Other Floors of La Fortuna

The upstairs -- I didn't take many pictures. I got the view on the Main Floor, and the bedrooms are pretty much just bedrooms.

The Stairs Up break into two parts around a sizable landing, and the three parts (stairs, landing, more stairs) each have their own separate floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on the inner wall.  The tall windows on the landing look west over a Mormon Church and its parking lot about half a block away. Emphasis on over -- the west side of the house is the steepest drop off, so the Church itself is 50 feet or so below the floor of the house.  (HomoDommi commented that they are destined to always own houses overlooking church parking lots).

The church parking lot.  Not really going to be visible once the trees have leafed.

At the top of the stairs there is a small (5 x 8) landing (lined again with bookshelves), and with a nice computer table built in across one end.  A very nice place for the Teenager to sit and play games or do homework -- quiet, aloof, but open to the house, so not too far away from everything.

The upstairs has three bedrooms, all ordinary square rooms with small closets and big windows on the view -- Girl-Child's on the southwest corner, Teenager's next to it, directly overlooking the loggia, and, behind them, what quickly became known as "The Fourth Bedroom" -- windows on two sides overlooking the north, the driveway, the relatively ordinary suburban-looking neighborhood.  This room will be a guest bedroom, and until there is something better, officially HomoDommi's "art" room.  There is also a bathroom.

My room these first couple days in the house, the 4th Bedroom has the only ordinary view in the house.

The basement / Ground Floor

The taller window (see below) overlooks the koi pond and rock garden.

The portion of hill upon which La Fortuna is built is so steep that the "basement" is completely above ground.  The floor is mostly taken up with "The Red Room" -- appropriated as a television/games/guest bedroom already, with a door opening directly outside to the front side of the chicken coop.

This is The Red Room, before we moved in any furniture.  In the original plans, those windows matched steps outside along the side of the house.  In the actual layout now, that's just a rock garden with the koi pond just outside of the taller window.  

The Red Room was the Texan's guest room those first nights in the house.
The door visible at the back is to the L-shaped room. I am standing in front of the door to the outside.

Another room -- hardly a room -- is an L-shaped area almost the full length of the house. The spine of the L is perhaps 5 feet wide, the foot of the L perhaps 6 x 8, all with a half-finished, uneven floor. The whole room is only half-finished -- the head space is quite cavernous, but the non-walkable part of the room is a giant ball of rough concrete.  I think of this as the cartilage between the hill and the house -- protecting each from the other -- the house won't slide down, and the hill won't be eroded away.  The room, such as it is, is currently hip deep in quick and cheap shelving housing working supplies for the chickens, the koi pond, the garden, paints, all nicely labelled.

The back of the L

The foot of the L.

The space isn't really very useable for anything but storage, but I have no doubt HomoDommi will improve that.

There is a second door to the outside on this floor, as well, in an unadorned, concrete-floored hall/mud room.  It opens discreetly to the egg nests at the back of the coop.

Update: Linen Closet, redux

The upstairs linen closet is done. Well, mostly -- the contractor's part is done. We still have to caulk the inside of the doors, prime, and paint it, which will lead to repainting all the woodwork and the walls of the upstairs hallway. HomoDomi is going to strip the hardware and buff and re-age it, but that will come early next year. And later, we will add a laundry chute. But at least now we have the feeling of lots of storage space. (The box in the lower right covers the hole that will become the chute.)
Today we had to find a latch for the new closet doors, to match the old. We went back to Rejuvenation House and combed through their piles of old fasteners. It's dirty work, but fun to do -- you feel like you could discover treasure at any moment. (But Rejuvenation House is not run by dummies, and the true treasures have been pulled out already and the merely valuable pieces are priced accordingly). (photos taken with mobile phone)


We found two matching latches (with a bigger handle than the one which had been on the closet), for $10 each. Not bad, when they were asking $30 for new reproduction.

