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Original House

Our Home

Our original house. (After many years of "improvement" It's Memorial Day today. This could have been taken later, on another Memorial Day. Note the little Norwegian flag.

      The pine tree, a Monterey Pine, remained for awhile longer.
      It was a large and majestic tree but developed the dreaded and lethal beetle damage.
      It began to lose needles and look sick and when Dr. Charles Baker, an entomologist friend of ours, visited he told us it was doomed. We removed it to help protect the other Monterey Pines in the area. We hired the removal and they ground the stump. We kept several five or so inch slices of the trunk as a memory.

      We needed financing of course. The GI Bill gave us a 100% loan at just over 5% interest. One three bedroom home had been completed. It faced almost north and was on a triangular lot that gave a large sunny backyard. They would not let us buy the four bedroom house next door with an even bigger backyard because I did not make enough money! Anyway it wasn't finished, so we accepted our three bedroom home gladly!

      There was no street lighting and the road was still gravel. And there was no driveway yet!!. We had no mail service for four months! We essentially moved in as the carpenters moved out. They had to come back and reset the master bedroom window when the sliding panel fell out on the floor.

      I don't even remember our early furniture but was probably what might be called early primitive.

      I'm writing this on 1 July 2007, 43 years later. We are still here and have made many changes in the house. It started with a skylight in the living room. I built the skylight myself, about six feet long and sixteen inches wide using glass with wire in it to prevent danger should it become broken. I made metal flashing (I had them bent on a brake at a local plumbing shop) and thought I would try to get it under the existing rock and tar roof. Bad Mistake! I wound up cracking the existing tar paper underneath, which had become quite brittle. This compromised the roof quite seriously. As they say education is not free. I called a roofer and he fixed the damage and explained what I should have done! I have since installed three other skylights in our house and one each in two neighbor's houses. No leaks that I know of!

      To encapsulate the procedure, get in the attic and measure the distance between the rafters so you know what skylight to buy. Cut the hole to fit a commercial skylight, often 22" x 22". Pre-drill the flashing on the skylight. Slather a half gallon of Henry's Asphalt around the hole to cover the area of the flashing. Leave no channels for water to get in. Place the skylight and press it down till you have a good seal all around. Nail the skylight down through the pre-drilled holes being careful not to get too enthusiastic and bend the flashing. Put some Henry's all around. Then place a 6" band of fiberglass cloth across the bottom seam, then one up each side and the fourth one across the top. You do them in this order for the "shingle effect". Lastly, slather the rest of the gallon over the top of the fiber glass being sure it is worked in thoroughly.

      There will be some drywall work. I strongly recommend hiring a professional to finish it off. Drywall is not a skill, it is an art! For this first skylight I had stripped a 4 x 8 foot piece of ceiling drywall off, leaving the rafters and the bottom of the roof in view. Also the eight foot wall now had to go to the roof! I have been incredibly fortunate using the "Services Offered" section of the local newspaper. I'm sure there are some bad workers offering their questionable efforts but I have never had a bad one. This time I got a wonderful old retired drywall man that only did occasional jobs if they interested him. He was a wonder to behold. He measured the size he needed, went out to his pickup and with a box knife scored the sheet. He then grabbed it on the end, give it a kind of snap and it broke off cleanly and perfectly. To him it was usual and pedestrian. To me it was a wonder!

      When I took the 4 x 8 sheet down I ripped into the neighboring sheet just a little, probably about the size of three handprints. And the ceiling was textured. This didn't faze him. He started puttering around with drywall patch and and then called to Sauny saying, "Have you got a little instant coffee?" Sauny said, "Yes, Do you want me to make you a cup?" And he said, "No, I just need some to adjust the color to match the rest of the ceiling!" You don't get that kind of education out of books!

      I left the rafters exposed and we just painted them white!

