Wait. Not so fast. Now that downstairs is almost done, the floors still look unfinished so we decided to install tile. We have literally been looking at tile for 3 months and NOTHING has blown us away. I think we were going to do just because we thought we should, to make it look more finished. And then we rediscovered stained polished concrete. Again.

A buddy of ours (talented artist) sent us this site to check out what another DIY couple did with polished concrete at their house. They did a really good job. Check out the designs they created with masking tape on their polished concrete floors.

The stained and acid sketch polished concrete floors I have been looking at on the web look amazing. Summer is stoked on the idea of a design/tile look and I love the idea of a four pointed compass at the entrance way downstairs. I think we found our solution. Now, the new task is to strip the old glossy sealer so the concrete actually absorbes the stain.

I have read a few different ‘do it yourself’ websites and watched a few videos on how to remove the sealer, and I have narrowed our two options to non-toxic strippers; Soy and Citrus.

Citrus Concrete Seal Stripper
The citrus stripper seams much more labor intensive. It involves spray 20 cubic feet at a time, letting the stripper site with cotton drop cloths over it, then pealing up the cloth and most of the stripper with it. This needs to be repeated until all the stripper is gone.

Soy Concrete Seal Remover
The Soy concrete sealer stripper seams to be much less labor intensive (lazy gene). The Soy is applied to the floor, let sit and then gels up and can be removed with a wet-vac and hard bristled broom.

Really, the job is going to be a lot of work no matter what option we choose. Summer and I will both have to move our entire offices and clear out the entire downstairs to the gym, bathroom/laundry room and the platform in my office. Man, this DIY stuff sure is exhausting!

If anyone has any good advice, PR supply information or recommendations, we would greatly appreciate it!

We have been searching for a cool tile for downstairs for a couple weeks now, but aren’t really having any luck finding anything in our budget. We narrowed our choices down to about 6 different tiles that range from porcelain tile to slate. We are going to keep the tile 12”x12” to help reduce the cracking and tiles coming up in the future due to our floor being uneven. The basement was never designed to be apart of the house so the floor wasn’t poured level. Another thing we are going to have to do is strip the concrete polish/sealer up from the floor. From what I understand, if you pour water on concrete and it beads, the mortar you use for the tiles will never stick to the floor and you will waste a lot of time and money.

Help us choose! Which tile do you like the most?

Building materials and labor are much more expensive than we ever expected and although we are ‘do-it yourselfers’ on many of these projects, some of them become too expensive trying to get it right…over and over and over and over and over again.

Our current BIG project is finishing downstairs. We have been slowly saving our money and finishing one project at a time and are really making progress. We recently paid one of our buddies Jerry to come over and install the last two windows downstairs.

After this, we have to:

Before Pictures of the Basement Openings (sort of)

Pictures of the Project in Progress

After Photos of the Window Installation

- Clean. There was annoying construction crap (spackle/drywall dust that took more then 4 floor scrubbings, stray concrete, etc) that I had to clean up.

- Paint. I painted the ceilings and soffits white, the walls light blue and one wall a bright blue.

- Install stripper pole. It might seem strange that I have a ’stripper pole’, but it really is the best excersize and it’s super duper fun. Like playing on the monkey bars when you were a kid!

- Install entertainment center. 32″ TV mounted on the wall, hooked up to a Mac Mini so we have internet access, DVD player, Wii Fit and stereo system.

So, there are all sorts of fun things to do in our gym now! We have a treadmill, stripper pole, Wii Fit balance board, Tai Bo/Dance/Fitness DVD’s, yoga ball, free weights and jump ropes. And most importantly, we have air conditioning in the gym (This may seem like a given for a house in Puerto Rico, but most of our house does not have A/C.)!

While I would consider the gym as being done, these are a couple of little things that will be done in the near future:

- Trim out the windows. But I havn’t figured out how we are going to do that yet.

- Organize/hide all the cords hanging from the entertainment center.

- Install grande mirrors on the back wall.

And one last thing that we will eventually do:

- Install Brazilian teak hardwood flooring. We have just enough left over from when we did the upstairs, so whenever we get around to doing the floors downstairs we will install that in the gym. But we are pretty burned out on construction, so the polished concrete floors are just fine with me until we decide to open that can of worms .

