Framing The 2nd Floor

View from the roof garden across to the new 2nd floor of main house

Ahhhh, now we're getting somewhere. I never thought I would have a 'second floor' when I was little. I grew up in Los Angeles in a Spanish style home with a front and back yard. We're talkin IN THE MIDDLE of town, not in the burbs. One floor. That was back when, I guess, there was still space for single-story homes in the center of town. My Dad still lives there. 

Originally, we planned to do 3 floors and put the kids on the third level (trap em in, I always say). But our architect Andreas Gritschke talked us out of it noting that this home is our dream home; translation: "the place we will never be able to afford to leave", We figured three floors doesn't mix well with hip replacements. 

So two floors it is.   

First Floor Framing

The house of cards begins on the first floor.

 I will try to take the photos from the same place every time so that you can see the progress. This is taken from the roof deck garden of my studio, which is above the garage. We rebuilt the garage-studio-rumpus room several years ago thinking we could live in it when we rebuilt the actual house. Well, two kids later that CLEARLY ISN'T GONNA HAPPEN. It's so weird to look down from this angle because the whole thing just looks 'detached'. Well, it IS detached, but I mean it in the way that one's whole life is scrambled and pulled apart and all the things you knew no longer appear to be what they were. And I try to constantly visualize the end result. Looking at the bones of a house in ex-ray is really pretty interesting. Here it looks like those card houses you make with deck cards when you're waiting for your food in a restaurant when you're little. What? You mean your Mom didn't have cards in her purse?

This is the first floor. Wow, that's a freakin whopper of a steal beam!  We did a reverse floor plan because I wanted to save our yard. We're one of the few homes in our neighborhood to actually have 5 blades of grass and unless it's hailing, we eat outside. But all the neighbors around us (we gracefully opted to let them go first in the renovation process) went up, thus sucking our sun with them. The German and I fought to the blood about a staircase versus a yard, and our brilliant architect came back with our plan. We put the bedrooms on the ground floor where light isn't an issue, and the living area is  a second floor loft style open floor plan. The ground level connects the old and new building; upstairs we have a courtyard in between. 

The Chicken And Egg Game

Well, I suppose there's nothing too exciting about this pic. There are folks working, and so there's proof that the little night gnomes aren't the ones fooling us into thinking something is actually happening. So that's exciting, true. It's hard to visualize how this will all get pulled off with these two guys pushing wood shards around.

 But the stress is looming for me and I am trying to keep my wits about. I actually work in television on a major episodic show. This means I work in excess of 12-14 hour days. And what THAT means is The German & I have to also begin picking all the fixtures needed for plumbing because even though the faucets go in way later, everything that make them work have to be purchased and put in right away.

The chicken & egg game is an evil construction monster. So figuring out how to cram in the time to do all this is scaring me.

Where Am I? Where is my closet?

Let's play "find the bathroom"!

This is such a strange place to be in. The property is no longer recognizable as it was, and the shock that there's 'no going back' teeters on my mind.
We will try to photograph most of the documentation of our journey from the same place (which is from the rooftop garden of the back building) so you can see the growth.
As I look down, I try to imagine where the new rooms are. I am holding in the mass panic I feel looking at those channels outlying what I think are rooms and wondering if something is left out-where is the bathroom? Where is the hallway? Where is my closet??? Oh-my-gawd-they-didn't-look-at-the-plansssss!!!!!!!!!!!!
The comparison of the size of the rooms to the size of the kids running through them is so small. Sophia and her friend are having so much fun playing in the dirt. But I want to cry…

The Frog [Prince]

Once upon a time in an artsy land not too far away; well okay maybe/probably far from some of you, there was a yucky little 950 sq foot 1946 beach bungalow in Venice Beach California. We first rented it until we found our dream house on a hillside nearby. In this pic, you can't even see it through the overgrown jungle!

That was in 1994.

Back then you could still hear gun-shots in deep Venice until Julia Roberts moved in and ‘there went the neighborhood’, & with that to-do came the police to clean it up.

Flash forward a wedding, two kids, several career changes, a green card preceding a citizenship, about three cars, a partial reconstruction of the garage into a rumpus room/guest house/T.V. room/roof terrace, many cramped visits from wonderful forgiving friends and family members, and finally a HUGE dream.

It’s now year 2010…The Frog, (thank gawd for our sanity) got kissed.

And so, our journey into construction hell (did I say that?) I mean bliss begins.