California 2 Puerto Rico

I know, I know. I start out a lot of our posts by saying; “It is so much harder to put together a house than I ever would have thought.” Well, here we go again. This is hard stuff.

The first bathroom that became functional in the house was the guest bathroom upstairs. We measured out for and framed a steel tub, measured out and installed the backer board, the right height for the shower head and measured (taking into account the space the tile would take up on the wall) out the distance to where the drain for the toilet should be.

It is a small bathroom and I really like how the Kohler one piece toilets look, so I bought the Gabrielle series for both the master and the guest bath. Here’s the problem. They look cool, but they don’t work that well. Much. Really.

This Gabrielle series Kohler has a 1.6 gallon tank but boasts the flushing power of a 3.5 gallon tank. Now, I don’t know how strong a flush a 3.5 gallon toilet has but these Kohler toilets take multiple flushes. The advertisement we saw for them (on their website) spoke so highly of Kohlers flushing power that they built an interactive game where the player can click on items in a virtual bathroom and flush them down the toilet!

To top all this off, the Kohler toilet in our master bath stopped filling up with water a few days ago. It just stopped. I thought the water may have been turned off behind the toilet, but nope, we’ve got water, just not in the efficient 1.6 gallon tank. I wiggled the fill valve, but can’t figure out how to take it apart. It is all plastic and it looks like one giant piece. I have spent the last hour trying to research Kohler replacement parts, fill valves and trouble shooting and really haven’t made any progress.

Wow, does this mean that we have building our house for so long that appliances we installed in the beginning are already starting to break?

Wow, I am learning so many things about construction these days, which is funny because we have slowed down so much lately. We are really just planning our next strike and what we are going to work on with the budget we have, but I am still learning construction lessons the hard way.

For example, I busted the water main planting a tree last week. Since then, I have dug up the pipe three times now because there have been leaks. Leaks!!!? What is going on? I am measuring the pipe, cutting the pipe, priming the PVC pipe and then gluing the PVC pipe and then giving it time to dry. When I turn the water back on at the street level, I always do it very slowly and with a spigot on so the air/water pressure doesn’t blow out the pipes.

Yesterday, after two trips to the hardware store (Ferreteria), I had all of the PVC elbows, PVC reducers and plumbing tape. By the time I had all the cuts and pieces ready to go, I realized that the glue I purchased at Home Depot two days ago had hardened in the can. Since I was so close and so sick of going to the store, I searched our little construction graveyard in the back and found another bottle of PVC glue, but this stuff was clear instead of the blue I have always worked with. I glued the pipes back together, gave them time to dry and fired up the water main.

Water was shooting out of the connection at the the 1/2 inch threaded spigot. I assumed the reason for this was that it was missing a gasket. I called Summer (she was at home depot buying plants and asked her to pick me up a couple of 1/2 inch gaskets. Well, that did the trick at the thread where the water was obviously leaking, but once that stopped, I saw that all of the couplings, elbows and reducers I installed had slow leaks. Aaaaaaaah! I can only guess that the glue I used was not good anymore because all the connection points were clean and smooth before I primed and glued them.

This morning, I am going back to the ferreteria (Hardware Store) to buy another set of 1/2 elbows, 1” to 3/4 reducers, 3/4 to 1/2 threaded reducers to try to fix our water main one last time. Rincon Construction Lesson Number 3,228: If the parts only cost $.89 each, buy extra, it can’t hurt to have them laying around the house in an emergency and it will save you $20 in gas and the embarrassment of buying the same 4 PVC components 4 times at the local hardware store.

There are many, many, many things that I never considered when I would day dream about the ‘pride of ownership’ and owning our own place. I simply wanted to surf, work and not pay someone else’s mortgage in doing so. Those three things helped direct us to the Caribbean and Rincon (all though there isn’t much surf here in the summer months).

Now that the pride of ownership has worn off a little, I am realizing that ‘maintenance cost of ownership’ is what the Real Estate Agents don’t tell you about. The biggest maintenance project we have, which is ongoing, is our yard. We have it sectioned off (in our heads) and certain areas get more priority than the others. For example, the right hillside to stream area is going to be fenced off for the Mini Donkeys. Therefore, we aren’t mowing the grass in there…so it is 10ft tall after 3 months of no-love.

The front yard is probably getting the most attention. It had been excavated so many times during construction that it had nothing living on it at all and is filled with rocky veins.

A few days ago, Summer and I decided to plant a Beach Grape that Mark gave us up at the top of the driveway. After about 4 swings into the rocky dirt, I heard a familiar sound. The pick (which I swung) hit some sort of PVC which echoed up under the ground in both directions for about 40ft and then began to spew water everywhere. Wow, finding a water source to dig a well was going to easier than I thought! No, just kidding. I hit the main water pipe running from the city water up the hill down to our house.

Here is the hole I dug around the pipe getting it ready for repair. Do you remember me busting the septic pipe just a couple of months ago?

Our plan has always been to put a spigot at the top of the hill so we wouldn’t have to drag 125ft of house all around the yard every time we want to water something. The hole in the water main is a little lower than we were planning on putting the spigot, but since the pipe is exposed and the hole is already dug, we are going to make the best of a bad situation and add a spigot. Heck, we probably couldn’t have hit that pipe if we tried to put the spicket any where else. Stay tuned for the finished product!

FYI: Spigot is not spelled spickat