One of the reasons we built the rock planters was to help divert water away from the foundation of the house. Now that we have the planters done, we needed to consider drainage from them as well. If you don’t provide sufficient drainage from your planters they will slowly fill with water and never drain, rotting all of the roots to the plants you have in there…the soil on top will look perfect, but everything a couple inches down is drowning.
Jerry and I drilled holes before we made the rock wall and placed 1” PVC pipe in them to help evacuate any standing water that may build up in there. The next step, before we add topsoil was to add about a foot of rocks to help the water drain to the bottom and out the sides.
I ordered two yards of rock ($80) and had it delivered to the house yesterday. I had to run downtown really quick, by the time I got back the truck was in our front yard (no where near the walls) with the back of the truck up ready to dump all the rock….I honked my horn, he stopped and we dropped the rock half and half in front of both of the walls.
The temperature outside while we were shoveling these rocks was 90 degrees with a heat index of 105 degrees. Boy…it will be nice when Summer and I sitting on the front porch with Ice Tea next Summer…
At the end of the day, we had a pretty nice sunset with the moon showing off our back yard. It isn’t anything spectacular, but it’s pretty nice.
Summer and I really want to have a very raw look downstairs. Currently, it is all completely raw block walls and slab concrete. Our plan is to polish the concrete on the floor and maybe keep the walls block and just sand them, clean them and let them look unfinished. Then we could put our money into detail work around all of the doors and put in some killer industrial private investigator doors in the offices and a normal door for the guest bedroom/gym.
The other option for the walls is plaster or some sort of concrete that could have a smooth finish. The problem with this finish is that it takes a long time and is expensive both with concrete and about 2.5 weeks of labor. If it was something we had our hearts set on, we would spend the money, but I feel like we are just doing something to take the next step to finishing the house, not doing it because we like the idea of it.
Regardless, we definitely want the floors polished…so the guy I hired last week showed up a day late and polished up the floors. Before he could do that, we had empty the entire contents of downstairs (including 30 some sheets of 4×10 3/4 inch greenboard, power tools, plywood etc) and put it in the new shed we built to hold our tools and stuff.
We built the shed under the existing master closet out of pressure treated wood. There were two things we did that will hopefully make our life easier later. First, I set the floor with screws over where our septic tank pipe is in case we ever needed to get to it and second, I mixed a couple bags of concrete and covered the ground with a few inches of concrete. The reason for this was simply to keep the weeds out…weeds in Puerto Rico can be very invasive.
Here are some pictures of our guy polishing the cement, of the shed and a video of the guy I hired polishing our concrete and of our shed.
Stefan and I have been searching for a sink for the stupid guest bathroom for at least 2 months now, and it’s getting ridiculous. We just want to finish the bathroom, damn it! The big problem is that everytime we find a sink we like, it only comes in white, which won’t work since the toilet and tub are almond (light beige).
So, I’ve decided that we need to make this decision now. I’ve narrowed it down to three choices and we will let the guest audience (that’s you) decide which sink will be purchase for/installed in our guest bathroom:
Here is a DecoLav brand vessel sink in blue (it is also available in clear, violet, green, cobalt, amber, silver, copper and gold). It’s simple, stylish and only $184. I think this sink would look good since the bold blue will break up all the brown in the guest bathroom (walnut colored tile and almond colored fixtures). Plus, it will compliment the blue paint on the walls, without being too matchy-matchy.
This Porcher “Zen” sink is kind of cool, no? It’s pretty modern without trying to hard to be modern. It’s available in “biscuit”, which I think would match fine with our “almond” fixtures. This Porcher sink is $360, which is getting kind of expensive for the guest bath, but it is a pretty cool vessel sink.
.
This American Standard “Morning” sink is available in white, bone, linen, daydream (blue), beige and black. I would consider this sink in linen or daydream for our bathroom. But would a light blue sink be cute? Or ugly? Will the linen color be to much brown with the brown tile and light brown fixtures? The American Standard “Morning” sink is $255.
