ROCK ON!!!

A 5.4 earthquake hit near LA
yesterday and it rocked and rolled us here in San diego for 20-30 seconds.
Doesn't seem long, but trust me when you are thinking to yourself; is this going to stop, keep going, get worse, what should I do next? It seems longer. It definately put a jolt in my pacemaker for a good 20 minutes. It is very unsettling to fill the earth under you roll back and forth.

The map on the right shows all the earthquakes in CA and Nevada over the last week. (477 total). Which is pretty normal. You can pull up this map any week of the year and it looks like this always.

The big blue one at the bottom is the one that hit yesterday. I believe there were 70 aftershocks and they say another one could hit today.

Slowly but Surely it comes together

Here is another during picture. The office/garage is painted and the desk is going in. We need to complete installing the desk, trim the windows and baseboard, hang pictures, hook up the scanner, printer, fax, and hang the fan. (I think I need Jen to help with the fan). You can't quite see it but to the right is shelving we installed to hold all the tools; which we will cover up with a curtain to hide it all.


We painted the ceiling the same color as the back wall. Scary. I am so used to always painting the ceiling white. Very hard to get the whole room in the picture but this is the better half of it.

I will take a final once all the trimwork is done. That will probably be next weekend. Still too much to do tomorrow. I shouldn't work on Sundays, but we gotta get it done so Matt can start to focus on building the biz.

Well I must agree with Jen that this is painting purgatory. This is the garage after the priming process.. I am certain that those who are sent to the depths of purgatory will be made to texture, prime, tape and paint walls for eternity. How I hate the painting process. I will admit though, that the garage looks a heck of a lot bigger.. but man is it bright. Next step.... Painting!!! UGH!!!
DOES THE FUN NEVER STOP?!?!?!?!?!?!

Our Latest Project-The Garage/Home Office

When we added on to the house, we knew that since the garage would lead directly to the pond/deck area we wanted to turn it into a family room. So when the city came out to sign the final permit, we told them that the delivery of the garage door had been delayed and we would install it upon delivery. OK... so we lied. We actually had a sliding glass door being delivered. Well as you can see from this pic.. the family room never got done.


Coldwell Banker just closed Matt's Real Estate office three weeks ago so he was laid off. We both decided this was his push to go independant, get his business going and work from home. My company had closed 6 offices in the past two years so they had a sale on July 18th to get rid of all the extra computers, desks, chairs, desk mats, etc......Hence the push to empty the garage and turn it into Matt's office. We scored big time!!! For $430, we came out with a computer, keyboard, monitor, 2 desk chairs, 1 large 2 drawer file cabinet and 5 small ones, 4 desk floor mats and a huge desk that will wrap around half of one wall and corner off and extend the full 15 ft. length of the other wall. WooHOO!!!!

Since it was a garage, the construction workers drywalled it, but didn't do such a great job on the taping of the drywall. So off to Home Depot we went to buy some drywall mud and we spent
most of the weekend texturing the walls and ceiling to hide the bad tape job.

During and after shots to come....

Our Tiny Piece of Heaven

Our yard is only 2500 Square Feet but we have made the most of it. A sitting area near the pond and another on the deck to the right of the pond with a jacuzzi....
Oh!!! Heaven.....





The goldfish that we bought for only $.29 are quite amazing. I have mixed gold ones with tan ones and black fish and what is so amazing is that over time, they all take on each other characters and start to take on the other colors of the fish in the pond. If you have ever seen Koi fish; they have spots of all kinds of colors. Just like Bryce in the picture above. LOL!!!!


Here is the new trellis that we built above the deck and jacuzzi. When I first remodeled the house back in 1996, I dug a hole and placed the jacuzzi so that it was even with the deck. I miss stepping down into it. It felt like a built in Jacuzzi. But this one!!!! Oh YEA baby.... more jets, more powerful and after working on the house all day, it feels GOOD on the body!!!!

My Personally Handcrafted Fireplace

During the renovation, we had to tear down the old brick chimney. Instead of building a new one we tore out the old fireplace and found fireplaces on the internet that were gas and vents outside like a clothes dryer does. No need for a chimney anymore. So they installed the fireplace and I found a mantel on the internet that matched the craftsman style of the house and instead of buying one, I build this myself. I also decided to add shelves on each side to hold DVDs & CD's.

Took me a while to figure out exactly how I was going to do it. It was a lot of wood cuts, staining, sanding, sealing. Most of the outside had to be glued on, as I didn't want nail holes showing and I didn't want to fill them because I wasn't sure the putty would stain right.

This is so much nicer then the old wood burning fireplace we add. Old ugly brick from the 1920's when the house was built.

I sure will miss all the craftsman style of this house when we move. Houses these days are just thrown up with Home Depot crap molding, all looking the same and as drap as the next door neighbors. I always wanted to own one of those old Victorian homes in Salt Lake. Guess thats why I fell in love with this place.. Our house is one of the few in our neighborhood that have character. All the others have been stuccoed... YUCK!!!

This is our house before we started the MAJOR renovation.
We found a really cool program that would allow us to build the walls, put in furniture, change all the interior and exterior colors, flooring, the whole nine yards. When you were done, you could do an actual tour of the house to see how it would
look. We spent many months changing the floorplan umpteen times until we finally got the end result.

And here is the end result. It was such a mess. The whole back half of the house plus the garage had to be torn down, do that they could pour a better foundation and be able to build up two stories. We were building in the big firestorm of 2004 that took hundreds of homes and the smoke and ash were coming into the house through the large hole we had in the back for months. I will post pics of the project here soon.