Upstairs / Downstairs

 Now that the metal decking is all up, the spaces are taking shape inside the house. It is great to see how the verticality is playing out, too. Upstairs feels like a treehouse....

tranquility

This is the street that our project is on. This spring weather is really amazing and the wind blowing through all these chinese elms sounds like water....it is totally restful.

Stairway to...

This past weekend, we got the stairs up. We are still getting the rest of the roof deck on, but you can see a bit of it in the photo below....

Looks like a house now

We have the walls all up, as you can see in some of the photos, and we erected all the structural steel and got the metal roof deck up, too. (will post photos of that soon!).... This process has gone so fast and relatively smoothly considering so much of these construction techniques are new to us.

(this was the last prefabbed wall being craned into place)

moving fast now

Things are really picking up on site now. Our move to prefab the panels has really panned out as we are putting the house together....This was the site on Saturday:

                             

and we took these pictures today:

We are on track to finish all the framing and have the roof decking up on Friday....awesome.

7 Reasons to Love LA series

We just found this great series on LAist featuring 7 snapshots from their Flickr pool that give you more (visual) reasons to love LA. It is easy to forget the variety and crazy cross-sections of life and culture in this city....take a look for yourself.
(view from Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook)

More work on slab!

We are moving ahead on site. Slab is poured and we cut control joints...walls going up soon. Had a little help from the smallest concrete sweeper around.

Fields of (liquid) gold

If you have lived in Los Angeles for any length of time and perhaps noticed the oil derrick on the Beverly Hills High campus, or seen the oil fields flanking La Cienega as you drive to LAX, then this story (via CurbedLA) should be an interesting bit of knowledge for you. We were interested to learn more about them and their history in Los Angeles....Check out the full story on it here.
(image of the Baldwin Hills oil fields from The City Project's flickr photo stream)

Colored Concrete or Epoxy Coat?

We are at a point where we are choosing whether we should use concrete with integral color or if we should wait and epoxy coat the floor. Both have pros and cons, but in the end it will be an aesthetic choice....
(images from here and here).

Freeway Flowers

One of the great benefits from all this rain, aside from the obvious bit of drought relief, are bunches of beautiful wildflowers popping up everywhere in LA....including on the sides of the freeways.
These were snapped as I exited the 10 at Arlington....

site happenings

it always seems to take so long to get a project out of the ground....well, I guess it is almost officially spring, right? things are finally popping up on site for us....

rainy day fix

if you are looking for a little pottery love, do not miss the Bauer Pottery studio sale going on this weekend. We hit it up in December and it was really great- so much to carry, so little manual dexterity...and with a four year old in tow (but that's another story). The deals are good relative to their everyday prices, they have a fairly wide selection if you go on the first day, at least. Last time they had some great little custom succulent arrangements- not sure if that is happening again, but if so they would make great gifts.
Okay, that's it. Oh, and it looks like there will be a food truck (Grilled Cheese Truck)....so, yum... enjoy your rainy day!
(image from Sunset Magazine, via the Bauer Pottery website).