.
.
Here is a picture of the bathroom that the sink is going to be installed in. Walnut colored travertine tile, almond colored fixtures and brightish blue paint:
If you have ever been to Puerto Rico you know about their famous frogs. They are called ‘coqui’ meaning little frog and there are around 300 different varieties. They don’t ‘ribbit’ like frogs in California, they say their own name very loudly, over and over again from sunset to sunrise. Here is an audio clip of a coqui;KO-KEE.
Imagine 100’s of these little frogs yelling their name all night long. Eventually, it becomes white noise, but in the beginning, they are loud. Here is the kicker though, I have been coming to Puerto Rico for 15 years (as a surfing tourist) and had never actually seen a coqui. They are extremely elusive.
Because of this, Summer has a conspiracy theory. Here it is; The constant “Ko-KEE” noises that last all night long in actuality are really made by giant cockroaches. Knowing this is bad for tourism, the tourism board of Puerto Rico has fabricated the story about the coqui so as not to deter tourists from visiting.
Who would want to visit an island with singing cockroaches? She is genius, I never would have thought that. Man, cover-up after cover-up, when will the madness end?
The madness ended last night. I came home from the The Pool Bar where I had a great dinner of rice/beans, breadfruit and chicken ka-bobs and there was a coqui waiting for me on the front porch. I think word got out about Summers little conspiracy theory so they sent this little guy over prove her wrong (they probably get some sort of kick-back from tourism taxes or something).
I pulled out my camera, set it to MACRO mode and got up real close and personal with this coqui. I took about a dozen shots, but these two looked the best. At one point, he jumped from a chair to the door and he was lightning fast!
The plan (as of Tuesday) for today was to fill up the planter boxes a couple inches with pebbles (to avoid too much water on the roots of our plants) and then proceed to fill them up with topsoil so we can start planting. Then, we were going to haul a bunch of topsoil from the neighbors house to the front yard and at the same time order more topsoil for the front yard (we only have about 5 yards at the neighbors house…a dump truck holds about 20 yards) and get a few estimates for sod (it rains so much the seed would just get washed away) and arrange for all of them to show up the same day so we could spread the topsoil and lay the sod without all of our soil getting washed down the hill. If you don’t think it rains hard here, check out the Puerto Rican weather we had today…hard rain but not much wind and it only lasted about 45 minutes.
Back to the plan….eh hem…it never happened. But here is how it went down.
Last night, at 5:00pm, a concrete guy that we have been trying to track down for over a month stopped by and said he could bring his diamond bit orbital floor sander over to the house and polish the floors downstairs. But, he could only work for the next two days. So…of course, you have to get things done when the contractors are available, so I told him to come on by at 10:00am and we would have two rooms ready for him to sand. The plan was to move everything into the finished rooms and then do those floors…but we have a lot of stuff…and most of it is heavy…so I pulled an audible.
Jerry and I cleared out the two rooms, Mark stopped by and helped me move all of the hurricane shutters upstairs to under the deck, and we started building the shed that is going to go under the new Master Bedroom Closet. The video below was from this morning at 10:00am (oh, the cement guy never showed up and said he’d be here on Saturday morning instead) showing the work we did and still had to do. By the end of the day, we dug out the footings, poured the concrete and framed up the shed. I’ll show you more pictures tomorrow. For now, check out the video of our downstairs walk through.
We are going to be covering the entire upstairs (except the two bathrooms) with Ipe Hardwood Floors. Ipe wood, also known as Iron Wood and Brazilian Walnut, is valued for its durability, strength, and its natural resistance to decay, wet conditions, and insect infestation.