Update: Linen Closet

Day Two: Michael installs shelves, and hangs one door (built from scratch, of course). The wood is beautiful, old-style fir. HomoDomi has suggested leaving it as stained wood, but that would require stripping the other closet and the other four doors in the small hallway. Also, I think the white paint looks nice and is appropriate for an upstairs hallway of the time.

Mike said he hadn't built for exposed wood, and there were touches left in that were intended to be covered with paint. I think that convinced HomoDomi more than my opinions about required extra work and appropriateness.

So far as we know, the woodwork paint is original -- so in order to match, we will likely have to repaint all four doors and the other closet. I want to get a quart of pale blue-green paint and update the walls of the hallway, as well. The existing blue-green is a pretty color, but has faded and gotten dingy over the years.

Here, for fun, is the view from the bottom of the closet down through the kitchen (the light glowing in) to the basement. You can just make out, behind all the wires and white pipes, the blue line that is the curtain-wall of my room.

The Upstairs Hallway

We've been really busy the last several days, and I've been too tired to blog at the end of the day.

Michael, the poet who installed our attic fan last month, freed up some time for us this week. So we've got him fixing the hole on the second floor where the chimney used to be. We love Mike and hope he will have time to do many other projects for us. But first, the New Linen Closet.

Here is the progression: Last April, we had an over-crowded linen-closet and a wall in the upstairs hallway. The plan is to have, by next week, two gently filled linen closets in the upstairs hallway, side-by-side, looking as if they had been there all along.

In the meantime, if you recall, we removed the chimney behind that narrow space of blank wall. We sawed through the lathe-and-plaster wall, exposing the chimney and a large hole. You can see, in several of these photos, the back of lathe-and-plaster walls around the sides and back of the hole, and a gap that has been considered useful for running electric lines. The whole second floor is electrified by five wires that run from the fuse box in the basement, up this hole along the chimney, into the attic, across and then back down between the walls of the second-storey rooms. Some of this electricity is original knob-and-tube, which actually is in pretty good shape. About half is a slapdash job from the remodeling done in the 1950s.

By the way, also run up the hole from basement to the floor of the second-storey are the water pipes for the upstairs bathroom. That is, water comes in through an underground pipe into the basement on one side of the house, across to the middle of the house, up the chimney hole, and then, between the ceiling of the first-storey and the floor of the second-storey, back across the house again to exactly above where the water enters the house.

This talk about electricity and plumbing will become relevant in future blog entries, when I talk about the work going on in the attic and the kitchen.

We took down the chimney bricks in April, and since then, the hallway has been an over-crowded linen closet and a drafty hole extending from attic to basement. For seven months, we've had a large plastic sheet roughly taped over the hole in the wall, but really there's been nothing to prevent a boisterous child from jumping/falling/being pushed from the second floor down to the hard concrete floor of the basement. In fact, for a while there, towels were being dropped (but they fell into an area almost impossible to reach behind tables and bookshelves and things, so that was discouraged).

Anyway, there's nothing like getting things done. Mike took measurements Monday, started building yesterday, and except for waiting for glue to dry and painting, will be done tomorrow, I think. He started by closing in the box with plywood yesterday, and today he did the frame and molding that will decorate both old and new closets, so they look like a set. Tonight, the glue holding together the grid decoration (false panels) for one new door is drying; tomorrow the other will be set. HomoDomi and I scrounged through piles of antique and junk hinges today at Rejuvenation House in order to find four hinges that exactly match the original hardware (nothing so grand as shown online, which have been cleaned up). I just realized, writing this, that we forgot to pick up a latch. Darn, another trip to one of our favorite stores that we'll be forced to take.

We asked Mike to leave the holes to the other floors -- both the ceiling up to the attic, which we will block from above, and the gap downward. You can sort of see his shop vacuum blocking the hole in the floor in the last photo. One of the projects coming up will be installation of a proper laundry chute down to the basement -- complicated because it passes through the kitchen, and we haven't finally decided where exactly it should be located yet (wiggle room of two feet or so).