Now that's love. Two months gone and Lizzy shows up the minute I walk down the path to the shack. Inside everything in in working shape. Electricity is still on and the refrig is working. No small feat. It makes returning after a red eye bearable. It means coffee in the morning and food in the freezer to tide me over until the jet lag ends and I can get over to St Thomas.
I knew it was too good to be true. The truck wouldn't start the next day. Tim shows up to give me a jump. Still no luck. It's not the battery as best we can tell. I'll have to wait until Monday to get a mechanic to come by. Money I did not want to spend. With nothing to do on Sunday, I take the battery out, clean everything including the grounding wires to the engine block etc. Put it all back together and miracle of miracles it starts just as the battery is being run down from constant trying.
Elation is an understatement. All the fear and loathing about serious problems, ordering and waiting for parts, all the while stranded on the mountain while trying to figure out how to pay for it. Poof, all gone!
Not a good way to start the day. Mongoose Junction fire. Ultimately put out by all hands with a giant bilge pump rushed over from Coral Bay.
It was this ship's pump, the Silver Cloud, that saved the day in Cruz Bay. She's anchored in Coral Bay. As a coincidence would have it I was invited aboard for a surprise birthday party for David Silverman.
Here we are waiting in the hold. Surprise...
The usual suspects. Without David I'm not sure Save Coral Bay would be so successful. Summer's End Group had no idea they would run into such a force. With our Go Fund Me fund raising I think it is safe to say we have a very good chance of prevailing.
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Serenity
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That was quick! Three days later the tile arrived. Two of the boxes suffered major damage. Hmm, will I have enough now? Add that to my rookie fears of worrying about the walls being plumb, the ceiling and window being level etc. I never gave any of this a second thought until I actually started to tile and I realized what the implications could possibly be from my original plaster job. The tile is perfect and it is definitely going to show if my work isn't. I made a minor adjustment at the base board and started. The first hurdle was at the window sill. Pass. Then the top of the window and finally the ceiling line.
Despite my starting fears it turns out cutting glass tiles, even with the wrong blade is a lot easier than travertine. Perfect cuts every time. There is an enormous amount of tedium however. Each tile has to set with spacers etc. The same effort as laying a 16" tile but you have to place eight tiles to cover the same area. Plus you have to be very meticulous with the thinset coverage. Any hollows will show through the glass when it cures. They try to help by putting paper on the back of each tile. In the future I will definitely lean towards tiles already on a mat so that you are putting up eight or more at one time. While this wall was only 40 sq. feet it felt like doing 300sq ft of floor tile. I am not looking forward to the down stairs bath where I plan on doing the entire shower and a chair wall all the way around the room.
In another break for the good guys the pattern layout allowed me to make use of all the broken tiles filling in the end pieces. In the end it all worked out. All my self induced tension produced a reoccurring pinched nerve that numbs part of my left arm and elbow. Haha.
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The color looks much better in person.
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Thank god they don't bite!
My new toaster/convection oven The old Black and Decker bought the farm after eight years. Totally absurd for a shack kitchen but it makes a great pizza.
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| Carnival 2015 |
With the wall finished I figured I'd put the sink and toilet in upstairs. As you can see the termites constantly remind me who's the boss in the tropics.
From the ongoing boating chronicles...all in a couple of months.
The boat above, Jaws, is Coral Bay's constant nightmare owned by a local reprobate. Always dragging anchor fouling other lines etc. This is his third time on the rocks. He's also connected to the marina people. Well, nature took it's course and sunk her after a small storm.
In really horrible news the wreck above killed two people.
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A flipped water truck
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In more tragic news a crane truck from St Croix shipped over to St John to help on a Park project flipped over on a steep grade and slid off the road killing the passenger.
The bladder arrived with the hardware above. As you can see the piece being held is larger than the opening it is supposed to go into. Everything comes in individual baggies so you don't realize there's a problem until it is time to assemble and use. Of course the manufacture doesn't believe it, hence the picture is taken and forwarded.
