California 2 Puerto Rico

I am such a novice in this construction thing. I was a typical office worker (that surfed and came from a fairly active background) that was making some money and decided to give up the life in the fast lane for a couple acres in Puerto Rico and a fun little project (sarcasm). Finish a six bedroom, two bath house in Rincon Puerto Rico. Haha! Give up the fast lane? I have been busier now than I have ever been in my life and I have spent more Cash Money in the past eight months than I ever did in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Manhattan or La Jolla gourmet restaurants and clubs combined.

I have learned so much (including how to spend money), but today young grasshopper, I give you advice from an experienced (1 project) Do-It-Yourselfer. This advice will help you keep it together on a big project like ours. Every time we do a clean up, I feel a million times better about our progress around the house. So, here is my advice to you: Keep your construction site clean and organized

Today, I had a little Tom Cat come and scrape all the extra concrete, scrap wood and trash out of our backyard. We worked filling two large dump trucks (about 8 meters each) for about four hours and are now pretty much ready to plant some grass seed in the backyard.

We are also expecting our plants from Montoso Gardens tomorrow…so before they get here with the tropical plant and fruit delivery, I am having 8 meters of Top Soil dumbed down by the mango tree so we can make a little shaded nursery area for some of the younger plants and have the ability to back fill the big plant holes with rich top soil.

Starting the clean up of our back yard

Our Rincon backyard looking pretty good.

It feels great to see our back yard clean like this. I wish I kept it clean and organized from the beginning, it would have saved me so many headaches.

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The plants are coming!

Last week Stefan and I went to Montoso Gardens in Maricao, Puerto Rico, where the have all sorts of interesting exotic plants. Like lemons as big as your head! Well, as big as my head at least…

David Brunner was nice enough to show us around and educate us on various exotic plants that they have on their farm. We placed a fairly large order and the plants should be arriving shortly. Here is what we will soon have planted on our property:

2 Areca Catechu palms 6′-7′
2 Macarther palms 7gal., 5′-6′
1 Triangle palm 3gal.
1 Red Sealing Wax palm 4′-5′
2 Grafted Rambutan trees
1 Grafted Abiu
2 Purple Grumichama 1gal
1 French Peanut 1gal
1 Cinnamon tree 1gal
1 Cannonball tree
1 Grafted Maprang
1 Noni
1 Mangosteen
1 Yellow Jaboticaba
1 Spanish Tamarind
1 Aemygdiana rhizome
1 Tahitian Ginger 3gal
2 White Torch Ginger 1gal
4 Red Torch rhizomes
4 Pink Torch rhizomes
2 Cacao Trees 1 gal
1 Ae Ae Banana 3′-4′ division
1 Peanut Butter Fruit 2gal
3 Pink Ginger 3 gal
3 Red Ginger 3 gal
3 Polynesian Princess Ginger 3gal
6 White Bird of Paradise
4 Orange Bird of Paradise
3 Mexican Gold Heliconia 1gal
3 Oriole Orange Heliconia 1gal
3 Iris (red) heliconia 1gal

Most of the plants above you may have never hear of, but that is because Montoso farms specializes in exotic fruit trees from around the world. If you’re looking for the standard fruit trees (mango, orange, grapefruit, etc), you won’t find those at Montoso farms. They are far more interested in rarer varieties of fruit, which is fine my me…I can’t wait to have our property overgrown with interesting plants and fruits!

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Summer and I are still working hard on the house everyday. It is funny, we moved down to Puerto Rico for a more relaxing tropical lifestyle and I am busier than I have ever been in my entire life. Ha, I guess that is just how it goes when you build a house.

Now that we have the beautiful hardwood floors in, it is really time to do something about the driveway. At the moment, it is just scraped dirt with some hard rock, but when it rains, it pretty much turns into a slip and slide. If you are parked down by the house and a good rain comes through, you aren’t leaving unless you have 4 wheel drive. For Example:

The mud and dirt from the driveway get tracked into the house by the dogs, us and our friends that come over. I mop in the morning and by the time Summer wakes up she doesn’t even notice that I cleaned the floor.

Now, we have plenty of options as far as driveway surfaces go, but I think our bank account is going to dictate what we are going to be able to do to resolve the problem quickly. Concrete is just too expensive right now, and we will be able to cover up a gravel driveway down the line with concrete when we can afford to pull the trigger on such an expensive project (maybe when we get the pool and cabana in the back yard :-).

Here is the basic layout for the driveway. Nothing fancy at all.

Does anyone have any experience with gravel driveways out there? The only thing I remember about them as a kid is they suck to walk on with bare feet. I am looking for a little deeper intellectual insight than that though. How often will we need to pour in new gravel? Do we need to build a form for the driveway or do we just dump the rocks and push them around? Will they drain well or will they all erode down the hill? Should we have a big roller come in and compress them down?

Do you guys have any insight on gravel driveways in Puerto Rico or elsewhere?

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Two days ago, Summer and I went to Home Depot with a truck load of things that we bought for the house that we didn’t use. Some things we bought were the wrong size, wrong color, wrong thread, wrong thickness, wrong angle, wrong, wrong, wrong, ALL WRONG! After paying a 7% restocking fee on a few items that we have had for over 3 months, we ended up with a wopping $350 in refunds. Boy, that could really help pay some bills right now, OR, we could be good little consumers and buy more stuff!.

Summer and I left Home Depot with a 6.5 horsepower Toro lawnmower. This little puppy may help us whip our yard into better shape. After running it for an hour or two yesterday, I have a new respect for the lawnmower. It cuts down some pretty thick an tall stuff. I think in about 3 years we’ll really have this yard under control.

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It may not seem like all that exciting a shot to you, but our landscaping really is coming along. Even with all the progress, when I take this same picture (hopefully minus the flooding from the tropical storm) in two years, all of those little plants you are looking at are going to be going off.

Some puddles from the tropical storm and a great BEFORE picture of our landscaping

Starting from the left side I see Eureka Palms, Christmas Palms, Traveler Palms, Coconut Palms, China Palms, Royal Palms, Ficus Trees, Snake Plants, Caoba Trees, Mahogany Trees, Bread Fruit Trees, Queen Plams….I am going to stop now. I can’t wait to see the AFTER picture in three years…and again in 5 and again in 10…so on and so forth.

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I recently got a hot tip from The Kruses on where to get some great plants, here in Puerto Rico. Karina recommended Montoso Gardens, which is in Maricao:

Montoso Gardens has all sorts of great exotic fruit trees, flowers, nut trees, spices, palms and more. They even have an online store and will ship plants for very reasonable prices. Stefan and I are going to head over to Montoso Gardens sometime this week, so we’ll let you know what we end up with :)!

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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.

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A mere 3 weeks after planting grass seed, our lawn got its 1st mow today. I can’t believe how fast the grass grew in. Awesome!!

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We worked all day planting palms today. I want to take a bunch of pictures when we have better light, but I told Summer that Mark and I planted fourteen palm trees and she made me go out into the rain as the sun was setting to take a couple pictures to post so she could see them. This is the only one that came out with enough light for you to see….I’ll take more pictures tomorrow and explain the layout and battle plan.

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I have been religiously watering the seed on the front lawn two or three times a day since we planted the seed on October 18th. It has taken quite an effort to keep workers off of the dirt (soon to be lawn) and I make everyone walk the plank to get in and our of the house. It will be cool once the steps are done because we will be able to avoid the front lawn all together (enter/exit through downstairs) until it grows in nice and lush.

This morning, I grabbed my cup of coffee and headed outside to turn on the sprinklers and guess what I saw! Our dirt has green peach fuzz! Check it out:

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