A test of wills

Coral Bay's "Safeway" in one of its many paint jobs.

With Earl the hurricane gone, the new view from the porch. The right half of the picture with the now dying tree used to be blocked. Because of how we positioned the house and with those trees not on our property, Earl was a good guy!

The houses in the picture above had been blocked by three trees that I imagined I would take down at some future date. I did have to cut the stumps to clean them up plus drop a 30' trunk after the tree was topped. Can't say enough about the inexpensive 18" electric Poulan chainsaw I bought years ago after hassling with various gas saws, rented and borrowed. Throw it in the corner and a year later plug it in and cut down some trees. Throw it back in the corner when you are done. Starts every time. There's no idle, they are perfectly silent when waiting to cut. No bad gas, bad oil mix, or draining for storing and zero upkeep. Better still--$89 on Amazon. Unless you're Paul Bunyan it will cut everything you have with 100' heavy extension cord. Further than that you may melt a plug like I did.

These guys are a hoot. They move in, stick around about two weeks, eat everything thing that crawls, stare at you and the computer screen and then split never to be seen again. Sometimes they'll chase the cursor around the screen.

With Earl now gone and the property cleaned up I went back to finishing the tape and muding of all the walls. Like everything, it took longer than expected. Squaring up the dropped ceiling with some uneven joints was a mini nightmare. Time and patience took care of it. Just do it as the commercial says. I hate that commercial.

All this work was just setting the stage for the task coming. I wanted/intended to plaster all the walls with USG's Diamond Veneer plaster. Aside from its water vapor protection, extreme hardness and sound damping qualities I wanted it for how it looks--nothing beats genuine plaster, something we have been living with in San Francisco for thirty years. Long gone however, is the vastly superior unaffordable chicken wire, 1/2" thick applications. Instead we now have a one or two coat, 3/16" variety which meets all my requirements. Extremely affordable by standards, it is a minimum requirement in any upscale home stateside. In fact, good crews will install the rock, tape, mud, plaster everything and be gone. No sanding required, ready for painting. Some folks choose to leave the walls unpainted--they are that beautiful. Here's a video of the product. I include it for folks interested. If you want to see a professional crew working, watch the tape. There is a beauty to it.


The above is the professional side of the business and below is my idol/inspiration from the UK!


If you watched the videos the key link is the "working" time of the plaster. Generally about an hour during which you complete a five step process. Really a perfect set up--one wall at a time. Like oil glazing, you have to get the product on the wall and manipulate it, keeping a wet edge so to speak, until you reach the end of the wall. No stopping. With plaster you do get breaks, however short, between steps. With a couple days practice I'll be good enough to get it done. OK, it might look a little Moroccan but I'll just say I did it on purpose. Hell, it will go with the arches!

I spent two days practicing on a broken sheet while watching every youtube video on plastering. I was giddy with how the product did a lot of the work itself. Every step was timed on a windup 60 minute clock. The finish was so hard I left it out in the rain over night to see how it would stand up. Two days in soaking tropical rains did nothing. Daddy was so proud of himself!

By way of background, part of my satisfaction stemmed from not wanting to do this. While I wanted plaster, I thought I really should get some professionals to do the work. By any stretch it was a three day job for two people. The rock was already up, taped and muded. Stateside the going prices used to be 1.50-2.50 a sq ft, two coats, including hanging the rock. With that, I spoke to some folks in from Florida who were doing a very large stone and stucco job on island. At 2000+ sq ft, one coat, I thought I was looking at $3500 max for one coat not two. I get it, we are on an island, prices are high.

Sit down Patrick, this one is going to hurt. $10,600/4.50 a sq ft, for one coat, I was speechless. Better yet it was going to be spread over one month, weekends only. Let's see, 2000+ sq ft divided by 8 days gets 250 sq ft per day or 125 per person. I can do that on my knees with one arm and I have never done it. That's usually what one person does in little over an hour by himself as evidenced by the entertaining English bloke in the video above not to mention the other twenty videos I had watched. If the guy wasn't so nice over the phone I would have told him to go f'k off. You want to rip me off, man up, and take it from me physically. Pound the shit out of me, do it right. A valuable lesson, tough one for me to learn--on an island you have to keep your mouth shut and a smile firmly planted. There's only 4,000 people here. Hell, they know very little about you and what they don't know they make up. Peyton Place and then some. Actually I wouldn't want it any other way but it can be difficult at times. I have never named names on this blog for that very reason but I have had a person go whack causing me minor problems--possible connections/friends lost. Everyone thinks you are fabulously wealthy to be building a house on St. John. No one, and I mean no one, believes you are building a house virtually alone. You are to be skinned. You are living the dream. Trust me on this one--you are living the dream! "You got property and you are building a house, not just anywhere but on St John. Shut the f'k up, I don't want to hear you have no money. "

With steam coming out my ears it was either pass on the plaster which I had already bought or do it myself with the appropriate pain and suffering. Anyway that's the story on how I ended up doing it myself.