Ipe and the Janka Test
The rating chart is from the Janka test, a rating test commonly used to measure wood hardness. Basically, the test calculates the number of pounds per square inch required to drive a small steel ball half its diameter into the surface of the wood. This test shows that Ipe wood is more than 368% harder then Teak wood! Ipe has a Class A Fire Rating which puts it in the same category as concrete and steel. Ipe Heartwood, is typically reddish brown with a greenish tinge, often with lighter or darker striping. When sanded and finished Ipe looks similar to a teak wood but for half the price.
Jamie and Brian, two old and great friends from my days in New Jersey, are going to be here in Rincon in November to do the installation. They have both been installing hardwood floors for years and always seem to be working there downtime at friends houses applying their well tuned trade and skills. We have about 1500 square feet upstairs not including the front and back porches. Right now we are guestimating that we are going to spend about $7,000 in wood alone. If we were to use Mahagony we would be spending $14 per square foot as opposed to $5 per square foot for Ipe.
Check out some examples of finished IPE (Brazilian Walnut and Ironwood) inside and outside.
I like the smooth finish on this floor
The is a little more our speed, but I don’t know if I like the spacing
An IPE Deck, I really like the wood
Today was a very productive day. Jerry and I finished up cleaning up all of the extra rock from the blue stone planter boxes and stairs, we filled up a truck full of trash, carried in 200 12×24 1 inch thick marble tiles (they must weigh 15 pounds each) and helped Louis carry in the first two rough pieces of our kitchen.
Although I am excited about all of the progress we make at the house…you can’t see a lot of it as you work on it. It slowly evolves into something that is too slight on the daily level to notice. It’s only when I look back at the before pictures that I realize how much progress we have made. The kitchen, however, is not one of those slowly evolving things. Once we put in the back to two bottom pieces (two “L” shapes) the kitchen took form right in front of me.
I will have more pictures for you in a day or two…mark has my camera. Lo Siento.
I have been waiting quite a while to say this…Summer and I now have high speed Internet access in Rincon! After an aggravating day of broken automated message systems and 27 minute waits with PRT (Puerto Rico Telephone), I tracked down our DSL Modem this morning through the company that PRT hires to do all of their shipping; Island Wide Shipping.
The story they (Island Wide Shipping) is that they have been trying to deliver the package everyday since they received it (except Sunday) which was on the seventh of September. There is no way that is possible. Jerry and I have bee here building the rock wall non-stop for the past two weeks. My opinion is that Island Wide Shipping is just a bunch of slackers that scored a big corporate account like Puerto Rico Telephone and do a mediocre job at best because that is all that is expected of them. When I called them to try to track down the package yesterday, I was sent into a circulating voice message saying to “hold for an operator” every 2 minutes. After about 40 minutes on the automated machine last night a Spanish speaking operator came on (even though I pressed “2″ for English) and as soon as she heard my english/american accent she shot me back into the circulating automated messaging machine to wait for an English speaking operator. I gave up 25 minutes later…cursing. Over an hour on the phone with the frickin’ automated message with nothing accomplished…I was going nuts. I waited another 30 minutes on hold this morning before i got an operator on, tracked down my package, got directions to the facility in Mayaguez (South on the No. 2 and take a left at the light after the Holiday Inn Casino and then the second left into the office park…you’ll see a sign outside) and went and picked up our modem.
I brought it back to the house hooked it up and am stoked on the quality and speed of our service. Check out our upload and download times;
For Caribbean Island living, the download speed is pretty good and the upload speed ain’t that bad either. I am stoked…my productivity is about to explode. It has been tough to get motivated to go to work when you are running an Internet based business on a cable modem (Choice Cable) that has download speeds a little better than dial-up (it was 70k).
Well folks, we have another Tropical Storm out in the Atlantic. Mark was telling me while we were driving around this morning and he seems to think that Puerto Rico is about due for a Hurricane. Now, I am not going to give mark as much credit as I give Dr. Lyons but it made me a little weary, especially after the high winds, rain and tornado that just hit our house yesterday.
The big problem is that everytime we find a sink we like, it only comes in white, which won’t work since the toilet and tub are almond (light beige).
