California 2 Puerto Rico

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.

Gotto go to the airport and then SURF!

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Brian got down a couple of days ago. It’s been great having a buddy around that really knows what he is doing. He has been installing hardwood floors for years and rolled in with all the right tools and brain power to get it done right.

As you can see, it is factory pre-finished tongue and groove hardwood floors.

After lining up how the floor is going to be installed, it is time to take wood out of the boxes and line them up so that the cracks do not overlap each other for at leas two boards. This is called ‘racking’. Once the racking is done for about 6 rows (30-60ft accross) brian cruises on in there with his pneumatic nail gun and throws in some staples. Don’t get me wrong, these aren’t the kind of staples you would use to send stapled receipts to the tax guy. These staples are Bostich 2 inch by half a doo-hickey strong staples that are put in to each board with 120 pounds of air. Strong stuff….

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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.

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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.

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After quite a few tests of the grout in the kitchen, we went with an Antique White Non-Sanded Grout. Gino grouted all of the seams and little cracks yesterday…and this morning I am sponging the entire floor tile by tile. I am using two buckets of water and one sponge to clean the thin film of grout from the tile surface…one dirty water bucket that I use to dip the sponge into after wiping one tile and then the smaller bucket to dampen the sponge in clean water so I can get started on the next tile with some relatively clean water (I breaded chicken in a similar fashion when I was a line cook….clean hand…dirty hand).

Here are some pictures after one round of sponging. It will probably take three meticulous passes with the sponge to get the grout residue off of the marble before we are able to seal it with the 511 Impregnator. It took me about 40 minutes to go tile by tile…and my back is feeling real nice. It really makes me appreciate the hard work Gino has put in to get the floor completely flat and the butt joints to line up so well.

It’s hard to see the film from this angle, but it’s there

You can see the thin film from this angle

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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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Acting the recommendation of the Granite guy in Mayaguez, I am going to buy 511 Impregnator to seal the white marble floors in the kitchen. The only stuff I found around here is way too expensive…so we are going to order it online.

511 Impregnator Sealer is applied to polished marble floors as a water, stain and slip protector (it also says it can be used on slate, quarzile, travertine, polished granite, porcelain tile, quarry tile, terrazzo, concrete, brick, stucco, agglomoerate and sanded grout). It is designed to protect medium to dense porous surfaces. It creates an invisible barrier that resists moisture and stains but still allows moisture to escape. Each gallon covers 1,000-4,000 square feet.

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Stefan and I decided against doing wood floors in the kitchen, so we bought cream colored marble for the floors. Next step was to figure out what the hell we are going to do for the kitchen counters. Originally we wanted to do a modern concrete counter top, but we couldn’t find anyone skilled enough down here, that we would trust doing them. So, we went granite shopping the other day. Quite honestly, I thought all the granite was ugly, but we found one that we think we like (of course it’s the most expensive of the bunch…):

Here is a picture of the cream marble (floors), mahogany (cabinets) and green granite (counters):

What do you think? It will cost over $6000 to do granite in the kitchen. Ouch.

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As I mentioned before, we’ve picked out a dark brown marble for the walls in the master bathroom and a light brown/cream travertine for the floor. Here is a picture of the tiles and trim we spent a good few days trying to decide on. The trim is small travertine tiles accented with copper:

Well, Stefan just told me that Gino (our tile guy) doesn’t like the trim. He thinks it looks too rustic for the marble. What do you think? I still think it looks good and we’re not trying to be all bling-bling marble with gold trim ;).

Stefan already axed my 1st choice of trim, which you can see here. Why doesn’t anyone trust my design ideas?

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