I'm about to get stung and not by just this guy.

This guy got me twice. Stumbling to the door in the dark I sideswiped him and he gave me a warning shot to my instep. Nothing like the time I got that death jolt putting my glove on, trapping one in the thumb hole. No heart stopper but definitely a wake up call. Who knew I could jump so high, sideways. Unfortunately I landed where he had run to. Boom, again, this one landed me over by the sink. Thankfully they ration the dose depending on how life threatening the situation is. Perhaps neurotoxins are hard to make even for them.

With inspiration from the English chap in the video above, I cracked open a bag and set about mixing my first batch sans the tea. I started on a small back wall in the den/future library. (it still looks like a beginner mogul run at Heavenly) Worse comes to worse, it will be behind a bookshelf. Fifteen minutes later it was virtually unworkable. Thirty minutes, it was concrete. I assumed I did something wrong. Mixed it too little, too much, not enough water, too much water. Spent an hour cleaning the wall and tools etc. Not a good start. None of this happened on the practice board.

Mixed a new batch. Same result. Climb back to the shack and start phone tag with USG corp. trying to find out what I'm doing wrong meanwhile researching plaster problems on Google. Hoop jumping at its best. Two days later, trying every trick they could come up with, it was determined that the plaster is no good. Duh. (The bag I used to practice with was one of two that were good, out of the twenty.)

I forget how to read the bag but the product was long outdated by the time I received it. It was shipped months out of date. Plaster goes off if it absorbs too much moisture, general humidity etc. Because of that, it has a use date. You know you have a bad batch if it contains what feel like crushable pebbles. That's the retardant, if you will, congealing leaving no working time. Blah, blah.

What I can tell you, corporate jockeys earn their keep pointing at the other guy. USG corp to Seacoast Supply to Tropical Shipping to warehouse conditions at expediters to fork lift operators. Whatever it takes, I'm not getting a refund or a new shipment despite the product being months out of date. "How do we know you did not let the product suffer in the last hurricane?" Who put the rips in half the bags, which forklift operator, at the truck, the warehouse, tropical shipping in Florida, St. Thomas or St. John? The dated bag is just for reference. All this and days later to avoid $800.

Taking matters into my own hands I asked to talk to the chemist at USG.
"Did the loss of working time ruin the chemistry of the plaster?"
"No, it will still work but is it worth it?"

The nightmare begins....



I had to have my plaster. I'm the person who finishes a bad movie or book once started. Not good.

The process--3'x3' square, with 15 minute working time including the mixing time, clean all tools and buckets, rinse and repeat. It took me almost two months to complete the walls and ceilings in what I thought would be three weeks max. Then to pull it all together I had to skim coat all the surfaces with pre mixed All Purpose Mud to even out the borders between the squares so to speak. In fact I'm not done because I had to move onto something else. Good news--what I have done looks somewhat like I was hoping. What madness however. A test of wills. Bad news? I'll get to that at another time.
Every time I come down the driveway they run/fly to the wall next to the truck.
Spider eyes magnified. Thank god I'm bigger than them. This is why they see you coming from every angle!
Perfect timing. Otto shows up just as Denise is supposed to fly into St. Thomas. Of course the phones are dead so I don't know if she has landed. I start the drive to Cruz Bay just as the storm makes landfall. Brutal. Halfway to town I get a signal and there is a message. Plane diverted to San Juan, could not land, will attempt tomorrow. I return home thankful. I did not think I could make it to Cruz Bay. It is very nasty out. Small trees nearly smacking the roadbed. Max winds at elevation 75mph. However what Earl lacked Otto had in spades--rain, lots of rain. The British Virgins had the worst flooding in their history. My primitive rain gauges, empty five gallon buckets standing in the open collected 20" in less than 48 hours.