      The bathroom had no windows. It was the "Black Hole of Calcutta" even with the lights on. So that was next! I did this one right! I then built a frame with 2 x 4's for the drywall. I tapered it as much as the ceiling structure would allow to get the maximum reflected light into the room. Again I hired a drywall artist to finish it off. The room is painted bright yellow. The overall effect was startling. The yellow color made the reflected light look like sunlight! For years afterward, when I passed the door, I would reach in to turn off the light I thought was on!

      I then put one in the master bedroom and another in the third bedroom that had poor lighting. I lined these last two with vertical shiplap boards. Again we painted the rafters and left them exposed.

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      We had eight inches of water in our house in January 1973. In addition to a great deal of rain, we had clogged and inadequate lake drainage under Madonna Road so the water had nowhere else to go. The City should have known better as a slightly smaller flood had occurred about four years earlier, but the City did nothing to prevent a recurrence.

      I will tell the flood story elsewhere on the page.

      We decided that we had two options, move to high ground or put a two story addition on the house. We looked around to see if there was anything else that would suit our purpose. We made a bid on one place out on O'Connor Way that had about 7 acres but the owner changed his mind and took it off the market.

      So we decided the addition route would be better. We had a discussion with another couple. Al and AliceCooper. He was a Professor of Biology at Cal Poly. He and Alice had grown up in east Los Angeles, a rather rough area. Instead of taking the easy and possibly jail route in life, he went to the University of California at Riverside and got a Ph. D. in Biological Science, an admirable accomplishment. We also talked with a another friend of ours, Mr. Don Grant who is a fifth year architecture instructor at Cal Poly. We discussed our desires to build it ourselves and he designed an addition that gave us a 16 x 24 ground floor and a 20 x 24 second floor. The two rooms were open and had no internal walls.

      As summer came, the Coopers offered to help us build it. They were extremely capable with a great deal of experience in this kind of thing. Sauny and I had no experience at all but a lot of bravado. It was the Cooper's obvious confidence that allowed us to decide to do it!

      The first thing I did was buy about $1500 worth of tools, including a radial arm saw. The next thing was the digging of the footings for the 16 x 24 concrete slab for a two story building and the five concrete blocks that would support the five vertical 6 x 12's that would support the overhang of the second floor. They had to be about eight inches wide and around 30 inches deep! There were some "internal" supports as well so there was a lot of digging. We decided to do it ourselves. I do not recommend this. Hire this. It is a lot of work. A lot of dirt to get rid of and not esay to keep to just the volumes you want removed. There were little collapses here which ordinariiy might require some forms. I rented a Ditch Witch hoping it would make short work of the job. It almost made short work of us!. Shoulders, arms etc, UGH! The ground was adobe and resembled a somewhat rotten brick!

      We had to get rid of a huge amount of dirt somewhere. I had bought a 1956 Chevy, long bed pickup the fall before and had been workng on it for a number of monthe to make it safe to drive. When I bought it, nothing worked. I hope to write a story about it elsewhere on the page. My memory says that I took 17 loads of dirt to a place that needed it out by the airport. It was so heavily loaded that the tailgate almost touched the ground and it tended to sway gently when I drove. I don't remember too much help unloading the truck when I got there but I must have had some.

      We finished digging about the time Helen and Rollie arrived for the 4th of July visit. The footings looked like they had been dug by thoroughky pooped amateurs, which we were. Some of the walls had collapsed somewhat. I just could not see straightening them up with forms. We were too tired. So we took the collapsed dirt out and left the extra volume. It would take extra concrete but who cares! We put the rebar in, using twice as much as was required. Why not, it's cheap! We took a day or two off, then called for the concrete truck and the pumper. There was no way the truck could get into the backyard so it dumped its load slowly into a hopper of a pump and a large tube (6-8" ?) carried the concrete to the back yard, probably 80 to 100 feet from the street. The man operating the hose in the backyard, stood on the iron and swished the hose back and forth spewing the concrete where it needed to be. It took three trucks to deliver the 19 yards of concrete we wventually needed. When he was partly done he turned to us and said, "What are you building here, a rocket pad?" Both Al and I appreciated that remark. We tended to overbuild.

