As you all know, Summer and I are designing a walk-in closet that will be made out of cedar. Having a closet will really give us the chance to free up a lot of space around the house, organize our clothes and have a place to put our shoes and belts.
Normally, finding specialty items, like 3/4 inch cedar plywood, in and around Rincon is not the easiest thing to do. Normally, it goes something like this. ME:(at Home Depot): “Hi, I am looking for a shower drain. Can you please show me where they are?” Home Depot Guy: “Yeah, we normally stock those, but we don’t have any. Do you want to use this plastic PVC drain designed to drain concrete patios for your shower drain?” ME: “No thank you, do you know when you are going to get them back in stock? Home Depot Guy: “No, we don’t know when we are going to get items, they just arrive. Can I help you with something else?”
Here is some of the wood we found in Aguada. If you need directions on how to get there…it is really easy and very reasonably priced.
Brian and I both woke up early this morning. It was pouring rain all night…beating on our commercial grade corrugated metal roof. We wanted to surf before he started working and I had to leave for the airport to pick up Summer….but the waves were really bad so Brian opted to start work and I opted to blog about the back deck and start carrying extra hardwood out of our living room to my office where it will be stored until we are ready to use it.
I could be wrong, but it sure looks like that rainbow ends at our house.
Brian is leaving today. His flight is out of Aguadilla at 5:15 on Spirit Airlines. That basically means that we have to leave here around 2:15 to get him there early enough to not stress. Saturday traffic is always a wildcard down here in Puerto Rico. You either luck out and get the holeshot…or you get stuck behind every weekend driver that isn’t in a hurry to get anywhere. The only guarantee is that there won’t be pimped out Puerto Rican school buses stopping every couple of minutes.
Brian has a short list of things he would like to get done in the next 6 hours.
Finish the floor in my office
Attach the kitchen threshold trim (Jamie made it the day he left)
Trim the ledge along the steps
Finish the work on the bullnose of the floor where it meets the steps
Hang the microwave oven
Yesterday, Brian and Jerry worked a full day (10:30am - 6:00pm) completing the back deck. Since he has been here, Brian completely rebuilt the back deck, laid the hardwood floors, built the knee wall (taking into account a 62″ opening (French Door) dead center to our future back deck and a 36″ opening all the way to the right for our future steps up to the back porch (we would like to train all of our guests to use the back door), framed in where the screens will go (all I have to do is trim out the PT with a hardwood) and put T-111 plywood around the outside so it matches the rest of the house (once we paint).
Back Porch at 60% done
Opening for the French Screen Doors in the center
Enclosed back porch from the outside
Building this house really has been a marathon accompanied by a series of sprints. The work is slow and steady when I am the General Contractor but as soon as someone that knows what they are doing shows up to help, the progress gets shifted into high gear for the duration of their stay. Jamie and Brian really got so much work done while they were here that the only two major things we have left to deal with is the master bath/jacuzzi area and the 3rd bathroom downstairs.
I have to leave for the airport in less than ten minutes, so this is going to be short as sweet.
There is a ying and a yang to ordering pre-finished tongue and groove hardwood floors. If you order too little, you’ll slow the job down by a few days at best waiting for more wood to arrive or at worst, the supplier won’t have any of the type of wood you are using left. Jamie and Brian told me when this happens, you are forced to switch the type of wood you are using halfway through the job.
We estimated at we would need 1,780 square feet to cover all of upstairs. That included an extra 10% for waste for bad cuts, bad boards, broken tongues etc. For 1,780 square feet we received 100 of these boxes (that weigh about 70lbs each).
By the time Jamie and Brian installed the floor in the two bedrooms and great room we had 39 boxes of flooring left. Wow, that is about $4,500 in extra flooring that can’t be returned!!!! So, we decided to put the hardwoods in the guest loft where Summer and I have been sleeping, on our soon to be enclosed screened in back porch and built a platform in my office for my desk and files. We still have enough wood left over to put tongue and groove above the closet in the master bedroom and above the bathroom. I’ll also be able to use it to trim out above the closets/great room.
Depending on how good I get with these tools I have here, I may even use it to build the shelves in the hallway closet and in the master closet. Heck, its good expensive wood that is going to last forever…and we have it…so we’re gonna use it.
In retrospect, we wouldn’t have spent the extra money if we had known we didn’t need to have this much hardwood flooring to finish the house, but it is allowing us to add a bunch of extras all out of beautiful teak.
When I first moved into the house back in January the list of things to do was so unbelievably long that it was overwhelming. As a first timer, I tried to make the right decision on a bunch of things that I had absolutely no experience handling.
For example: The house had no electricity and was scorching hot every night when the sun went down. We had no back doors to where the back porch would eventually be and the guy who started the construction had a couple pieces of scrap plywood down (some of them overlapping seams…whatever would fit) so he could walk around. I decided that we needed to put down something safe (5/8 sheets of plywood) with railings knowing that we would be under construction in the heat for the next 4 months (we are at 6 months of construction today).
We put down the cheapest stuff (non-treated) because I figured we would just be tearing it up to put down decking for our screened in porch. Well, now that we built up the knee wall around the porch (and made it weather proof), and we had enough extra wood…we decided to continue the teak out onto the porch…but we couldn’t install the teak over top of non treated lumber because the termites would make quick work of it down here.
I went to Home Depot in Mayaguez and forked out a bunch more cash to put down 5/8’s treated plywood and build up the knee wall (actually 4ft) and build the jams and jacks for the screen doors. The top half of the porch will be screened in. Two doors…french doors leading straight out to the deck (that will be there eventually) and one off to the right with a lock that will be a back entrance on the second floor.
We really pushed the Toyota to its limits bringing home lumber for Home Depot.