Denise lands the next day. For the next five or six days we huddle inside. Afterwards I worked the usual 3-4 hours a day when she is on island with the beach in the afternoon. The rain caused a mudslide that back filled the septic saving me that effort. The forms for the still unpoured retaining walls stood the test. However silt basically filled in the bottoms. They will have to be dug out with a small gardening tool or torn down and rebuilt. Shit. The house took some water around the windows and doors with their temporary coverings.

Otto hits Coral Bay.
With all the retaining walls I had built the property withstood the records rains. Other parts of the island did not. Centerline, the main road across the island, suffered greatly. Several massive slides raised serious long term concerns, especially for the home owners above and below the damage. In other areas, the road was completely undermined. For Californians, think Highway 1 in Big Sur. Same damage, fears and delays.
These pics are after several days, in some cases weeks, of clean up.
Above and below is the road to our place. One lane lost. Who knows when this can be cleaned up
In fact the road was cleaned by the residents. Dr. Bob, in the yellow hat, standing by to "chiro" anyone's back should they need it!
Over the years, through their contracting and constant clean ups, it inspired this cover.

an email at the time sums it up.....

"Centerline is pretty much put back together. All the fallen telephone/power poles, I think three, are all up again, some on different sides of the road. One lane in a few spots because of significant mudslides. Constanza(our road) is really beat up. I will have to probably take a coal shovel and remove the rock carpet that covers the road. No one else comes up this far. I'm worried about my tires.
The wind blew down my temp doors and the house flooded to some extent ruining some bags of plaster. I'll have to redo some plaster spots. Otherwise the usual."

This is the pool at the Westin, our only hotel type resort. A river ran through it so to speak.
Mostly drained waiting for repairs.
This happened twice in 2010, having never occured before.
A river definitely ran through the tennis courts!
The south shore road in front of the Westin where the river passed.

A few days later we are back to normal. Denise flew out and I got back to the grind of finishing the plaster. Two weeks later we clouded up and another storm blew by to the south.
Tomas, from out of nowhere.

Basically by the time it departed we had raked up 100" of rain for the season, twice the norm. Centerline road was not in good shape and the road to our house really could not take any more.

Thanksgiving finally arrives with the end of the hurricane season.

The view from the Thanksgiving buffet at Caneel.

Roger on the back left meets a high school friend, Louanne, wearing the hat.

Roger pops for Thankgiving at Caneel every year for an assorted crew. He lets me mooch in everytime. Louanne and her husband just happened to be on a cruise that stopped in St. Thomas. What are the chances? New friends, Tim and Sheila on the far left. Fran, Roger's wife, has the pony tail.

The deer know where to hang out.

Beautiful twilight picture. Wrong. It's the car barge on a reef. Yup, despite making the trip several times a day, seven days a week, all year, they still find a way. Did you know it is legal to drink and drive on St. John? But I don't think it applies to barge captains.

Not to be outdone, this is the Westin ferry boat on a different reef a couple of weeks later. Yup, they make this run everyday.

Here's a short list of the Honor roll....

March 2007 - The American Pride, a 96-foot ferry carrying 15 passengers and three crew members to Tortola, runs aground at Triangle Reef just south of Morningstar Beach. The crash ruptures the boat's fuel tank, and 350 gallons of diesel fuel spill into the water. The ferry stays lodged on the reef for a number of days.

January 2007 - The Native Son Express collides with and capsizes a 30-foot pleasure craft, hurling the smaller boat's four passengers into the sea.

December 2005 - An Inter Island Boat Service ferry shuttling Caneel Bay Resort employees between St. John and St. Thomas runs aground at Steven Cay, just west of Cruz Bay. Some passengers sustain minor injuries.

June 2002 - Varlack Ventures' Venture Pride is not carrying passengers when it runs into the rocks in the channel between St. Thomas and Hassel Island. No injuries and no damage to the vessel are reported.

April 2002 - A Tortola-bound Native Son vessel, the Voyager Eagle, hits Johnson's Reef off the north shore of St. John. There are 33 passengers on board, but no injuries are reported, and the passengers are transferred to another ferry. The vessel stays stuck on the reef for a day before it is pulled off.

March 2001 - A collision between the Caribe Tide ferry and the Roanoke car barge outside Cruz Bay injures about 40 people, none seriously.

