I say all this even though we are still in California, because I miss home. One of the things I think about are the beautiful Trade Winds consistently blowing through the house. Without fail, almost every day, those Trade Winds start blowing through Rincon around 10am and don’t settle down until 3 or 4 o’clock. When we were in Palm Springs a couple weekends ago, I took a few pictures of the mesmerizing windmill farms. They are everywhere.

Renewable Energy in Palm Springs

So, it makes me wonder. It would be great to subsidize our power bills with wind or solar power. I need to think money though, does Puerto Rico recognize renewable power additions to your home in tax breaks or credits? Is it considered when your house is being appraised for a refinance or sale? How many solar panels do you actually need to power a 4,000 square foot house? How much do battery back ups cost and do you need a lot of space to store the fuel cells?

Sydney time takes 100% of your attention 85% of the time. That 15% is when she feeding herself cheerios, playing with her juice bottle or watching the animals in amazement. Even when she is on the front porch in the pack n’ play (see photos) or trying to crawl around on the floor, she requires constant supervision. It’s like she’s a baby or something

This last week, I have been leaving the office around 5:00pm and loading up Sydney in her new baby backpack and hiking up into the hills. Our average hike was about 45 minutes or so and Sydney just loved it. Loaded up in the pack, she is way up high, bouncing around, grabbing for leaves, checking out cows (see photos) and staring at every dog and cat like it’s the first time she’s seen one. Keep in mind, we’re in Puerto Rico and everyone has dogs. It’s like a barking orchestra as you walk through the narrow roads up and down the hills.

Last weekend, we started building bench railings on the front porch. Sydney is getting more and more mobile everyday. Putting up the bench railings is going to kill two birds with one stone. First, Sydney won’t be able to fall off the sides of the porch (highest part, the front is bordered by a big planter) and that is a good thing. Second, it solves our front porch seating issues. Porch furniture is super expensive and we haven’t found anything that we like that will work on our narrow front porch. Adding the benches has eliminated the need for furniture out there. Now we have two hammocks and seating for 6 to 10 people. I’ll upload the bench photos as a single post once we finish them. You can get a sneak preview by checking them out in the background of the front porch picture with Sydney.

Sydney and I went for a hike in her new baby backpack (see video on my blog) last week. I hiked up the 414 and around the ridge line of our valley up into Rio Grande and the headed back down toward Rincon and our house. I ended up on the wrong side of the valley when we got back down and had to cut through the woods (sketchy with all the pica pica) to get home in time for Sydneys bed time routine. We are only about a 5 minute walk from downtown, but as you’ll see in the picture below of our house, we are still situated nicely on our own little hill in the valley where no one can build up 6-8ft away from us.

There is an old water tank about halfway up the hill from our house that has great views. It is a big square concrete structure that sits on the edge of the hill and affords great views of downtown Rincon and the marina. Coincidentally, it also has a great view of our home.

Sort of an Arial Shot

- 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 composted everything that we could, raised bees for honey, bartered my dads services for food/produce trade out from farmers and my mom baked all of our breads and did all of the cooking for the family. I don’t every remember going out to dinner as a kid. Why would we, we had everything we needed at the house (thanks mom/dad).

Our move to New Jersey brought to light the evolution of society and we had city sewer, city water and the trash trucks picked up our trash at the curb in front of our house (45 feet from where we stored the trash cans). I became a city kid pretty quick and took most of it for granted. North Carolina and California brought more of the same conveniences. Well, you’ve heard the story before, Summer and I left California because of all the people and the ridiculously high cost of living and real estate.

So here we are, de-evolved from California conveniences living in Rincon and having no desire to change anything at all. We are trying to grow at least enough produce for a salad or two a week, we have at least 30 fruit trees planted and our septic tank is 40 yards behind the house. Not including our construction projects, we have about 70% more house chores to do because of our lifestyle change and our days are just as busy as when we lived in San Diego, but our satisfaction with life is 10 times what it was in Carlsbad.

Why, you ask, am I writing about this today? Here’s why; yesterday I picked up my chainsaw and lawnmower from the small engine repair shop and I’m getting ready to tackle some of the lawn this morning and I need to take the trash to the municipal pick up spot witch is about 1,500 feet from where we store our cans during the week. If I were a kid, I would hate dragging those trash cans all the way up the driveway and switching them out with our empty cans, but I’m not a kid…so they are getting thrown into the back of the truck for a speedy drop off.

When was the last time you used a chainsaw, machete or had to fill up your pickup with trash to get it to the dump? I do it weekly, and I’m loving it.

Any who, we got the doors, yay! And Trey installed them for us on our guest bathroom, guest room, master bedroom and downstairs bathroom.

Here are our newly private guest bedroom and bathroom…

When Trey was cutting the doors to fit them, he noticed that the doors were not solid mahogany, like we were told. They are actually pine with a very thin mahogany laminate. Fabulous…

Oh, well, they look and feel nice and solid. And we are just happy to finally have doors in our house!

Summer and I are managing the expensive work little by little and enjoying our new home AND as you guys know, we are landscaping like crazy. Much like investing in a home in a booming town like Rincon, all of the landscaping we do today is going to be mature and beautiful in 5 years which makes our time spent on the yard an investment.

I was walking around the yard with my coffee this morning, watering our garden, and decided that I wanted to show you guys all of our star players:

I planted this flamboyant tree on the side of our hill about 6 months ago. It really likes it there because it is growing like crazy and looks really healthy. We just need to keep the vines off of it (and all the other plants)

These are Elephant Ears transplanted from Dennis Richs’ Pool Bar. These guys must be prehistoric, because they are just huge. Definitely the fastest growing plant we have so far.


This flamboyant tree started at 6” tall 6 months ago and is reaching for the sun. Once these Flamboyant trees mature, they are going to provide great shade and beautiful flowers.

This is the state tree of Costa Rica, it is called a Guanacaste Tree. They look like the Flamboyant tree but get to be 6x the size! Great shade tree down the line.

Everything in our planter is BLOWING UP! If you look closely you’ll see Ginger (red flowers), Christmas Palm trees, some invasive plant from the stream bed, passion fruit vines and some flowers that Summer planted.

We almost named our street, Crooked Palm Lane because a bunch of Palms we bought last year were all super crooked. We have been staking them and trimming them to help them straightne out. This Queen Palm is getting less crooked everyday.

These palms (I think a Royal Palm or King Palm) are so green and majestic when they are mature…I’m looking forward to seeing this one dead center in our front yard.

This rubber tree is well over 12ft tall now, it was about 2 ft when we planted it 6 months ago.

Well, it ends up that the owner has changed their mind, and there isn’t a house for sale in Sector Vargas after all. While we were walking around the hills, Jerry and I stopped at his uncles house for a quick hello and glass of water. He took us up to his roof to show us the views the second floor will have once he builds an addition. His view really is going to be great, especially of our house!

Here is picture of our place from above. If you click on the picture, a larger one will open in a new window.

Here is the same picture with our property line. Anyone want to help me get this under control? You can click on this picture to make it bigger as well.

True story.

Haha.