Summer and I finally found a great door place in Puerto Rico. They are located on the No. 2 highway just north of Isabella (if you are driving towards San Juan). They had a very large supply of nice wood doors. All of these mahogany doors look like they are hand made. They range in price from $100 to $500 per door. They also sell brass hardware and other door fixtures and accessories. What they don’t do, is sell the doors in pre-hung frames.
Two of these doors upstairs, guest and master bedroom
We are going to cut out the top square of wood and add glass
The office doors do not include the louvered side windows. We did however buy four of those for under our back porch. We’ll have two 19′ louvered side windows on both sides of our 96” tall, 72″ wide mahogany French doors (not pictured here).
Placement of Louvered windows and the new giant French Doors:
Summer and I went to the Rooms to Go liquidation center before she left for California looking for some furniture. I found an awesome couch set for my office but ultimately didn’t buy it…but I had a reason. I couldn’t rationalize spending a bunch of money on lounge furniture for my office when i am still working on a desk that I made out of left over Cedar plywood.
It prompted me to look around online a bit and I found this great desk….in Wisconsin. Does anyone know if there are any antique dealers here on the west coast or in San Juan?
Stefan decided that he wanted to try his hand at plumbing and installed a pedestal sink in our downstairs bathroom, so we picked out a Kohler sink from Home Depot and a Pegasus faucet in brushed nickel.
Installing a sink seems like an easy task, but it’s pretty involved and can be difficult if you don’t follow the instructions exactly. The 1st bummer was that we realized that we had to knock a hole in the new drywall in order to install a 2×4 to attach the sink to. Something that you would have done before installing drywall, if you know what you are doing. Us, not so much…
Stefan showing off his plumbers crack as he knocks out drywall to install the stud to attach the sink to:
Kuta inspecting the pipes and planning the sink installation:
Stefan installing the valves/hose thingies that will eventually bring water to the sink faucet:
Stefan having a stand off with the sink and faucet…:
Summer checking for drips:
I should be a plumber…:
The finished product…A Kohler pedestal sink with Pegasus faucet:
Let there be water!:
All in all, it was a good learning experience and I think we did a great job!
We are keeping the upstairs of our house somewhat tradition when it comes to the interior design, so we decided to get a little buck wild,insane, um, creative, with the downstairs. For the downstairs bathroom, we picked out a dark gray (almost black) tile for the floors, light gray tile with oriental accents for the shower and a bold “cranberry” color for the walls. Well, that “cranberry” color turned out to be HOT PINK. Here is the progress of the bathroom and laundry room so far:
Every one that has seen the bathroom has laughed and made a “techno”, “nightclub” or “lets do drugs and get naked in here!” comment about our sexy little techno bathroom…haha. We were going for a more zen feel, but whatever, it’s hilarious. I wish we had the foresight and purchased a black toilet for this bathroom.
Before my last trip to San Diego, I wanted to get the paint done in my office. Unfortunately I was rushed, didn’t read the faux painting instructions and it wasn’t turning out the way I wanted it. So I abandoned the project, until today. Here is the base coat + partial paint that didn’t turn out:
I’m doing a faux finish that requires a lighter tinted paint (the seafoam looking paint) as a base coat, with a paint/glaze mix for the finishing coat (the darker teal color).
On my 1st try, I was rolling the darker teal paint on and then trying to manipulate the paint with cheesecloth, for a weathered look. Unfortunately I was getting roller lines and I ran out of cheese cloth about 1/10th of the way through…
So, I resumed the project today with a new game plan. I mixed the glaze and paint (4 parts glaze to 1 part paint) and cut up a terrycloth towel and used that as my paint brush.
I scrunched the towel into a ball, dipped it into the glaze/paint mix and “washed” the walls in a circular motion. It really was just like washing/scrubbing a car, and I like how it turned out (for the most part).
Here is the finished faux finish:
Now I need to paint the white walls (they’ve been primed already), and I’m thinking of adding a pearlescent additive to the white paint to give it an interesting shine. I’m also going to paint the window panes white.
After the white paint, I need to pick out baseboards, outlet covers and hang all of the dohickies that go on the wall (which I need to get right the 1st time, since I’ll be drilling into concrete to hang anything in my office).
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.
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.
Gino started laying the marble in the kitchen yesterday. He checked the level of the floor and thought it looked good so he started setting our 24 inch tiles. He set 3 of them, and on his fourth he had a hard time getting the joints to line up (Butt Joint) and he decided to tear up the three tiles he already set (it took him 2 hours) and to put down a floor leveler to make his job easier down the line.
I went to the Home Depot and bought UltraPlan, another Mapei product. UltraPlan is a high performance, quick setting, self-leveling underlayment for tile floors. The purpose of it is to level the floors to make butt jointing tile much easier and less time consuming. If the floor isn’t even after we lay the tile, marble tile can break. We used up 4 bags ($40 a bag) to level the floor in the kitchen.
This morning, we went back to home depot, bought a new 1/2 inch drill to replace the one that burnt out yesterday (i also bough it yesterday..so I exchanged the busted one for a new one), picked up 14 bags of Marmolina to plaster the walls (we should finish up this afternoon) and a new trow to apply the UltraPlex 2 marble grout / thinset.
The twins are supposed to show back up today at 2:30 to finish up with the wall plastering downstairs…it took about a week and a half. They said 4 days. I am really glad Summer and I discussed this one ahead of time and decided to pay them for the entire job (payment at the completion of the job) as opposed to the per day charge they suggested.
I put together a little movie of the work going on downstairs. The movie really makes it seem like this stuff is getting done in a day or so…but in actuality all of these tasks take a while. If your on schedule with labor, finding the materials throws you off. If you are on schedule with material, the guys that are supposed to be doing the work don’t show up. In order to stay on schedule, the stars need to be aligned…big time.
Another example of thinks taking longer than expected is the pain/sealer we are going to put over the plaster downstairs. The sealer is called “WaterTite.” From the research I have done, it is a great product that can actually seal out water that has a PSI of 32! It costs $38 bucks a gallon, and there is only one store on the West side of the island where I could find it. I went there yesterday (so we could start painting the plaster), purchased the last 16 gallons they had and brought it home. Jerry was here, taping up the floors with plastic and we were planning on starting the job last night. After I read the fine print on the container, I found out that you need to wait 30 days before applying WaterTite to new masonry. Well, I’ll calendar that one for November 10th.
Jerry and the twins have been working on plastering the downstairs walls and they are almost done! Here is a picture of Stefans office with one wall complete:
Unfortunately, the yard doesn’t look as nice…
It looks like the downstairs is going to be ready to rock by the time I get back down to Puerto Rico, so I’ve been trying to decide how I’m going to paint and decorate my office. I bought a book on painting and different techniques as I think I want to do a distressed finish on the walls…
