Week 47

Good news! The painter and Mr. Bunkport's final work have been scheduled for next week! This could really be it! Keep your fingers crossed that no one runs into any snags or unforeseen problems. We are so ready to have the garage and yard cleared out of construction materials.

Meanwhile, this week, two things happened:

First, I was at City Hall for something that took only a fraction as long as I thought it would, so I decided to spend some time in the Assessor's office researching previous ownership of the house. Mars is listed in the records as having been built in 1907 -- it may be older, but because City Hall burned down in the earthquake & fire of 1906, everything still standing after the disaster was listed as 1907 in the new city records, along with all the new houses that were going up as people rebuilt the city. I could only go back as far as 1919 in the Assessor's microfiche files, but I was surprised to find ten owners before us, including a Martin family, who sold the house in 1919, and a Portuguese family named Velludo (listed as Velvet in the 1940 census), who bought it in 1925. Interestingly, the house changed hands three times in 1925. The owner previous to us, Jackie, bought it in 1956 -- much earlier than I had thought, and interestingly, she seems to have taken title alone.

My guess that Mr. Davila, whose stuff I found in the old back part of the house during a clean out in 2012, was Jackie's husband was wrong -- he and his wife Mary were actually the owners before Jackie. They bought the house at the end of 1952, and Mr. Davila died in early 1956. His widow sold the house to Jackie in November, 1956. Interesting that she left his stuff down there the whole fifty-five years she lived here.

The other thing that happened this week is that I started the mural at the bottom of the outside stairs. My starting point is a repeating bamboo design I did in school ten years ago:

I sized it up 200% on a copier, and gridded out the space into 8-inch squares:

Then, I poked holes in the copy of the design, & used powdered charcoal and graphite to create outlines on the wall:

Now I just have to sketch the panda in somewhere, and I'll be ready to paint!

That's it for now. Hoping to have some exciting photos to post next week...