I don’t have to tell you guys that Summer and I are very into our landscaping and building not just our house, but creating a really cool tropical landscape. One of the things to deal with living in Puerto Rico are the termites. Termites are everywhere.

Termites have eaten their way through gardening equipment handles, expensive palm trees but mostly just kill the undesirable Salsa trees. These trees grow like weeds everywhere and take all the nutrition away from other more desirable trees (shade year around, fruit etc).

When we moved into this place we had no trees in the back yard. The yard had been recently bulldozed and we started from scratch with a few sprouted coconuts we found. Over the years we have been clearing out the Salsa trees, planting more stuff and trying to create a cool landscape. We had one Salsa tree that grew big quick, so we kept it for shade in the summer time but this year, it didn’t survive the termites.

I cut it down yesterday (with a reciprocating saw ) and now our back yard is landscaped EXCLUSIVELY with plants and trees that we planted ourselves. It’s a cool feeling to have, especially now that some of them are 8ft plus tall.

Sydney has been so much fun lately! She is crawling and exploring every nook of the house every day now. She has a few different play zones where she has her scene laid out perfect. She knows what she can reach, how to cruise around the room connecting furniture and walls and she loves standing at the window, peaking her head out so she can watch the front yard. The window doesn’t have a screen or glass and the wind gusts through there pretty good. It’s like she’s riding a motorcycle without goggles or a helmet.

Yesterday, Sydney discovered how to turn on the cold water on the water cooler. Now, every time cruises by the cooler, she looks up at the spout and goes for a quick pull just to see the water come out. I have a feeling it may be time to raise the water cooler.

We completely baby proofed the back deck (it didn’t take much) and set up a bunch of toys and books back there. It is Sydneys domain. I sit out there with coffee every morning and watch her explore her toys and her new little world.

Here is Sydney standing up using the wall. From here, she’ll cruise all the way around the corner to the other side of the window and look out at me. She’ll chuckle a little, go for the water cooler and then cruise back out to the deck.

Click to Get Full Size Version

Some Sydney Video Action

Here is Sydney in action on the back porch demonstrating her ability to make an elephant noise, crawl, cruise along the wall and take some steps. What a rad little girl

I think we are going to scrap the idea of laying tile downstairs and go back to polished concrete. In case you don’t remember, or weren’t reading back in September of 2007, we already made the decision to polish the concrete in the basement. We diamond polished the floors to smooth out the rough foundation slab and then applied the glossy sealer. That was it, we were done.

Wait. Not so fast. Now that downstairs is almost done, the floors still look unfinished so we decided to install tile. We have literally been looking at tile for 3 months and NOTHING has blown us away. I think we were going to do just because we thought we should, to make it look more finished. And then we rediscovered stained polished concrete. Again.

A buddy of ours (talented artist) sent us this site to check out what another DIY couple did with polished concrete at their house. They did a really good job. Check out the designs they created with masking tape on their polished concrete floors.

The stained and acid sketch polished concrete floors I have been looking at on the web look amazing. Summer is stoked on the idea of a design/tile look and I love the idea of a four pointed compass at the entrance way downstairs. I think we found our solution. Now, the new task is to strip the old glossy sealer so the concrete actually absorbes the stain.

I have read a few different ‘do it yourself’ websites and watched a few videos on how to remove the sealer, and I have narrowed our two options to non-toxic strippers; Soy and Citrus.

Citrus Concrete Seal Stripper
The citrus stripper seams much more labor intensive. It involves spray 20 cubic feet at a time, letting the stripper site with cotton drop cloths over it, then pealing up the cloth and most of the stripper with it. This needs to be repeated until all the stripper is gone.

Soy Concrete Seal Remover
The Soy concrete sealer stripper seams to be much less labor intensive (lazy gene). The Soy is applied to the floor, let sit and then gels up and can be removed with a wet-vac and hard bristled broom.

Really, the job is going to be a lot of work no matter what option we choose. Summer and I will both have to move our entire offices and clear out the entire downstairs to the gym, bathroom/laundry room and the platform in my office. Man, this DIY stuff sure is exhausting!

If anyone has any good advice, PR supply information or recommendations, we would greatly appreciate it!

We are being very budget conscious with our tile choices downstairs. Uncle Sam hit me with some unexpected taxes now that I have my business in Puerto Rico and Sydney may not be going to college yet, but having a baby isn’t exactly a discount program.

We have been searching for a cool tile for downstairs for a couple weeks now, but aren’t really having any luck finding anything in our budget. We narrowed our choices down to about 6 different tiles that range from porcelain tile to slate. We are going to keep the tile 12”x12” to help reduce the cracking and tiles coming up in the future due to our floor being uneven. The basement was never designed to be apart of the house so the floor wasn’t poured level. Another thing we are going to have to do is strip the concrete polish/sealer up from the floor. From what I understand, if you pour water on concrete and it beads, the mortar you use for the tiles will never stick to the floor and you will waste a lot of time and money.

