Catching Up:
I kind of dropped the ball over the holidays and took a break from updating the blog. This doesn’t of course mean that we stopped work. In fact, we worked right through the holiday. I took a week off to visit family in Florida, but as Lemmy from Motorhead says “the train kept a rollin all night long” on site.
Over the past six weeks we’ve finished our drywall, put on two coats of stucco, and started to line up our finishes. Floors go in this Wednesday (ahead of schedule), and tile goes in next week.
After we passed rough I had an insulation crew from Broken Drum come in to insulate the building. Shortly after this we had the insulation inspected and were given the “O.K.” to cover it up. Next, our dry-waller came in and spent the week installing drywall. Then, just before the holiday we shot our first coat of stucco, which is called the scratch coat. Since the footage was so high the sub chose to spray the stucco, and for two days it was raining cement all around the site. Our sub had installed a spray net and installed protection coursing all around the windows, doors, vents, and other protrusions in order to keep them from being covered. The house sat over the holiday and got it’s brown-coat the day after Christmas. It promptly rained for the next four days and that gave this second coat of stucco plenty of moisture, which aids in the curing process. Normally, if rain is not expected, then one would have to spray the entire building with water to keep the plaster moisturized.
I also installed the Polygal window in the garage. Polygal is somewhat of a cliché material these days due to it’s ubiquity, but I love the stuff since it allows you to illuminate a room with indirect light for a fraction of the cost that a frosted glass window of the same size would run you. Everyone has their particular method of detailing Polygal, and I take a pretty simple approach. 
Since we don’t get too much rain here in Southern California, it’s easy to field glaze the seams with clear caulking and mastic screws keep any water from penetrating the holes left by the fasteners. Also, I put a piece of L-metal at the base to serve as a drip-edge. This then gets caulked where it meets the stucco. It’s a simple, yet elegant way to waterproof the window.
A quickie for you. This is why it’s important to "flag" (hanging a strip of red tape from your exterior vent penetrations) your vents prior to stucco installation. The guys got it right on the scratch coat of stucco, but managed to cover up the vent to the lower bathroom, which is conveniently hidden under a cantilevered soffit. 
The nick you see is from me spending a morning “tappa-tap-tapping” on the brown coat to locate the vent. Luckily, I had photos to narrow it down, and with a couple of knocks with a hammer the vent was exposed for the stucco crew to come back and re-finish.
