for a table for 4, but right now a bit scary without the railing around it.

Our house in June, scaffolding gone, finally.  The wacky looking tubes all askew mark the places where vertical tubing will be placed to hold the railing that will be placed along the boundary of the property, to fit in with the railing on the house and deck for a really classy finish.  It’ll also diminish the "fear effect" of the drop off to the garden.

The garage door assembled and in place, and you can also see the rough electrical outlights for lights.  The garage door will likely be painted bronze to match the windows.  Chris is considering painting it a mahogany color to match the door, but I don’t think that’s necessary.

But the door sure is pretty, isn’t it?  Chris and Lora just hung this themselves–just the two of them!  They did it last week, carefully deconstructing the crate that held the very heavy door, taking each door off its hinges and first putting the frame in place, and subsequently each door was put back on its hinge.  This marked the milestone of having a completely lockable house.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 9:28 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.