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)