Oct 31 Post

Greetings friends!

More on our adventure in October! Well, we made huge progress Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday outlined in the previous three blog posts. We began each morning at around 6:45 am, and ended each day at around 5:30 pm. Like we 'enjoy' in the USA, we made at least a couple of trips into the Ferreteria (Home Center) each day; and lots of progress between times.

This first photo shows a pile of teak. It has been milled, but our crew has to sand and plane each piece to a consistent thickness, then trim to fit wherever they are hanging it. It is precise and time consuming work. But the results are some of the most beautiful work you'll see anywhere.

I'm wanting to show two views of the same photo, so that all can see where these guys are working, and what they're doing. In a previous blog, I showed photos of the facia board mounted below the drip edge of the roof. This photo shows Iladio fitting a piece of teak into the overhang which extends beyond the stair. Right about the level of his left arm will be the flat ceiling of the stairwell. Teak will extend up and inside, but that will be in the climate controlled space (eg: air conditioning/dry) space.

This next photo is that view from outside looking up. These guys appear totally comfortable walking on these beams, even though falling would surely injure them if not worse. It is on this sort of structure though that a lot of the work gets done, with metal lashed to trees... Neither of us would manage the life of a builder in Costa Rica!

This next photo shows the teak of the cupola feature. You can see the precision of the mitre corners. What you can't see here is how rich that teak will look once oiled. The variations of very dark to very light of old growth teak is amazing! Having craftsmen install it adds to the beauty. We have heard fellow gringo's speak of workers like ours with a certain distain - as if these guys were some out less talented, or less intelligent. These fellows amaze us every time we enjoy working with them, and feel that we're developing lifelong friends with them. They will always be welcome guests, and we will always delight at an opportunity to work with them.

So, on Thursday of our trip we ate breakfast as usual, got to work early on, and broke for lunch a bit after noon. We had totally layed out every fitting of the black AND grey water drain systems, and just needed to purchase a couple of fittings to complete the job. So we left for shopping and lunch with Rob and Kent. Jim sort of lost his appetite during lunch, but just wrote that off to the humidity and hard work. But, at the point of starting to work on that plumbing, became extremely dizzy, and nauseous. Thinking it was just dehydration, we broke for a water break. But that problem just continued. So around 2:30 we ended our day. With the help of Rob and our crew, we got headed downhill to break for the day. Dick drove us into town to our hotel, and Jim just got worse and worse. After some review a couple days later, we concluded something about Thursday breakfast resulted in food poisoning.

We attempted to work Friday morning, and did successfully repair two leaky joints and bring the supply water up to full pressure. And with the able help of our crew, ran the propane gas line from kitchen to bodega. We took a set of notes we could leave with Rob. But Jim was still too shakey to manage the rigors of below level plumbing so we stowed all our goods in the dry room, bid our crew farewell, and headed back to San Jose. So when we return in January, one of our first tasks will be to complete the black and grey water drain systems - and tie them into what we hope is a septic system we can readily connect to.

We snapped this photo of that wavey bridge we had to drive over both ways to/from San Jose. While secure, it waves as one drives across, and tilts back and forth as well. That red water below was moving at a very fast clip adding to the feeling of risk as we crossed. But, this is one of the wonderful characteristics of Costa Rica that make it such an interesting and charming country.

Thanks for reading our blog!

Ricardo y Jeeeem

(Dick and Jim)

Oct 30 Update

Greetings friends!





Before I get into the business of our trip, I wanted to share two scenic photos we took. The first one opens with the namesake of Torrente de Agua and that is the lovely waterfall which abuts the length of our property. With the rains so heavy, you can almost hear the noise of falling water into one of the many pools which are part of the course of the falls. You know for sure it is rainy season when you see that reddish silt floating in the pools - picking up the natural color of the rock.