We spent at least a week prepping and planning for pouring the concrete slab in the backyard. We jackhammered, scheduled the concrete truck, hired some guys that have poured concrete before and…at the last minute, shit hit the fan. Our guy that orchestrated this project (who will remain nameless) completely lost his mind and half of our help quit on the spot (after they got a few rakes and shovels thrown at them). So we were stuck with a truck full of concrete and only 2 guys to make this happen. Luckly, they magically pulled it off!
(please excuse the mess. We’re not tweakers, I swear. You try living in a construction zone, damn it!!)
Pouring concrete is not as simple as it sounds. If you don’t have enough help to spread and finish the concrete before it sets, you are screwed. Especially with this project, because this slab leads into our backdoor, so it had to be very slightly angled away from the house to avoid rain from pooling and flowing into the house. Pretty important stuff when you live in a hurricane zone and it rains nearly every day in Puerto Rico.
Anyhow, the slab is done. Yay!
It measures 21′ x 31′, cost about $1500 ($1000 in concrete and $500 in labor) and took about 8 hours to complete.
Yeah, I know, we have been talking up Ipe hard wood floors for months now. The problem is, we couldn’t find anyone to mill it for us and none of the distributors on the island had it in stock. As a matter of a fact, the only supplier I could find that even had hard wood flooring in the past two months only had Mahogany and was charging $14 per square foot. Let’s see, that’s $14 X 1,750 square feet = $24,500 for floors! Holy Cow! Aaaaack!
Tray (built our steps) and I drove out to Cabo Rojo to one of his wood suppliers and got a catalog from them…they had Ipe, Walnut, Brazilian Cherry, Teak. What a relief, we are going to be able to get our floors (I already booked the tickets for Jamie and Brian to fly down and install them) because this company seems legitimate with a big glossy catalog. BZZZZZZZZZT! Wrong Answer! I called the supplier to order our IPE and they didn’t have any type of flooring in large quantities. They could offer us a couple hundred square feet, but not what we needed.
So now, it was the mad rush again calling every one (in spanish) I could track down that may have hardwood floors. After a stressful couple of days I found a place called Ferreteria Tesero Evenista in San Jaun that stocks hard wood flooring. Their pricing was good ($6.50sq ft) and they had Ipe in stock. The day before delivery (a week before the arrival of Brian…the wood needs to sit in the house for a week to get acclimated) they called me and said they didn’t have enough Ipe. The only thing they had 1,800 square feet of was Brazilian Teak. It is still a very hard wood, it is naturally resistant to rot and termites, but it isn’t Ipe.
Lacking other options, I pulled the trigger on the Brazilian Teak. They delivered the Patagonia Brazilian Teak yesterday. One hundred boxes on a flatbed. Yesterday was a Saturday so there wasn’t anyone here working that could drop what they were doing and help so I unloaded all of it in a little under two hours. I have bruises all over my shoulders and arms from HEAVE HOEING them up onto my shoulder.
We have been preparing our back yard for some concrete for about a week now. We framed up the area where we are going to pour concrete, measured out how / where the slab is going to be poured, twisted up rebarb and of course, jackhammered out the old giant concrete footings.
The concrete truck was scheduled to show up at 7:00am this morning. We ordered 8 yards of concrete and a pump truck. The pump truck showed up at 6:30am. Jerry was here as well, he got the truck and is picking up his crew. Gino rolled in around 7:15 and now we are waiting on Jerry’s crew and the concrete truck.
What I haven’t been doing with my time is painting the sealer on the walls downstairs. Summer and I wanted to get the sealer on the walls downstairs this week so we could get rolling on decorating her office and getting the tv room downstairs ready for the couch (which arrived today).
I set up the brushes, paint tray, moved all the furniture to the center of my office and did a last minute read of the directions on the Water Tite Sealer Paint. The small print mentions that you need to spray a combination of water and muriatic acid on the walls and scrub off the white residue that is often left after concrete work. I don’t have everything I need so I think I am going to check the surf.
Scrubbing the acid on the wall is going to take some time…instead of just being careful with the paint, we are going to have to cover everything in plastic. Gotta make sure we’re good…..I’ll buy the supplies we need tomorrow.
The Surf
The surf has been good for the past two or three weeks now…work was really slowing down until Mike showed up. Now, under Mikes supervision, we’re moving again…although the posts are a little slow. I’ll try to be better with keeping you guys in the loop.
Here is a video I took when I was spying on Stefan jackhammering the cement footings in the backyard:
We are reducing the size of the footings because we are going to pour a cement slab under the porch and the formerly big square footings would have been the perfect ankle-biting height. You can thank us next time you are stumbling around under our back porch and you don’t smash your foot into them.
Although Stefan did put in his time with the jackhammer, I can’t give him all the credit. Jerry did most of the work and my dad took his turn playing with the jackhammer too. If jackhammering looks fun to you, we know where to rent one for $60 a day. Come on down to Puerto Rico and we can find something for you to jackhammer!
Lately, it seems that I am in more of a hurry to finish the house and have grown a little impatient, but I think it is just a phase. It will get done, and we are doing it right.
There are two things that slowed down our progress as far as the master bath goes;
1. We are using Marble
2. We are but jointing the tiles
I’ll explain #1 to you. Marble is a natural stone which requires special expoxy mortars and can crack easily when cutting. If you use ceramic tile, slice ‘em and stick. Much quicker.
The fact that we are pushing all the tiles up against each other without any kind of seam means that the tile installation needs to be done on a perfectly flat wall/floor. There is no ‘fudge’ room that a seam allows you to have. Most houses aren’t framed or stacked (Puerto Rican concrete style) perfectly straight which means you need to add concrete board to the walls, float the floors with a floor leveling compound and apply extra mud to the walls to ensure a tight fit (but joints).
Here is the current progress of the marble installation in the Master Bathroom:
