Not much time to post today, but I wanted to show you this video walk through of the house. Brian has been working us hard and has brought a new life to the house. He has re-designed our master bath to fit a big jacuzzi tub, enclosed the double headed shower and toilet into a “wet closet” and ripped down the old walls that led to the closet and old bath. We then framed in the little deck off of the master bedroom and have made that into the master walk-in closet.
We finished drywalling the kitchen, guest bedroom, guest bathroom (including cement board and prepping for the tile) and the master bedroom, bathroom and closet. Lots of work…check it out.
I happened upon josplumbing, which I think is an EXCELLENT internet marketing idea by Kohler.
The interactive website let’s you pick items from the bathroom and flush them down a toilet. Sounds strange, but check it out. After flushing random items (including a bra, rubber duckie, flowers, dog food and more), I thought, “I want a toilet like this!”, and just so happens we are in the market for a toilet for the master bathroom…Very slick marketing, indeed!
When Brian Mangen showed up, we had just finished most of the rough in work (electricity, plumbing etc) and we didn’t really have much direction. I knew it was time for drywall and we were getting quotes, but that was about where we were. Summer came down for the week and we didn’t work much in that time. It was great spending time together, we don’t get to do that much these days, so I was guilt free shopping for fixtures and kicking it with Summer.
My plan was to finish the bathroom downstairs (we are going to make it all white and sterile looking so I couldn’t mess up the decor), finish up the offices (so I can stop renting an office once we got power/phone/DSL) and get the kitchen started (custom wood worker, appliances, etc).
Brian has been remodeling houses for a long time and has done quite a few of his own homes while living in them, like I am doing now. He re prioritized my list. Our goal this week is to finish the Guest Bath and Guest room so I can have at least one part of the house that is done in order to keep my sanity. Also, when summer comes down we will have a full bath (Bathtub and all!) to enjoy instead of using the outside shower and the toilet in a framed off soon to be a bathroom. From there we will finish drywalling the great room and master (we are framing in the walk in closet and water closet) and I will move my be into the master and have the guest room as an office. Simultaniously (hopefully) we will be getting electricity and I will be able to put a fridge in the house (no more dirty coolers and 3 bags of ice a day) and wait for our cabinets. From there, when the money is there, we’ll open up the floor, put in the staircase and finish the offices, bathroom and great room (Media Room) downstairs.
The only thing we will complete downstairs is screening all the windows and covering all the holes critters and mosquitos can fly in through so we can start sleeping without nets….and the laundry room.
Here are some pictures of the guest bath upstairs.
Last week when I was in Puerto Rico, Stefan and I bought all of the ceiling fans so that Florida Brian could install them. We spent close to $2000 on 8 fans (Have I mentioned how expensive building a house is lately?!), but having good fans in such a hot climate is essential. Well, just so has it, I got an email from Home Depot today announcing their big 4th of July sale, where all ceiling fans are 20% off…Damn the poor timing!! Oh well, I’m still happy with the fans that we picked out. Here is a picture of the ceiling fans that Brian installed for us in the great room:
I was a bit baffled when I received the picture above, since the fans are obviously on and as far as I know, we have no power to the house, but it turns out that Brian rigged some sort of converter so that we can power the house via our generator (although the generator is too loud to run at night).
Stefan, Brian and Brian have been busting their butts working on the house this last week (Stefan has been too tired to update the blog each night, but he said he would post all the new pictures tonight). They are currently working on drywalling the upstairs guest bedroom, guest bathroom and kitchen, installing shower/tub/sink and tiling the guest bath. I think they are also knocking out walls and rearranging the master bedroom/bathroom.
After talking to Stefan last night, it looks like we are burning through the $30K that we saved for this project, pretty damn quickly. So, I got this idea! I made the “Help Build Casa Descanso Verano” widget, which will allow people to donate cash to help us build our house! It will be a sort of “Sponsor a Piece of our House” type deal, where when a donation is made, I will list who made the donation (or it can be anonymous), how much was donated and what part of the house that donation paid for (The list can be viewed on our “Contributors” page). Doesn’t that sound like fun?!
Stefan and I don’t desperately need donations and if push comes to shove, we can get a loan, but I just thought that this would be a fun way to get our family, friends and blog readers directly involved in the construction of our house :). (If you’re looking for a charity, here are a few good ones: Surfrider, ASPCA, Canine Companions and Charity Navigator)
We went on an all day adventure to Mayaguez two days ago looking for the plumbing we needed for our new showers. We have 3 bathrooms to buy for and the master bath has a double headed shower. We checked out Home Depot and Sears but couldn’t find anything we liked. The options down here are very limited, so we are going to have to buy them online, have them shipped and then get our plumber to install the fixtures.
While we were at Sears, we took a walk through of the Borders looking for magazines that could give us some ideas for our kitchens and bathrooms. Luckily, Summer happened upon this book, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Building Your Own Home”, so we are now clear as far as knowing how to build our house. Phew….
I did a really really stupid thing yesterday and let me tell you, I learned my lesson.
I pulled the sheets off of my bed to laundry and in doing so I pulled the mosquito net off as well…and just let it hang above the bed, I planned on putting the net back on with the clean sheets. This was the big mistake. You can see how mosquito nets fit around the bed here…
When I came home from Marks last night (we had a golf tournament on his playstation) I made the bed, tucked in the netting and settled in for a warm nights mosquito free rest. Wow…was I wrong. I never felt any of the mosquitoes biting me but I started itching all over. I wasn’t really sleeping anyway, like a kid the night before Disney World, Summer arrives late tonight so I was just kinda staring at the ceiling waiting for sleep to fast forward the next 8 hours. Well…it got to the point where there was no way I would be able to fall asleep with how much I was itching. I turned on the flashlight and looked around the netting but couldn’t find any mosquitoes and I didn’t hear any buzzing around my ears so I figured the bites must have been from earlier in the day and the itching was just kicking in because I wasn’t preoccupied with other things.
This morning when I woke up, the first thing I saw was about 30 pillsbury dough boy mosquitoes chilling on the net right above my head. The more I looked around the more I saw. My mosquito netting trapped the little buggers in there instead of keeping them out…and I am covered with itchy red bumps.
What’s the lesson? ALWAYS ALWAYS KEEP YOUR NETTING TUCKED UNDER THE BED. Lesson learned.
The talk of the town for the past two days has been two fold;
1. This is the hottest summer in 5 years (it is still in the 90’s at night some nights)
2. The swell is on the way
As far as number 2 goes, Josh and I woke up early to surf but the swell hasn’t hit yet. It is knee high on the sets and there is some texture on the water. It wasn’t inviting enough for me to blow off work but Josh is down there splashing around to kick the cobwebs and cool off.
As far as number 1 goes…jeez, we sure need some fans/ac at the house ASAP!
The guy who owned the house before Summer and I bought it had a basic little set up to sleep and “take care of business” while he was down here working on it (he was a contractor from New Jersey). He was much more hard core than Summer and I. As soon as we saw this little portable toilet it needed to vacate the premises. We never used it, but for some stupid reason it never made it past the front porch. Here is a picture of me putting it to good use while chillin’ in the hammock. Gross.
I have been down here working hard every day on the house all day and on the computer every night. I have been playing poker at a buddies house ($10 buy in) 2 or 3 nights a week and have been driving all over the West Side of Puerto Rico looking for the best prices or simply looking for something that is not readily available in Puerto Rico (for example: Jet Line to pull the wire through the pipe).
It is 88-95 degrees every day and working in the sun is hard and tiring. It is very rewarding working on our house, but I am still exhausted every day. BUT, I still manage to think about Summer all day every day and how great it is going to be when she can move down here permanently.
Summer flies into Aguadilla on Monday at 4:00am. We have a lot to do together this week; pick out bathroom fixtures, decide the shape of our staircase, decide the type of wood (needs to match the wood floors we are going to get upstairs…but not until October..so we need to make a decision this week), pick out designs for our cabinets (color and shape), decide on which type of concrete counter top we are going to get, pick out our kitchen appliances, decide the shape of the back porch, ceiling fans, sconce lighting, track lighting, bathtub, type/color of tile for the bathrooms etc.
I can’t wait to pick up Summer at the airport. 2.5 days to go.