The second photo was as we were driving up the mountain to our land, and captured this wonderful view across the Parrita valley towards rain forests, with a spectacular view of the rain falling there. That 'body' of water in the foreground is actually the river which is reasonably wide at this point, especially during rainy season. But this is not atypical of much of the year in mid afternoon.



So one of the things we absolutely, positively had to complete during this trip was the plumbing to below the first floor. In this photo, we put together the drains for the second floor bathroom. We know it can look confusing. The left side with that white elbow is the upstairs toilet. The pipe that is narrower is actually the vent shaft which goes across the ceiling to the outside, and then up to provide incoming air to help drive the flow when one flushes the toilet. Just to the right of that pipe (where that blue flexible electric conduit crosses, is the air vent for the grey water drains for the shower and sink. The ceiling in the room will be lowered about 8" so that it is flat, with this plumbing above it. It is still a nice height, just lower than the rest of the rooms. We make up for that with a large floor to ceiling window, plus a generous window over the sink. These two should bring in great light, and make this a warm and comfortable bathroom. All this notwithstanding, the shower into which we're looking will remain unfinished at least through January, and possibly February 2009. This space gives us good access into the electrical panel, and we want the opportunity to provision for Air Conditioning before we close up these walls.

We wanted to include some new photos of the storage level of the casa. One might think of this as the 'basement' although this floor, like all the others, is well above ground level. You can see the TV cables hanging down so that we can run a signal to each bedroom and upstairs. As of now, we don't know what we will use for TV. The switchbox on the wall will be the bottom switch so that if one is working on something at that level, and it gets dark, they can turn on the overhead lights. There are separate switches and lights in the closed room (aka, the dry room). More on this space in the next blog post...



In this final photo for this post, Enrique our electrician is running electric at the lower storage area (bodega) level. The tubing on the ground uphill is the drain plumbing pipe we will install in January. The metal lower down is construction material. The zacate block you can see running outside (from the post with the switch box) is just a temporary walkway. Later in the project we'll create a cement pad here, and a concrete stair going up. But most likely we'll also leave that path as it goes to the parking end of the driveway, and will be very convenient.

All for this posting, yet another from this trip.

Thanks for reading, feel free to comment.


Ricardo y Jeeeem
(Dick and Jim)

Oct 28 Update

Hola friends!

Mostly a photo post here, but I want to include some words, and some more of the story from our week in Playon Sur, Parrita, Costa Rica.

I want to lead off with this first photo of the stair steps going in. While creating the stringers was interesting, difficult, and challenging, making each of the steps is a tedious process. Our crew begins with a length of 5cm x 5cm angle iron. Viewed from the end you would see an "L" with each leg of the "L" the same 5cm length. Our standard depth is 30cm (roughly a foot) by the width between the stringers, roughly one meter. The corners are cut at a mitre, and the four pieces are welded together to form sort of a dish. Smooth on the outer edges, with a flange of sorts inside. That dish is welded at planned points with the upper leading edge even with the upper edge of the stringer every 350mm. Once welded in place, a piece of fibrolet (cement board with fiber) is cut and placed at the bottom of the bowl. Once the steps are all fabricated and welded in place, cement is mixed and that bowl is filled to the upper edge with concrete. The fibrolet holds it in place, and once it hardens, all is set to put the final ceramic tile on top to create a finished, beautiful surface. The steel is painted, and this will be an ongoing maintenance item.

The next thing we tackled, actually on Monday midday, was to meet with the gutter fabricator so that I could pick out the profile of our gutters, and then retain him to create them and install them. The total distance for gutters is just about 45 running meters. For custom made galvanized gutters the cost in Costa Rica, installed, is $950 US. May seem like a lot, but price out putting gutters on your own house and you'll find this is a pretty good price. Because rain can be so very very heavy, these gutters are unusually large - easily twice the size (4x the capacity) of standard US gutters. And for our dollar, these are made up with bonded color exactly matching our green roof.