      I had another friend that worked in the stockroom in the chemistry department. He used to make his living as a concrete finisher. So he did the swirling and smoothing and edging that needed to be done. I was sitting inside and resting after the pour when all of a sudden I jumped up and said that we had not put in the foundation bolts! So we rushed out there and fortunately the concrete was still soft enough to allow us to place them. It took several hours to get the concrete to the point where we could leave it to start curing.

      Several days later, after Helen and Rollie went to DIsneyland, we started the fun part, framing. I really enjoy the framing part of building because so much happens so quickly. This is when you see the shape of the final project take shape. When the framing is done, then comes the long finishing part which seems to go on forever and nothing great seems to take place!

      The first floor ceiling was at eight feet in the plan but had 6 x 12 Douglas Fir beams. The architect, Don Grant, was very short and was not bothered by the bottom of the beams being at seven feet. It made me uncomfortable though so I changed it to eight and a half feet making the bottom of the beams at seven and a half feet. I should have made it nine feet! We had sixteen foot 6 x 12's every four feet so I changed the stud distances with that in mind. Instead of every sixteen inches, we put two studs under the beam and the third stud halfway to the next beam. One needs to average one every sixteen inches.

      We have a road called "Tank Farm Road". In the twenties Union Oil Co. had 10 acre concrete dishes to store oil before it was loaded on ships at Avila Beach. They were just off the end of the runway at the airport. The story says that a small plane from the airport failed on takeoff and landed in one of them! They were required to put some kind of cover. on them. So they placed vertical 8 x 8's in concentric circles. Then they put 6 x 12's and 8 x 12's in circles on top of them with steel pins at the end that went into the top of the 8 x 8's. Then they put 1 x 10's across the circles and covered the whole thing with asphalt roofing paper.

      Much later, probably in the sixties, they were abandoned. A man bought the wood and setup a system to recover the wood for sale. Yes, we bought a lot of it. We bought seven 16 foot 6 x 12's for the first floor ceiling and five twenty foot 8 x 12's for the the second floor. We also bought a twentythree foot 8 x 12 to go over the outside door to the patio. It even has one of the holes for the steel pin used to anchor it to the top of one of the 8 x 8's. We bought several more for various uses, supports for the overhang, the two sides of of the stairway and other uses.

      We changed the plan a little. The patio door wall was supposed to come over and join the house. But Sauny said why don't we push it out and make an alcove. That sounded great, so we did!

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      We needed a stairway to the second floor. We were just a tad cramped for space so I designed one that went up to a landing, the top of the furnace cabinet, one step short of the second floor, then turned right for one step.

      I wanted the non-wall side of the stairs to not block the view of the TV room when one came in the front door. So how was I going to support that side of the stairs. My neighbor, Varney Jerome, was a welder. He made me a stairstep with 1/4 x 2 " steel. It went level nine inches, then 8 inches up, then nine inches level, etc. Each of the level pieces had two half inch holes. I mounted a piece of commercial shelving support along the top. Then I cut pieces of half inch rebar and threaded both ends. Hopefully, these photos will clarify this.

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the Stairway	Stair Sketch	Stair Detail	the Rods

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the Upper Steel Plate	the step insertion	the upper rod support	the landing at the top of the stairs

      I did all the electrical inside. But we needed a new breaker panel because the old one was now inside the house and the breaker panel must be outside. So I looked in the "Services Offered" again found a great old, very experienced electrician named Tom Christmas. He was a major electrical contractor in his earlier career and had even wired airports. So a small job with 110V was a piece of cake. A little job he could enjoy in his retirement. He set a new box, brought power in  hrough the service point and increased the amperage of the box. He re-connected the circuits in the original box which is now simply a transfer box. He also set up a 220V outlet in the garage for power equipment.

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the East wall. Plate	The Stained Glass at the landing at the head of the stairs.

      I hate using extension cords so I setup a outlet so Ipt