California 2 Puerto Rico

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:

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We have had one reported injury since we started working on the house here in Rincon…and that was Josh…after he got back to California. His back completely went out on him. The week before he and I moved a boat load of boulders which very easily could have contributed if not been completely to blame on his injury, but it didn’t happen here…so I consider that a quasi-injury.

Today, I officially injured myself. It happened here and I can confirm what, how, when and where it happened.

Here are the Facts
• Machete Present
• Jungle Hook Present
• Pica Pica Present
• Kuta Dog Keeping an eye on me
• It was raining
• I was on a hill

I was chopping away at the Pica Pica in the jungle with a newly sharpened machete. I had been at it for about an hour and was making some great progress. It has been raining and in the mid 70’s for the past two days (I am wearing jeans and a sweatshirt right now) so the jungle work has been much easier without the beating sun, but the footing is more treacherous. So, I was standing on a steep incline and slipped while swinging the machete…which slipped out of my hand. It flipped down to the ground handle first as I fell forward into the hill. I put my hands out to catch my self and it came down on top of the machete pinning the handle to the ground…and the machete went right into my hand. Ouch.

I immediately knew I was in a little bit of trouble because I heard the blade scrape against my bone and when I looked down at it blood pulsated out an splashed me on the cheek. Because it was raining, I dismissed the fact that my hand was dripping red as a sign of immanent death. Instead, I applied a bunch of pressure and walked up to the house…took off my wet clothes and woke up summer to apply a couple of butterfly bandages (i am so glad she’s here).

By the time Summer got up, the bleeding had stopped and we put to butterfly bandages on it. Summer wouldn’t let me go back down there today, so we went and spent $5,000 at Home Depot instead.

Sick one!

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I have been anticipating a swell for the past three days. I haven’t checked the surf yet this morning but even if the swell did come in, I already know that it is going to be blown out. It is almost 7:00am, I have been up for the better part of an hour drinking my coffee and watering the peach fuzz and all of our new palm tree’s and the wind is blowing hard.

This mornings weather is a first for me (since we moved down in May). The trade winds are already blowing at a pretty good pace and everything is wet, like it was raining for a better part of the night. It is cool out and because it probably rained through the night, the humidity is relatively low. It reminds me of an early September morning in Jersey where I grew up.

If the surf is flat or too choppy, here is my agenda for the day:
• Pick up our tile order in Mayaguez
• Sweep, clean and straighten up the construction site (for my sanity)
• Work in the Jungle
• Try not to think about Summer being in here in less that 24 hours (or time will just creep along)
• Help layout the vanities in the master bedroom

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I am too tired to get into a big long explanation…but the stairs are done! Almost. We have a few more coats of stain and we need to put in the plugs (black, to match the stringers)…then it’s done. I wanted to get pictures up for everyone to see..it really opens the house up. It just feels bigger now.

This is what it looks like from upstairs

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I am quite tired right now. It has been a stressful day thinking about Summer and her entire family in San Diego facing the most devastating fires California has ever seen.

Aside from being a stress ball worrying about my future in-laws, I planted trees, watered the dirt (peach fuzz lawn), made a run to Home Depot, worked on the computer for a couple hours, watched Tray and Mark build the stairs and cleaned the grout off of the kitchen tile two more times before applying a test coat of 511 Impregnator in the corner of the kitchen to make sure it wasn’t going to discolor the tile or make it into gold or something screwy like that.

I had to wait a few hours before I could check the test area of the tile, and by the time it was dry and the waiting period was over, it was dinner time. I only meant to be gone for an hour…but one thing led to another and I got home at 10:30pm. I just finished applying the 511 Impregnator to the entire kitchen and I am ready for bed (I had to apply the sealer tonight because the kitchen guys are going to be here early in the morning to continue the cabinet instalation).

Have a look at the “unfinished” version of the lower half of our stairs. These guys really did do a great job with the mathematics of this thing…they weren’t working with much space because of the way our front door is set up and the location of the hallway so to get the runs as long as they did without making the steps too steep took a lot of skill, planning and execution skills.

Good night everybody!

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Tray and Mark are working on the stairs today. We discussed hanging the doors, drywall and trim while they are waiting for the stain on the steps to dry. They are on it! They get here every morning at 8:00am and complete the day by cleaning up after themselves. This is not typical for Puerto Rico.

Jerry and I will be working on the Jungle all day today. We customized two Jungle Hooks to pull down the Pica Pica and hack at the root with machetes…these should work great. The first two broke, so with a few improvements (I engineered the improvements) they should get us to where we need to be.