The next task after that was that in order to install them Gerardo's crew needed to fashion a facia board under the drip edge of the roof. Jim was really interested in how our guys were going to attach wood to the open ends of the roof structure. It didn't take long to get an answer. Gerardo queried Jim about what material we should use for a facia. Both of our preference was for teak. Gerardo has a buddy up the road who mills wood, and had some good but not finish beautiful teak he could mill into boards. A little negotiation on the size and Gerardo called in his order and the teak was milled within the hour. In order to attach it Averro cut little length of steel to weld on the ends forming caps, and then they screwed the teak into those. Now keep in mind, this is steel of a few millimeters thickness. Drilling was no simple task... We were curious how they were going to work up there and voilla! a truck load of steel 7x7 arrived. Gerardo's crew began roping these to nearby trees creating beams to stand on. You can see these beams, and the first of the teak facia going in just below the lower roof drip edge. When we get updated photos, we expect to see teak on the upper roof edge, and gutters along the lower roof. A drain system will carry the water from gutters to a concrete waterway designed to break up and slow water.

On Tuesday afternoon we met with our window maker. As we've mentioned before, one doesn't go to the Pella store, or such. In Costa Rica the window maker creates each window on the jobsite. So we discussed how we wanted the upper cupola windows to work, and set a plan for the windows over our sliding glass doors. In this photo, you'll see the teak which is over the upper veranda (eg: outside). The silver colored horizontal beams mark the upper and lower opening for a bank of six louvered windows which can vent even when the sliding glass doors are closed. That wall will be faced with teak both inside, and outside.

Finally, as we prepared for our first water pressure test on Thursday, we needed to provision the line going into the house. In this photo you see the grey plastic conduit for the temporary electric for construction. That white tube in front sets a temporary faucet. But lower down on that pipe is a tube for a spigot, and above will be a new vertical pipe for an outdoor showerhead. That retaining wall you see on the left

will be raised one block, and extended so that it surrounds the white pipe going up.

Above the wall will be a steel structure supporting the showerhead. If you look carefully at the base of the existing retaining wall; about even with Jim's foot on the left, you'll see the drain hole that is already in place. A single block course will make a quarter circle area to contain the water. The spigot is for washing boots, and the shower is for rinsing after working hard on yard work, or community work when one might be quite sweaty and muddy. Rather than track any inside, one can rinse outside.

The concrete will be tiled, probably in the same tile we're using inside and on the verandas. More on that later.

So that is the update so far. Another blog should complete the events the week of October 18 - 25.

Thanks for reading our blog!

Ricardo y Jeeeem

(Dick and Jim)

Oct 22 Update

Wow, what an intense week! With so much accomplished, I'll start slow and add during the days of this week.

We arrived on Oct 18th very late in the day. On the plus side, our time through immigration was fast, and customs was a snap. That surprised us since we had two large suitcases of plumbing and electrical materials, including a whole house water heater. But, sometimes it works that way. Steve picked us up right outside the door, and we had a great and relaxing night at Casa Bella Rita.

We rented our diesel Hyundai along with a GPS on Sunday morning, and headed to the coast, experiencing for the first time driving ourselves to the coast, and using a GPS. A couple of miss steps the wrong way on one way streets helped cement how to interpret the GPS instructions to turn (now doesn't actually mean 'now'). Once that was figured out, the trip was easy. On the way we 'enjoyed' crossing this wavy suspension bridge. Hard to tell from this photo, but it moves under the weight of the car quite a bit; resulting in a rather unusual sensation. The rushing water below added to the effect!

So we had a great drive to Parrita. The town was a ghost town when we arrived, which was spooky. We did take some time to check out our casita before heading into town, so were ready to check in, have dinner, and get a good night's sleep to be ready to work Monday morning.

