Last week I went through some of the pile of drawings that were included with the house. Within one tube I found the original architect drawings, including elevation sketches of our house. Designed and built in 1965-66 for Dr. John and Mary Richards and their three children, the architectural firm behind it was Worsley, Rankin and Williamson of Menlo Park. I searched the web for those names and discovered that Worsley and Rankin passed away somewhat recently. Rankin, in particular was modern architect, as what I’ve found links him to being influenced by Neutra and Eichler. This explains much about our house.
We’re lucky that we are just the third owners of the property, but we’re a bit unlucky in that the previous owners preferred the band-aid method of repairs most of the time. Thus we have the wall project and the roof/gutter project to get sorted sooner rather than later. My goal this week will be to get a working floor plan sorted that I can then use it to map exterior hot spots so that once we have the new flat roofs done over the Great Room and entry way, I can roll that into gutters and maybe metal shades before then moving on to having the house re-sided. My hope is to modernize things, clean up the busy-ness caused by the different exterior facings and random wires strung all over the place.
Lastly, Friday I shot some new videos of things.
First a panorama over by the pool.
Then another from the rickety deck that serves as a lookout.
10/18/19 Edit: uploaded videos to post.