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.