We got to work early, assembling the last shower faucet sub-assembly, and then diverted our attention to working with Gerardo in measuring and cutting the first stair stringer (the one against the building). Jim took some time earlier that day verifying the distance from the top landing to the front of the first step at the bottom. A quick minor recalculation of that resulted in a slightly different number to measure as points going up so that the steps are relatively equal. It was quite an experience working through the cuts with Gerardo, and then seeing his expression when it dropped perfectly into place. It was Jim's intention to just place the second stringer right next to the posts on the outside, but Gerardo wanted to span between them. Not too difficult to do if we had simply duplicated the first one, then marked the dividing marks. But we took a bit more challenging "tico" way. While successful, there were a few recuts needed to catch the right fit. In the end though, we really liked Gerardo's suggestion as it makes each step 5cm wider. Not much perhaps, but that little bit really is noticable. So in this photo, you can see Gerardo welding in the tack weld for the upper section of the outer stair stringer.

We also got to work getting the supply plumbing measured down below, and installing up to the point of making the connection through the foundation wall. We brought with us an inline filter and provisioned for a faucet so we could fill a bucket down there. You'll notice a little nib below that faucet. Our intention with that is to get a simple wall sink and mount it next to that, draining down through the floor for simple handwashing. The two valves above the filter housing will allow us to isolate the filter housing so we can easily change filters.

So with this done, we let Gerardo know we wanted to break through the wall the next morning and provision for a conduit to bring the permanent electric into the house, as well as water. And with this done, and being really tired, we left for the day.

So, enough for this post - I'll add to this in a day or two!

Thanks for reading!

Ricardo y Jeeeem

ps - Jim apologizes for not updating the 'back story' in awhile, and promises to pick up on that very very soon.

Oct 18 Minor update

Dear friends, we are on our way back down to Costa Rica. These are some photos from last week, showing progress installing teak. In this first photo, that is teak above the upper veranda. There is a LOT of this stuff to be installed, this just scratches the surface! But it is great to see it go in, since this is finish work.

If you take time to go to www.ticotimes.net you can read articles today about the rains this week, and resulting floods in Parrita. That poor little town is getting hammered once again. Fortunately, rains and flooding are nothing new. Tico's have a resiliant way of handling this, ensuring expensive electronic items are high up.

So, we are NOT at all sure just what we're getting into this trip. New adventures this time, coastal flooding, driving ourselves from Central Valley (San Jose) to the coast. One nightmare had us in the midst of mudslides! Seriously though, we're not too worried. Just an opportunity to be observant - something any old motorcyclist has made a habit of doing.


We'll be taking many, many photos this time, so at the end of the week, I expect to be making a few updates. Meanwhile, we wish you well as Fall settles over the midwest of USA. We absolutely will not miss the political ads!

All for now!


Ricardo y Jeeeem

Oct 12 update

Work continues. As you can see in the first picture, the teak at the top of the cupola feature (the outside part will get teak, just not yet). Our contractors are doing a really nice job fitting all that in. The splotches you see are droplets on Rob's camera lens. The joy of photos in October!

The second photo shows teak going above the veranda. There will be a band of solid walls above the doors, and windows above that to provide ventilation options. While we'll have virtually end to end glass, only a few of the windows at that level will be operational louvers.

This final photo shows the generator room of the bodega (bodega is closet or storage room). The dry room is nearly done as well, except that it needs two outlets, a light, and a window. But soon will be ready for us to stowe items permanently.

Today Dick and I went out shopping for items we'll need when we're there from the 18th to the 25th. Some of the simplest items are hard to find in Costa Rica. Other items are quite easy to find. Pipe hangers are hard to find... So we are bringing those, double electrical boxes, a whole house sediment filter, our electric tankless water heater (which is available in Costa Rica, but at more than 2x the cost). I bought a large suitcase from a coworker last week, and it is already filled to overflowing with building supplies. I'll actually fill another and have two suitcases of construction supplies.

Of course, we filled the bags on our motorcycles buying this stuff, but that is a good way to control the volume of such stuff for transport.