Help us choose! Which tile do you like the most?

Building a house is expensive. When Summer and I first bought this place we were thinking that we would be able to throw $40,000 at this place and be DONE in a couple of months. Yeah right.

Building materials and labor are much more expensive than we ever expected and although we are ‘do-it yourselfers’ on many of these projects, some of them become too expensive trying to get it right…over and over and over and over and over again.

Our current BIG project is finishing downstairs. We have been slowly saving our money and finishing one project at a time and are really making progress. We recently paid one of our buddies Jerry to come over and install the last two windows downstairs.

After this, we have to:

(buy) install our doors

tile the floor

install sub-floor in gym

install hard wood floors in gym (waiting 6 months)

build back deck

Before Pictures of the Basement Openings (sort of)

Pictures of the Project in Progress

After Photos of the Window Installation

Our neighbors got a couple of sheep and they are so cute! For the last few days, we have been sneaking up to their fence and “BAAAAAAAAAAA”ing at the top of our lungs to try and get them to come over. I’m pretty sure our neighbors think we are crazy . But, they have given us permission to come and visit the sheep whenever we’d like.

Sydney loves the sheep! Even before our new sheepy neighbors showed up, she would make the “Baaaaa” sound at her stuffed sheep toy, so you can imagine how interesting she thinks the REAL sheep are. We are seriously thinking about buying a pair of sheep to help out around the property. Maybe for Sydney’s 1st birthday she will get a sheep!

Ok, I have to admit it, Summer and I have been neglecting the blog. We haven’t been doing too much construction lately and Summer and I have both been buried with work. As usual, our free time has been spent surfing and gardening but mostly, we spend time with Sydney. She’s the best.

The entire family went to San Diego for a few weeks at the end of April and hung out with Grandma, Uncle Shawn and Great Grandma! We went to weddings, celebrated birthdays and cooked together. It is always wonderful to leave the island, but ALWAYS better coming back. It usually takes us about 10 days off the island to start appreciating what we left behind and by day 20, we are ready to do whatever it takes to get home. As always, the plants and tree’s all look like they went through a hyper growth spirt while we were gone and we were smiling from ear to ear when we woke up and looked at the front yard our first morning back.

Those pictures are of Sydney over the past couple of days since we got back to Puerto Rico. Our baby proofing efforts may be worth a blog post or two as well. You are never as prepared as you think you are.

An earthquake just woke me up. The house was rattling pretty hard and I hopped out of bed to check on Sydney. Kuta and Monkey slept right through it, as did the baby. I couldn’t find anything yet, but Summer just told me it was a 5.8 via a friend on facebook.

Yep, the earthquake map just said it was a 5.8 and it was centered right around Aguada! It was 11.3 miles east of Rincon.

AAAAAaaaaaaaaaah!

Believe it or not, we get a ton of emails from people all over the country, that have questions about Puerto Rico. So many emails, in fact, that we don’t really have time to answer them all. With that in mind, we’ve created a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page that hopefully will help answer peoples questions about Puerto Rico, Rincon, moving to Puerto Rico, the job market here, etc…

Check out the new FAQ page here:

Frequently Asked Questions about Puerto Rico

It has been a great past couple of weeks. Work has been really busy for both Summer and I. The surf has been mediocre after an insane couple of months and Summer and I have fallen into a great schedule with Sydney. The schedule thing is VERY important. It gives both Summer and I time to do things on our own (surf, projects, hang out with friends) which helps us power back up for Sydney time.

Sydney time takes 100% of your attention 85% of the time. That 15% is when she feeding herself cheerios, playing with her juice bottle or watching the animals in amazement. Even when she is on the front porch in the pack n’ play (see photos) or trying to crawl around on the floor, she requires constant supervision. It’s like she’s a baby or something

This last week, I have been leaving the office around 5:00pm and loading up Sydney in her new baby backpack and hiking up into the hills. Our average hike was about 45 minutes or so and Sydney just loved it. Loaded up in the pack, she is way up high, bouncing around, grabbing for leaves, checking out cows (see photos) and staring at every dog and cat like it’s the first time she’s seen one. Keep in mind, we’re in Puerto Rico and everyone has dogs. It’s like a barking orchestra as you walk through the narrow roads up and down the hills.

Last weekend, we started building bench railings on the front porch. Sydney is getting more and more mobile everyday. Putting up the bench railings is going to kill two birds with one stone. First, Sydney won’t be able to fall off the sides of the porch (highest part, the front is bordered by a big planter) and that is a good thing. Second, it solves our front porch seating issues. Porch furniture is super expensive and we haven’t found anything that we like that will work on our narrow front porch. Adding the benches has eliminated the need for furniture out there. Now we have two hammocks and seating for 6 to 10 people. I’ll upload the bench photos as a single post once we finish them. You can get a sneak preview by checking them out in the background of the front porch picture with Sydney.