Stress:
Please keep Robin (Summers mom) and Gary in your prayers (or whatever you do), they were evacuated from their house in Romona yesterday due to the Witch Fire that is burning in San Diego. Our thoughts and positive energy are with you guys…

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I am so stoked to have stairs leading from upstairs to downstairs! It really doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but it really is. Finishing the construction downstairs is about 1/16th the work as completing the work upstairs…polish the floors (done), plaster the walls (done), run electrical (done), hook up outlets and fans (50% done), install doors, runner boards on the floor and Seal and Paint the walls (we need to wait 30 days to seal the walls). As soon as the electric is done, we can move our living space from the construction zone upstairs to the 95% completed downstairs. This will clear out the space to work faster and get ready for the hardwood floor installation next month.

Tray and Mark started the stair construction on Thursday and are estimating they will be done on Wednesday. Can you imagine walking down steps to get downstairs/upstairs as opposed to the steep ladder (10 ft ceilings plus 3 feet of stringers…13ft down). The dogs will be able to roam the entire house freely…they’ll be able to go out back into the fenced in portion of the yard (i won’t have to worry about letting them out) and both of them will love sleeping on the cold concrete slab floor. There are a few benefits for Summer and I too…but this isn’t about us…it’s about the dogs!

The stringers are made out of Number One 3×6 treated lumber…they will be stained black to hide the green treated wood and to create a cool contrast with the Mahogany steps. The first two pictures are the stringers getting cut out and the last picture is of the giant milled Mahogany boards (in Summers office) waiting to be cut, routed and stained.

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With all of the work we have been doing on the house, we haven’t really been focusing on the Master Bedroom. It has been on my mind, but there is a chronological process to all of the work we are doing here and the way it works out…we need to finish “A”, “B” and “C” before we can get started on “D”. For example, I am not going to pull Gino off of the kitchen tile work to start on the vanities in the master bath because we are waiting on the kitchen tile work completion to finish installing the cabinets…and we are waiting for the kitchen cabinet installation to order the counter tops (so we can have an exact measurement) and the counter tops take 6 weeks to arrive. HOWEVER, we are waiting for the vanities to be built so we can measure the amount of tile we need so we can start to finish the master bedrooms jacuzzi and vanity corner…which is the first thing you see as you enter the room. See what I am saying…chronological process.

Another example of this is the process of laying the marble walls in the Master Bath. The tile we are using on the floor is a pre-sealed and grouted travertine. It is somewhere between a 1/4 and 1/2 inch thick. It will (is) cover the entire floor and will be the 6” border around the bottom of the shower and wet room. From there, we will stack the marble on top of it and carry it up the wall to six feet. Here is the process; the marble is 3/4″ to 1″ thick…so we need to build the bottom tiles out a half an inch or so so the staggered marble tiles are flush with the border tile. Because the marble is so heavy, we need to give the travertine a day or two to dry to ensure it is structurally sound….but we came up 10 tiles short for the installation so that has come to a grinding halt. We are pretty much dead in the water in the master bath until those tiles come in…which I had to special order from San Juan.

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Today, I worked with Jerry cleaning up all of the junk in the backyard to get it ready for the dump truck. Once we were done moving all of the wood and trash around…I went and picked up my Mark Richards surfboard from one of the local ding repair guys and went for a surf in little waist high, but clean surf. When I got back to the house, Jerry and the guys had already spread all of the topsoil around the front yard, dumped all of the trash in the truck and were pretty much waiting on me. I was only gone for two hours!

The guy that sold us the topsoil used a Bobcat to push all of the dirt around and pick up our trash. He said if we wanted to use it for anything, he would leave it with us for the rest of the day. Of course we could use it! So, for the next three hours I powered around the yard in a Bobcat clearing weeds, moving dirt and getting ready for our big planting day tomorrow. I think we need a few Bobcats for miscellaneous stuff around the yard…maybe 3 or 4.

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We started working on the kitchen floor yesterday. We are butt jointing all of the tiles (no gap) which makes it a more difficult task as opposed to having a gap between each seem that would allow you to fudge the measurements a bit.

After measuring the entire room, determining the center point and determining which part of the room is going to be the focal point, we laid out the tiles so that all of the cuts would be against the wall on the right and or under the cabinets once they are completely installed. The entrance has full tiles as will the main work area of the kitchen. The first few rows of marble that were installed need to sit for 48 hours to completely cure before they start making cuts and laying the sides. They’ll need to walk on them which means they need to be completely set and dry.

The factory cuts of the marble are not perfect, some of them are a little bit thicker at one end vs the other and some of the edges have tiny areas that look beveled. I don’t know if that is how all marble is, or if that is a bi-product of buying marble in Puerto Rico. There are going to be some small gaps that we’ll have to fill in with a grout at the end of the day. Gino suggested we grind up broken pieces of the marble to create a grout that matches color perfectly. We’ll see…do any of you have experience with a decision like this?

Here are some pictures of the progress:

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