I have to write my first letter to the editor in response to Mr. Wes Lyman”s letter about the county”s purchasing the Castle.
I am the person who wrote the Baseline Condition Property Assessment Report for the Castle along with the support of local professionals, Bruce Brower of Brower Construction with over 30 years of commercial construction experience, and Sylvan Stenge of Inspectpro a certified building inspector with a similar amount of experience. I have as a licensed architect and hospital building inspector with over 20 years of design and building maintenance experience.
We used ASTM standard E 2018-08 “Standard Guide for Property Condition Assessments: Baseline Property Condition Process” as a recognized standard the basis for our report.
The Lucerne Hotel was designed by architect John R. Kirby, who has done some fairly famous work, and built as the centerpiece for the Clearlake Beach Company”s planned retirement project between 1924 and 1928.
It was built with the best of materials and wood framing construction methods and is fully sprinklered, even the roof. The wood framing material is better quality than you can buy today, I don”t believe I had ever seen a straight grained +20 foot 2 by 8 before in my life until I worked on this building, in perfect condition no less.
Frankly, without doing destructive testing, Mr. Lyman, there is nothing significantly wrong with this building.
The structure is still solid with no evidence of shifting and yes there is one place on the interior of the building where a sill plate has had dirt up against it because of bad maintenance and there is about 3 feet of dry rot. Yes, because of stains on the wood you can see the building has leaked in the past, mostly around the laundry room, but the wood is still original, dry and better than the lumber you can buy in the lumber yard today. No, there is not any significant roof leakage, a roof with the pitch on this building does not easily leak and the exterior plaster shows signs of age.
There is no evidence of site drainage-related damage and the windows don”t leak. The Castle building is in as good or better shape than any existing wood building in the County of Lake, most likely even structurally better than one being built today.
Put a new hat on and paint her up and, other than our society”s need for amenities, this old lady is ready to dance!
Lyndon Ernst,
Registered Architect
Ernst Architects
Nice
