Part 7 Finishing Begins

Housebuilding Log 7 – October 2015

Sometimes the weird ideas just work. The problem with having no doors is that the fruit bats just love to come in and, fly around, and shit all over the place. I devised this great bat-shield from string and it works just great!
And another idea found somewhere on the internet said to make vents on the windward side of the house, so that the wind comes in, and the hot air can escape up the top of the roof through the roof vent.
Rainproof, too. Except I guess in a hurricane but they we’d probably have other problems to worry about.

Before the house exterior walls could be painted, we had to decide what to do about the ceiling part of the deck. There is a combination stain and varnish they sell around here, and it’s pretty cheap, so we bought gallons and had our faithful crew spray all the wood beams and ceiling.
And we got a couple of doors for the front of the house to replace the bat-guard.
But we just stood them up in the other doorway temporarily to keep the bats out of that entrance because I had run out of string to make a proper bat curtain..
So I’m saying to Ed today, (as he’s throwing a bunch of sawdust on the firepit) “I’m really happy we got so much done this season, while it’s still dry season” And he says…..I think the rainy season is going to start tonight’……..
Everyone here gets a case of addictive plant syndrome; mine was getting to be a pretty serious case.

I built a little prototype nursery from some of the junk laying around the place, and started trying to grow random things from seeds and cuttings.
Most things failed, but there were some actual successes. Being a Northern Girl, I am used to everything dying in the winter – here things just go on and on. Especially the weeds.

I would get fruits and cuttings from friends and neighbours, and the grocery store, even stooping so low as to steal cuttings from the side of the road. But I have great fun growing and rooting.

I didn’t really understand about transplanting and how important water and the rainy season is, so most things just suffered and withered and died off eventually.

I built little fences around the plants or surrounded them with cut pieces of PVC pipe leftover from around the job site and made signs because I didn’t know what half this stuff really was.
The ground here is so damaged, no topsoil left at all, just bare clay in most places and noxious invasive prickly weeds everywhere else. Hardly any shade so boiling hot and dried out. Quite a challenge.

I outlined the first kinda ‘flower bed’ with cement blocks to try to protect the plants inside from workers stomping all over it.

I was coming to the end of my first round of path-making, having come all the way around from the bottom of the hill to the top, across the top and back down the other side.
I carried gravel one little bucket at a time and spread it carefully over the dirt, and lined the down-side of the path with branches I found around the place.

And I started trying to terrace the worst of the steepest parts with branches and rocks and stuff, to try to stop the erosion and keep the leaves and soil up there where it belongs.
The nursery was growing, now needing 2 levels to hold everything.
During this time we were still doing lots of charters, but seeing as it is October now and full into rainy season, the tourist business is getting slower. We had a situation come up where our bank went bust, so there was a lot of running around getting our money back.

Here’s the LINK – BANK CLOSES FOR MONEY LAUNDERING

Over the next couple of months it was raining off and on, no surprise, being it’s the rainy season. So we had plenty to do inside the new house.

Ed built scaffolding and go the crew to spray varnish/stain the whole ceiling, while another guy was doing the drywall mudding.
I really wanted a pocket door to the bathroom, to save space. After some convincing, Ed relented and figured out how to do it.
Now for some finish paint on the inside, and a big cleanup!