California 2 Puerto Rico

Want a bathtub for your house? Easy enough right? Ehhhhhhh, wrong answer. Brian and I drove around the entire West side of Puerto Rico for almost 8 hours the other day looking for the Greenboard and a bathtub! It seems like an easy thing to find, but we could not find a nice cast iron bath tub (banera) anywhere. There were plastic and fiberglass ones everywhere…but bathrooms need to be done right the first time…or we would loose in the long run. We finally found one and a matching drain (not as easy as you think) and were able to get the guest bathroom started.

We have water, a toilet and a shower!

After about 7 days of running around and meeting local plumbers, Summer and I hired a guy named Hoche to finish roughing in all of our plumbing. He is a member of the Vargas family (the family that surrounds our house) and he also gave us the best estimate.

Here is what he is doing for us;

• Cap off all non-used water pipe
• Roughing in master bathroom
• Roughing in guest bath
• Roughing in kitchen
• Outside shower and spigot
• Spigots in the front of the house (two)
• Roughing in washer downstairs
• Roughing in new (3rd) bathroom downstairs, including breaking up cement
• Roughing in hot water heater
• Cleaning septic tank and completing all the septic plumbing work

Hoche did all this work for us for $1,400.00 in labor. Not a bad deal plus we are giving business to the family that runs our neighborhood. We are probably spending another $2,000 on supplies including the toilets, sinks, Jacuzzi tub and double headed shower in the master bath.

We bought one of the most inexpensive toilets we could find just so we could start using the toilet in the house, which is a score. No more running to the woods in the morning….sweet! You can laugh if you want, but when you come down to visit we’ll make you use the woods instead of the bathroom…who’s laughing now?

We also had the plumber install our outside shower. Eventually we will frame this in and rinse off here after surfing, snorkeling, spear fishing….etc. It’s also a good place to get the dogs clean enough to come into the house. For now though, it is our only means of cleaning ourselves up at the end of a hot day working. The day time temperature has been hitting the mid 90’s every day with mucho humidity.