Part 6 A Big Empty House

Housebuilding Log 6 August 2015
A big empty house.
So here we are, with a big house. Floor, deck, walls and a roof. Power sort of, and water sort of. But that’s it. We’re still living on the boat due to the lack of facilities here.
The wiring was done around the same time as the roof was going up, a massive spaghetti work of wires plugs and boxes. Ed hammered in all the boxes and had TieTie do the wiring part.

Tarpaper was put on the exterior walls and covered in wood siding. There’s no such thing as vinyl siding here, houses are either cement, wood or cement board exteriors, sometimes stone.
But we don’t have windows or doors.
Oh, and the drywall is up, that was part of the big building contract. But not mudded.

 

 

We don’t have any furniture, so here’s our setup for Happy Hours. A couple of buckets with a board on top for seats and a pail to throw in the empties. And Flaca keeps us company.
It feels kind of lonely around here without the gang all working and the noise and the mess.Time to sit back and consider the next things to do.

Not much progress is being made on the grounds. It still looks pretty shitty around here. I am continuing to work on the pathways, and I did get a flower bed sort of outlined but it’s really crappy looking. And I planted some bananas – the little roots were given to us by a neighbour and I had been carefully nurturing them.
I try to restore a muddy mangrove area at the south end of the lot to fill in some not-so-nice looking area.
You can’t really see them but I planted some little mangrove babies in there. (They died)
There’s a guy in Oakridge who does windows. We have really big windows. Our builder convinced us to make the windows twice as big as we really wanted them. And we’re actually glad he did. For one thing, we were not going to have air conditioning. Power is 5 times more expensive here than up north so we’re going to rely on ceiling fans and mother nature for wind. And, the windows we got are sliders, so one side is always glass, the other side screen.
Anyway, the guy in Oakridge got our money. Then we waited. We called. No answer. We called again, and waited and waited. Finally we went in physically to see him and he cried to us about spending our deposit on finishing another guy’s job and so now he really kind of needed more money to buy the materials to do our job. What choice do we have….we gave him some more money and sternly made him commit to coming and getting the damn job done!

So great, we have windows, next we will have to get doors.

We also really kinda needed something to sit on. The buckets with boards were ok for us, but sometimes we need guest chairs. So, the first furniture project came to life! Ed started setting up his workshop tools downstairs.
He quickly turned out a great set of chairs, and some benches! Which I painted all kinds of fun tropical colours.
Pinterest has been a great discovery. It is full of wonderful ideas. I found this idea with a palm tree in the railing, and Ed did the job!
In the meantime, I started the job of painting the railings.
The poor old Barge was in bad shape by now, so that got added to the job list – a fix up and paint job.
And Ed made a couple of gates to keep Flaca home where she belongs.
We are still going nuts with charters, very busy, and continue to bring supples for the house, and for the business. Of course it all has to come by boat, and hauling is never a fun thing.
But Ed improved the process with wheels!
Here is just one of the types of charters we were doing. This was a fun group!