Here is a walk through of our gym today:

Now, looking at these pictures, you need to understand that so much more went into this behind the scenes. First off, we have the electrical work. Brian flew in from Florida for a 7 day trip and ended up staying for 21 days! Apparently, the last guy we had down here completely butchered the electrical work and basically spit in the general direction of electrical code and standards. He didn’t ground outlets (we have gone through 3 battery back up units and the computer on Summers’ commercial sewing machine fried). Not to mention the fire hazard of ungrounded electrical run in a wood house. So, the former electrical rats nest known as our home, was rewired downstairs. We also added all the recessed lighting (good luck finding commercial grade recessed cans on the west side of the island), ran Internet up to the kitchen, set up the wiring in the wall for a TV downstairs and ran electric out of the front of the house on the left and right side for future landscape lighting and to have outdoor outlets. Brian did a ton of work that was above and beyond his responsibilities. He also fixed some plumbing issues around the dishwasher and cleaned out the sewer pipes before we close everything up. Man, I get tired just thinking about all the work he did.

Then came the next bit of work. Cleaning out all of the rooms and getting ready for the crew to come in and do the ceilings. We wanted everything out of the way so nothing was in the way and so nothing got broken. Cleaning downstairs was a much bigger project that we thought and we left more behind and open to damage than we wanted to when we left, but with Sydney and packing for two months in California we couldn’t get it all done.

The work took about 5 weeks to complete. Thank goodness we weren’t here for all that banging. At this point, we are sick of hearing the banging of construction and people coming over asking for money, running over our baby plants, driving on our lawn (around the rocks we have set up to stop people from doing that) or honking the horn in the driveway just as we get the baby to go to sleep.

So, without any further delay, here are the pictures of the ceilings, soffits, fans and recessed lighting downstairs.

Here are the big things left on my ‘to do list’:

1. Tile Downstairs
2. Install leftover hardwood floors in the gym/guest bedroom
3. Find a wood worker to build and install big ’shutter style’ windows like we have upstairs
4. Find and install french doors (get rid of iron bars downstairs)
5. Recycle the iron bars by welding them into our front gate
6. Back deck

We really are getting close though. We have been working much more outside on the landscaping and paint and empenatar work, but finally moved the next project to inside.

We are going to close up the ceiling in the basement with sophets and drywall and make it look real real nice. We are currently working on all the wiring downstairs, the future wiring for outdoor landscape lighting, power for our water purifier, our back porch lighting and a power source for an eventual pool area.

Once all the wiring is done, we are going to insulate the ceiling and close up the stairwell so we can have a fully climate controlled level of the house. This summer really taught us that it pays to have AC with a newborn. Sydney didn’t like taking naps very much all swaddled up when it’s 100 degrees.

Once I get some pictures I will upload them so you all can see the progress. I’ll also update you to where we bought the 3 wire and recessed cans which were very difficult to track down. Also, we had to reground all of the wiring downstairs that was in the block wall because the original electrician didn’t ground anything in the concrete. I don’t know if that is local standard or we had a lazy electrician with too man Medallas in him, but we blew out a bunch of battery back up units and Summers expensive sewing machine.

After calling around and asking around, I had the job narrowed down to a few local businesses. I narrowed my choice down even more by price point, brand names and professionalism.

The Air Conditioner Units I wanted were the new Inverter type units. They save over 30% in electricity than their predecessors and considering Rincons Electric Bills just went up 30% last month, that is quite a bit of savings. I also wanted to get units that were strong enough to cool all of downstairs when all three splits were run simultaneously.

After research and due diligence, I decided I wanted to buy the Daikin brand split units.

Our two offices and the spare bedroom/gym are about 12ft wide by 18ft long with 10ft ceilings. Our great room downstairs (between the offices) is 40 feet long by 20 feet wide. I decided that the 24,000 BTU split inverter units were the right ones for the job. Keep them turned low for the offices and once we finish up the media room and new entrance downstairs, we’ll be able to keep it all cool by cranking the units in the three rooms with our interior doors open.

The company we used for the job was Aguada Refrigeration and Air Conditioning. They were here when they said they would be, installed everything professionally (centered, sturdy etc) and gave us a 5 year warranty on the installation and the split units and compressors.

If you are researching for an Air Conditioning company that services Rincon, use the business I used, they were rock solid on all levels. Tell them Stefan from www.ca2pr.com sent you to them and they will give you a discount AND give me a finders fee.

Here is their contact information:
Aguada Regrigeration and A/C
• Office Telephone Number: (787) 868-3936
• Cell Phone Number: (787) 614-0412
• Alternate Cell Number: (939) 640-3693

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:







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!