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.

Continue reading Exterior Trim

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.

Continue reading Stucco

In March of 2007, Oscar from ODR Roofing in San Jose started the roof tile work.  Here, the tiles are stacked in preparation for laying them out, and ridge blocking is put in place in order to hold the ridge tiles.

Continue reading Roofing

Once the majority of the framing was complete, Chris and crew were able to start the exterior sheathing, beginning with the roof over the great room and kitchen.  The kitchen roof is actually what is called a "roof deck" in that part of the roof over that area also serves as the deck off the master bedroom.

Continue reading Closing up the Exterior

The final floor–the floor that will pretty much be the "master suite"–begins to be built. But first, one more shot of the ThermaSteel Panels.  They arrived unassembled (naturally) and marked with the figures that you see here.  The figures corresponded to the detailed drawings that Chris worked on along with the ThermaSteel engineers.  This shot shows the view of one of the bedroom window openings, and illustrates how vertically adjoining panels are connected with wide metal binding brackets screwed in place.  The header for each window frame is pre-fabricated into the the construction of the panel and tied into vertical steel studs that go straight up to the top of the upper panel, where the steel top beam completes the frame for both compression and shear strength integrity.

Continue reading Master Floor