So all work progressing very well! More pics before the week is out.


Ricardo y Jeeeem
(Dick and Jim)

Oct 8th Update

A few more changes this week. Work is progressing rapidly!

I wanted to share this photo from the kitchen looking UP to the cupola feature. This is taken from the perspective of a person standing, so you can see just how much height this ceiling/roof design gives to the second level. Most, but not all of the black metal will be covered with teak...


While not oiled to bring out the rich grain, this photo shows the inside center of the cupola with the teak applied. Quite a rich look we think!

Work has also been progressing on the bodega level, with particular attention to the 'dry room' part of it. When I initially got pictures the small window was not framed in. But Gerardo quickly and beautifully created that. As I explained in a previous blog, this little window is just to allow some natural light to come into the room, so that we're not dependent upon turning on a light switch every time we go in there. Sure, lights are nice, but hardly required during the day. Fortunately this won't have direct sunlight so fading won't be an issue. Recall that this room is for all our junk that we want to keep there, even when the place is being rented to vacationers...









You can see in this next photo the fiberglass insulation we're using in the ceiling, between the zinc roofing and the teak inside finish. While that zinc is durable as all get out, it is noisy in the rain, and in Costa Rica, rain is a major feature of our climate. So that fiberglass will soften the sound to what we hope will be a pleasant drumming of rain. Worst case, we'll retreat to those first floor bedrooms!!!



This final photo is taken from where the uphill side (patio entrance side) looking along the other uphill side towards the ocean. That window with the towel is the bedroom (#3) window that is over the bed in that room. The window that Rob is leaning out of is the long window in bathroom 3#. The window below, near that ladder, is the bodega dry room window. Looking ahead past the bedroom window, you can see the railing of the lower veranda. In all of these photos, there is a lot of green blocking the ocean view. After rainy season, we'll have all the bahoucca vines removed so that only trees are in view, and some of those will have selected branches cut to open up the view while enjoying the jungle trees.

If you're reading this as a prospective renter of this vacation villa, you'll see this open up as the casa comes closer to completion. We have NOT set a completion date, but our January 2009 trip is intended to result in a completed structure. At open, it will have working bathrooms, hot/cold water, kitchen with appliances and some furniture... It will take us some time to add in the other details that will more fully equip this to enjoy several days at Casita Torrente de Agua in PlayonSur, Parrita, Costa Rica. During Q1 of 2009 we'll bring on our booking website and you can book it through the site.

Peace!

Ricardo y Jeeeem

Oct 1, new month, new pics

Hola amigos!

Progress on electric continues. We'll be needing to provision for the transfer switch, but all in all, having a service panel in place is a good start!

We have a fair bit of rework to do as Jim located double electric boxes to contain two devices (eg: two switches, or two outlets) at once. This to make the inside wall finish easier, and electric things more organized.

We also dropped one "requirement", and will eliminate the two ceiling fans in the 'cupola'. After all, that is really intended to be a natural feature to manage cooling naturally.

We included this photo of one of the lower bedrooms. That big X you see is more wall area. But gives a nice idea what the light and view is like down on that level. Should be fantastic as the monkeys come through!

As you can see in this third photo, Alvarro is fitting in exterior fibroleit against bathroom #2, the one adjacent to the stairs that will go up to the main level. Our plan is to cover that overhang with teak to make that an attractive view. What I'm NOT seeing are the wall switch for exterior and bodega lights, nor the wall opening for the light at that corner.

While this final view doesn't show the whole structure, it does show the lower corner next to where the stairs will head up. That large opening above their heads still needs the window framed in, but for now is still the access to get to the second floor. Hopefully stairs can start 'soon'. That little window on the right just over the guys heads is the one over that bathrooms shower. Rather than use fans to vent, we're using natural air flow.

So friends, we do encourage comments.

Meanwhile that's it for this post. Thanks for reading!

Ricardo y Jeeeem