Stefan and I have been trying to take a break from working on the house, while Conner and Dianne are in town visiting, but I wanted to finished the closet really bad. So, Conner and Dianne decided to help us out and finish up the last of the master closet.
They helped build the last shelf and hang the last dowel. Our closet is finally complete and I love it!
Conner and Dianne helping build our closet.
Our completed closet!
Left side of the closet.
Right side of the closet.
Fill ‘er up! Can you guess which side is Summer’s?!
We love organization!
To make this closet, we used the following materials:
~ 3/4″ cedar plywood (4 or 5 4′x8′ sheets)
~ 6 wood dowels
~ 6 sets of dowel flanges
~ Belt hooks
~ Wood glue
Tools used:
~ Circular saw
~ Nail gun and nails
~ Electric sander
~ Level
~ Squaring ruler
~ Tape Measure/ruler
The total cost to build this closet was around $300 (since we already owned all the tools) and it took us about 6 - 8 hours of labor. Although, we can probably do it a lot quicker now that we have the kinks worked out :).
Damn you, westelm.com! I found the perfect day bed for our guest bedroom and they won’t ship to Puerto Rico.
A day bed seems like the perfect solution for our guest bedroom. Since there is a queen size bed in the loft area, we’ve been going back and forth on if we were going to get another bed or perhaps a pull out couch or something along those lines.
Cool daybed = bueno, West Elm’s shipping policy = no bueno!
Since the upstairs flooring has been laid, we decided to set up the living room set that was delivered a few weeks ago (and has since been sitting in huge boxes in Stefans office). Here is the dark brown leather couch and chair we got at Rooms To Go in Mayaguez:
We picked up the carpet at the Marshalls Mega Store (they have a great selection!) in San Juan and the TV came from the Costco in San Juan.
I can’t even tell you how nice it is to have a comfortable place to lounge! Before the couch, we would either be sitting at our desks, on a bucket or in the hammock, which isn’t very social friendly…
In our quest for decent furniture in/around Rincon, we’ve found the two best places to be Sears and Rooms To Go, both in Mayaguez.
Well, we have really moved far enough along on this project that we can really make this place look like a house with a little bit of work. But, what should we do? This isn’t a well thought out post, but as I procrastinate here in front of my computer, I will make a list:
Clean up scrap wood
Remove scrap concrete around new slab
Put up temporary Railings on the back deck
Build the master closet
Build a work bench in the shed and shelves to store lots of tools
Put all the tools from downstairs into the shed
Do something about our mud pit of a driveway (perhaps rocks until we can drop a couple thousand on cement or block
Get bedroom furniture for the master
Remove all construction supplies/tools from front porch and scrub it down
Buy porch furniture for front porch
Trim floorboards
Tile downstairs bath
Hang doors
Get Satellite Cable?
Aside from the obvious clean up stuff, do you know any small stuff that will make our house look homey? Summer and I don’t have any x-mas decorations up…maybe that would help (but it gives me one more thing to clean up…ba-humbug). What do you think?
Puerto Rico got hit by a freak storm (tropical storm Olga) last night and our power was out for the majority of today. So, since we couldn’t work (no power = no internet), we decided to design our closet. It took us a little over an hour, but here is the rough sketch.
Tomorrow we will go buy the cedar to start constructing the closet.
We can finally shower in the master bathroom! Yay! Although it’s not complete, here are some photos on the progress:
This is the threshold where the new hardwood floors transition into the bathroom. Looks good with the travertine!
It’s hard to get a good shot, but here is the majority of the wetroom portion of the master bath. You can catch a glimpse of the trim we installed around the window, but we decided not to use it to trim out the top of the marble. Please excuse the $1 shower curtain, we will eventually be putting in tempered glass:
Why, yes, that IS hot water coming out of our dual showerheads, and we get decent water pressure in the masterbath!
We still have not figured out what we are going to trim the top of the marble with…any suggestions? I love our Kohler shower heads/hardware. They feel nice and solid.
Jerry did the work on the downstairs shower pan and also the shower pan for the outside shower. They both came out pretty darn good! Here is a picture of the outside shower and the new shower pan:
It may not look that impressive to you, but here is what the shower looked like in May :
The shower pan is one of the most important parts to building a shower and it’s probably the hardest to get right (Luckly, Jerry is a master with concrete). Essentually you need to slightly slope/angle the floor so that the drain is at the lowest point. This is so that all the water flows towards the drain and doesn’t pool and sit stagnant in your shower. Gotta love gravity!
I also planted a foxtail palm and some purple flowery plants around the shower, for that “Yes, I am showering in the jungle” feeling :D.
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.
My dad hooked up the tankless hot water heater he brought down and it is SO nice to have a hot shower again! It’s easy to think, “Why do you even need hot water? Puerto Rico is already so hot, it probably is nice to take a cold shower!” Well, cold showers got old real quick. Our showers had pretty much come down to this:
Jump in shower. Turn on water. EEEEKKKKK. Scrubscrubscrubscrub. Jump out of shower. Sigh.
The tankless water heater is pretty cool from what I’ve experianced so far. Plus, you never run out of hot water since it’s heated on demand. The only thing that is slightly negative is that I love to take SCALDING hot showers and while the on demand tankless water heater does heat up the water to a nice hot temp, it’s not scalding enough for me at times :D.
When my dad built the piping, etc. for the hot water heater, I learned how to turn off the hot water to the house, where the hot and cold water bibs are and I learned about P/T valves (pressure/temperature values). Essentually a P/T value will release the water if it gets too much pressure or heat. So we can go away and not worry about the house exploding (at least not due to the hot water).
Here is a video I took when I was spying on Stefan jackhammering the cement footings in the backyard:
We are reducing the size of the footings because we are going to pour a cement slab under the porch and the formerly big square footings would have been the perfect ankle-biting height. You can thank us next time you are stumbling around under our back porch and you don’t smash your foot into them.
Although Stefan did put in his time with the jackhammer, I can’t give him all the credit. Jerry did most of the work and my dad took his turn playing with the jackhammer too. If jackhammering looks fun to you, we know where to rent one for $60 a day. Come on down to Puerto Rico and we can find something for you to jackhammer!
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My dad hooked up the 