December 2000 - The Native Son Kat, a catamaran ferry, runs into Cow and Calf Rocks with 84 passengers on board. No one is hurt.

June 2000 - The Captain Vic car barge hits Skipper Jacob Rock off Steven Cay but has no paying passengers on board at the time

Read more: http://virginislandsdailynews.com/news/westin-ferry-with-25-aboard-runs-aground-on-moravian-reef-1.1079089#ixzz1UNtRvGML

Spotted in Lameshur Bay. If I ran into this snorkeling I would be hard pressed to convince myself it's a whale shark! My mind would be certain it was the world's largest leopard shark and of course it was coming for me!

Sunrise at the house.

The mule train starts. To get a break from the plaster tedium, which I knew I could not finish before returning to San Francisco, I started emptying the container that had all the travertine. Several people had inquired about buying one. Of course they didn't despite all the promises, but nonetheless having one empty was a good thing. You would have loved some of their excuses. No worries.

How much travertine do I have? Not much by some accounts. In fact I don't have enough with all the changes I had made, upper patio, side patio and expanded lower. I'm short maybe 800 sq ft. Still I have about 1300 sq ft. By house standards not a lot. But by back breaking standards, 5 tons--10 crates, 1000 lbs. per crate, 20 boxes of five tiles each, it's plenty. Or in layman terms, 200 fifty pound boxes, that have to get from the crates in the container into the truck, down the hill and driveway, unloaded, humped down the ramp and a last steep set of 15 stairs into the house. Once there, a new process takes place which I'll get to. This is why most people look for level lots and drive everything to the front door!

Slippery when wet!

I worked at carrying down 1000 lbs a day-- 20 boxes. Doesn't seem like much until you do it. Two trips to the container, 500 lbs at a time. That's about all my truck can handle aft of the rear axle, down a temporary curved driveway so steep you cannot see the road on the way up! Throw in a little algae and sliding off the driveway is easily accomplished. I went through a rear tire just trying to get back on it once.

A man of constant sorrow!

Once inside the house I freaked myself out thinking I was stacking too much in certain areas. I mean, how much will the floor joists actually hold? Twenty boxes doesn't take up much room but yet, there lies 1000 lbs! Visions of the floor caving in. Where are my span charts?! The second guessing never ends for a rookie. You spend half of every day bitch slapping yourself telling your brain to shut the f'k up. Some days its actually pretty entertaining.

At this point all the boxes were opened and I started laying all the tile to spread all the variations around. Every box, the tile were different. Some significantly. Not what I was hoping for. I quickly grasped why some folks simply buy ceramic or porcelain tiles--consistancy. Layout is much quicker. I spent more than two weeks bringing the tile down and figuring my layout and colors.
The gray underlayment is my waterproofing/earthquake membrane--Stratoflex. It is the same stuff they used in the Mall of America to prevent the tiles from cracking caused by the extreme flexing of their suspended floors. It makes a perfect substrate for the thinset while protecting the double plywood subfloor. If we ever suffer any hurricane damage I can power wash the interior with no damage to the downstairs.
Lay it all out, then stack it in order along the wall. Peel them off and lay them. Don't think, trust the process, otherwise you will go nuts with color patterns making you cross eyed. When a tile breaks panic sets in trying to find another in the reject pile that will work. I broke three out of several hundred trying to get them up to adjust the thinset.
I used my steel studs to set up my right angles etc.

Every room was square to within a 1/4 inch so all my ensuing cuts along a wall were always the same. As luck would have it, perhaps because I designed every dimension based on a 4x8 sheet of ply, I only had cuts along two walls in a room using 1/8 spacers. In the den I only had to cut along one wall. All luck to be sure but I needed it, or so I thought. When I originally packed the containers in Florida I put in a very cheap--less than $200 Bob Vila tile saw. I mean a guy was there doing a demo claiming granite was no problem. I handed him a piece, he cut it like butter. With some extra blades I threw one on the cart. Still, five years later, digging it out of a container covered in termites such that there was no box, I was a little concerned if it could do the job, knowing full well that a good wet saw was around $1000.
Bob Vila did not let me down. The saw cut all the travertine with an edge as good as the quarry's.
With a substantial dent put into the layout and actual tiles laid it was time to head for San Francisco and the holidays.

Another year in the books. Where is the time going? I have been at this four years now. Actual building time is about 28 months now. Longer than I thought and I definitely still have a ways to go.