Stefan and I went to the Home Depot in Mayaguez and picked some paint for the interior of our house.
Yo Pinto (I paint):
Stefan pinten, tambien (Stefan paints, also):
Two great things happened today. First, I got to take this picture of the ocean from on top of Rincon today while running errands (Dad, Susan and Skyler; this is where my service cut out while talking with you on the phone). It was beautiful up there this morning…a few degrees colder than down by the water and the ocean was showing everyone home much it has been raining lately.
Second…the electric company came and installed our poles and ran the line to our pedestal. Apparently there is something that is not up to par with our permits or certifications or something…so we didn’t get the meter installed today…but we may be pulling enough strings to get the ball rolling tonight for tomorrow. We are meeting some people at 6:30 to try to get it done. Greasing palms may seem expensive, but it is getting things done quick. If you ever need any help in Rincon with electric poles…shoot me an email..I know a guy. 
Today Stefan and I went to Sears and picked out our appliances for the kitchen. We went with the Kenmore Elite line in stainless steel and bought our refridgerator, stove, microwave/hood and dishwasher.
I feel poor now :). Appliances are quite expensive, but Sears was having a 20% cash back deal, if you bought 3 appliances priced over $399. So we bought the stove, microwave/hood, refridgerator, dishwasher, washing machine, dryer and an airconditoner. We spent $7500, but we get $1500 cash back. So, $6000 for (fairly) top of the line appliances, isn’t too bad.
Today, Gino was going to finish up the tile work in the guest bath. Unfortunately, when the drywall was put in around the sink area, instead of moving one of the pipes…the guys just screwed the greenboard in over the pipe causing it to bubble out. If we had done regular tile instead of butt joints, Gino would have been able to lay the tile over the bow and it wouldn’t have been a big deal but since all of the tiles are “butted up tight” against one another…it would have made for a bad tile job..so Gino spent a couple of hours chipping away at the greenboard and evening out the area with grout and didn’t have time to finish. So…still no toilet for us to use and no pictures for you to see. Once it is done, I’ll post the pictures so you can see how rad the travertine looks.
We bought all of our appliances at Sears today (summer is going to post pictures later) and met with our cabinet maker to tie him down to a price and time frame. More to come….
The regional supervisor of the electric company, whom I met and had a couple of drinks with earlier in the week (I may have greased him a little), showed up to the house with three trucks and an army of guys this morning. He told me that he will have the poles up with the lines run by Monday…but I didn’t know if he meant this Monday or next Monday. Either way, the ball is rolling, they got the holes lined up and drilled out…now we just need some poles, lines and juice. Once the poles and lines are up, I will need to take a letter of completion/certification to the power companies office in Mayaguez so they can check the line from the Meter Pedestal to the House to ensure it is up to standard. As long as that gets approved…we could have power that day.
Come on power!!!!! Let’s get some fans in the house (have I mentioned its hot AND the fans keep the mosquitoes off of you too)!!!!!!
In 2 weeks, our house went from this:
to this:
I had no idea that the house was already so pimped out. Stefan, you need to post pictures more often ;).
I couldn’t come up with a good title for this post because the work didn’t really get any “construction” accomplished, it was more a lot of little things and some major manual labor to get this work done. Although it didn’t really feel like it was doing much, it really moved the house forward when we were done.
We have been sleeping with mosquito nets every night because of the fact that downstairs was not screened in and had hundreds of tiny places for mosquitoes to sneak in. This week we framed off the giant openings on the ground floor, added big french doors (so we can still move big stuff in and out) and screened it in. It may not seem big, but it puts us that much closer to being able to hang out in our house without bug spray on.
The final step in getting rid of all the little pests will be to install the screens in all of the downstairs windows. I had a guy that was supposed to show up on Thursday morning, then on Friday morning but he pulled a ‘no call no show’ which is pretty typical for down here. I’ll work on him again next week.
Again, this is something that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it really makes the house feel more like a home in these final finishing stages that are going to take so long. Over the past couple of weeks we have been doing all kinds of work to the house including plumbing, framing, electrical, drywall and concrete board. Because of all of these projects we have been using many different tools and purchased a lot of supplies that have all been stored in the Great Room for ease of location. Now, having 10 different people in and out daily using tools and not having a ‘proper organized place to put them’ has created a lot of headache both in the sense of finding a specific tool and the amazing clutter that it created. We also had 8 sheets of 5/8’s treated plywood, 25 extra sheets of 4/10 fire retardant greenboard (originally 140 sheets), drywall tape and drywall mud laying all over the place.
So…I built a shelf for the tool room downstairs and we organized all of our tools into the one central location (but you have to walk up and down the ladder if you forget a tool) and moved all of the supplies in there as well. I also hung a surfboard rack and stored all of our boards.
Once the Great Room and kitchen were cleared out, it was on to priming. Here are a few pictures of the before the priming stage and after the rooms were fully primed.
As I’ve said before, construction on the house is going quicker then I’ve expected. So quickly, in fact, that I realize that we need to figure out what we are going to do design wise, pronto. Since we’re already trying to pick out tile and flooring, I think we need to have a game plan when it comes to the general look we’re going for. Stefan and I picked up an amazing deign book called “Interior Design Details - 1000 New Ideas for the Home”. Here are two rooms that I really like:
There are two things that made redesigning the Master Bedroom and guest bath possible.
1. Our house is all wood framed upstairs
2. The only weight bearing walls are the two off the great room and the outside of the house.
With that in mind, look at the first before picture before we re framed the wet room, removed the closet, enclosed the little porch, and built the walk-in closet.
I didn’t really notice this until afterwards, but look how long and skinny the bathroom was. We would have been squeezing in any kind of “over sized tub” into the corner and it would have looked ghetto. We also wouldn’t have had room for a his and hers sinks and I don’t ‘think’ we would have had enough closet space for summer and I.
Now, we have a walk-in closet that we will have to do some cedar built-ins because of the high humidity down here. We opened up two windows to the bedroom that were blocked by the old wall. If we left the wall up, we would have lost all of our cross breezes entering the front of the house (where the trade winds blow from) and getting sucked out the back windows. We also wouldn’t have had the bad ass set-up we have now. It might be hard to see this in the below pictures (maybe a video will make it easier to picture…or a visit!) but the way the room is set up now, when we sit in the jacuzzi now we will be able to see out the windows with the crossbreeze and still have the rest of the vaulted ceilings and master bedroom making you feel like you are in a giant room (as opposed to boxed in like the old set-up).
The water closet will have a door (our old plan was to leave it all open), the toilet and a two headed shower that will take up the entire back end of the room. It will be 5ft wide by 4.5 ft long. Frame it in a little and big clear glass doors with the river rock floor and travertine walls…it is going to be an insane bathroom!
We are looking into what type of granite we can get down here (and how much) so we can do a teak or mahagony finish on the front of the jacuzzi and top it/back splash it with granite. Hardwood floors throughout the entire house (to make it feel more open/big) with no interuption right to the woodwork at the bottom of the jacuzzi. Very exciting stuff…i’ll stop yapping. Check out the other pictures.
Trying to envision the house complete is much harder than I thought now that I have been in there working everyday. We are ready to tile the guest bath and get the entire guest side of the house up and ready to go so we can live in a completed part of the house while we finish the rest of it. While Brian was down here he suggested we do river rock floors in the bathrooms and travertine walls. Here are some pictures to give you an idea of what we may do.
River Rock for the floors
Travertine for the walls
What do you think?