California 2 Puerto Rico

Here is a video walk through of the downstairs of our house. The cement floors have been polished and coated with two coats of high gloss concrete sealer.

The walls are going to be plastered this week and then we are going to work on the stairs. Stefan is currently researching designs and of course the hardest part is trying to decide what we want…

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Summer and I really want to have a very raw look downstairs. Currently, it is all completely raw block walls and slab concrete. Our plan is to polish the concrete on the floor and maybe keep the walls block and just sand them, clean them and let them look unfinished. Then we could put our money into detail work around all of the doors and put in some killer industrial private investigator doors in the offices and a normal door for the guest bedroom/gym.

The other option for the walls is plaster or some sort of concrete that could have a smooth finish. The problem with this finish is that it takes a long time and is expensive both with concrete and about 2.5 weeks of labor. If it was something we had our hearts set on, we would spend the money, but I feel like we are just doing something to take the next step to finishing the house, not doing it because we like the idea of it.

Regardless, we definitely want the floors polished…so the guy I hired last week showed up a day late and polished up the floors. Before he could do that, we had empty the entire contents of downstairs (including 30 some sheets of 4×10 3/4 inch greenboard, power tools, plywood etc) and put it in the new shed we built to hold our tools and stuff.

We built the shed under the existing master closet out of pressure treated wood. There were two things we did that will hopefully make our life easier later. First, I set the floor with screws over where our septic tank pipe is in case we ever needed to get to it and second, I mixed a couple bags of concrete and covered the ground with a few inches of concrete. The reason for this was simply to keep the weeds out…weeds in Puerto Rico can be very invasive.

Here are some pictures of our guy polishing the cement, of the shed and a video of the guy I hired polishing our concrete and of our shed.

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The plan (as of Tuesday) for today was to fill up the planter boxes a couple inches with pebbles (to avoid too much water on the roots of our plants) and then proceed to fill them up with topsoil so we can start planting. Then, we were going to haul a bunch of topsoil from the neighbors house to the front yard and at the same time order more topsoil for the front yard (we only have about 5 yards at the neighbors house…a dump truck holds about 20 yards) and get a few estimates for sod (it rains so much the seed would just get washed away) and arrange for all of them to show up the same day so we could spread the topsoil and lay the sod without all of our soil getting washed down the hill. If you don’t think it rains hard here, check out the Puerto Rican weather we had today…hard rain but not much wind and it only lasted about 45 minutes.

Back to the plan….eh hem…it never happened. But here is how it went down.

Last night, at 5:00pm, a concrete guy that we have been trying to track down for over a month stopped by and said he could bring his diamond bit orbital floor sander over to the house and polish the floors downstairs. But, he could only work for the next two days. So…of course, you have to get things done when the contractors are available, so I told him to come on by at 10:00am and we would have two rooms ready for him to sand. The plan was to move everything into the finished rooms and then do those floors…but we have a lot of stuff…and most of it is heavy…so I pulled an audible.

Jerry and I cleared out the two rooms, Mark stopped by and helped me move all of the hurricane shutters upstairs to under the deck, and we started building the shed that is going to go under the new Master Bedroom Closet. The video below was from this morning at 10:00am (oh, the cement guy never showed up and said he’d be here on Saturday morning instead) showing the work we did and still had to do. By the end of the day, we dug out the footings, poured the concrete and framed up the shed. I’ll show you more pictures tomorrow. For now, check out the video of our downstairs walk through.

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We are going to be covering the entire upstairs (except the two bathrooms) with Ipe Hardwood Floors. Ipe wood, also known as Iron Wood and Brazilian Walnut, is valued for its durability, strength, and its natural resistance to decay, wet conditions, and insect infestation.

Ipe and the Janka Test

The rating chart is from the Janka test, a rating test commonly used to measure wood hardness. Basically, the test calculates the number of pounds per square inch required to drive a small steel ball half its diameter into the surface of the wood. This test shows that Ipe wood is more than 368% harder then Teak wood! Ipe has a Class A Fire Rating which puts it in the same category as concrete and steel. Ipe Heartwood, is typically reddish brown with a greenish tinge, often with lighter or darker striping. When sanded and finished Ipe looks similar to a teak wood but for half the price.

Jamie and Brian, two old and great friends from my days in New Jersey, are going to be here in Rincon in November to do the installation. They have both been installing hardwood floors for years and always seem to be working there downtime at friends houses applying their well tuned trade and skills. We have about 1500 square feet upstairs not including the front and back porches. Right now we are guestimating that we are going to spend about $7,000 in wood alone. If we were to use Mahagony we would be spending $14 per square foot as opposed to $5 per square foot for Ipe.

Check out some examples of finished IPE (Brazilian Walnut and Ironwood) inside and outside.

I like the smooth finish on this floor

The is a little more our speed, but I don’t know if I like the spacing

An IPE Deck, I really like the wood