Assembled waiting for the part. This is how my punch list gets so long and half the time I forget how I originally did something or why. When the part comes I'll have to stop doing whatever I'm working on and remind myself what the original problem and solution was. It's all very manageable until your punch list gets pages long. I have some electrical circuity issues downstairs that are going to drive me nuts when the time comes. The labeling has faded in the humidity over the years.
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Another marina proposal
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In the category of you can't make this shit up, this is what the clowns envision for Coral Bay.
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Interesting parking job. Using a small tree as the parking break.
The part arrived six weeks later. Then the drama started. Following the directions I assembled the unit as instructed. Checked and rechecked the system, pump and filters, bladder and all the lines. Whenever I powered up the system the pump would not stop running nor would the system hold any pressure. Of course I thought the bladder had suffered in transit. I even pulled the filters from the cisterns (below) thinking I did something was wrong, perhaps they were too low and plugged? With no luck, I called the bladder help line, to no avail. Finally I called the unit manufacturer--different from the bladder people--and explained my situation. After reading them the instructions they said it was backwards. The printed directions were for a different set up. Say it ain't so. Now all my plumbing is off by about one inch. After I stopped crying I took everything apart and started all over.
Finally a temporary working toilet! Just in time for Denise's arrival. On the way to the airport I stopped at Home Depot and ordered 150 sq. ft. of white Carrera 3x6 tiles for the lower bath. It was an orderable product. Delivery expected in 3-4 weeks. At $5.69 a sq ft. it was a great deal.
Yea, two weeks of beach time with Denise.
While Denise was on island we allowed ourselves to be seduced into a real time waster. Previously Denise had been contacted by a loan officer of a bank that shall go unnamed. The basic premise was they wanted to loan us up to 80% of the assessed value of our property. Money to be used as we saw fit at 5%. Given out precarious financial situation relative to finishing the house in our lifetimes, haha, we had to take a look. Building the house on Social Security checks was getting very old. I don't mind poverty, been there done that a few times, but with no end in site it was getting extremely demoralizing. I hadn't had a drink at a bar in years. Thank god for books!
So with financial records in hand and despite warnings from Elvis Marsh that it was a scam of sorts, we went through the interviews, as in plural. Appointment after appointment, review after review, each time wanting another piece of data despite our rating over 800. All we wanted was 100k, a paltry percent of the appraised value. Sadly it was following the script that Elvis had outlined. In a nutshell, your loan gets approved but they flip it to a construction loan in the fine print with a deadline for completion which then turns into a mortgage, throw on mandatory hurricane and earthquake insurance for 12k a year with a 100k deductible and a maximum payout of 60% of replacement value. As an added bonus thousands of dollars in closing cost! Dumfounded I asked the agent if we looked that stupid reminding her that I built the house and damage could not reach 100k. She pretended to act insulted. Yes, yes, I want to pay you about 150k for insurance I don't need to get nothing in return. No wonder peeps that buy/build houses with a mortgage have to charge so much when they rent it and then walk away if there is major damage from a hurricane.
Well, at least my special order sink arrived. I put it in sideways so it doesn't protrude into the door opening. The bathroom tile is now past due. I have to scramble now to have work within the constraints of our budget. The tile was going to take me until I returned to San Francisco in July.
These are the pictures of the unfinished retaining walls. That's the project. Wire brush and sand off the crud build up over the years and put a stucco finish on.
I found a very affordable material out of Puerto Rico that is a combo cement/marble dust product that can be used indoors or out, $17 a bag, that leaves a very smooth surface as opposed to a sandy stucco finish. Something along the lines you see on Greek islands. Manual labor that I'll have to teach myself as I go.
They make it look so easy
The major benefit of this product besides a ultra smooth finish is it's all in one bag, nothing to be added. With professional stucco folks they get the cement and sand delivered separately both of which have to be protected from the elements. Until I found this product, doing the walls was way down the road when the driveway/parking area was completed. I can have nothing delivered. Everything has to be carried by hand. Packaged in 40lb bags was an added bonus.
The first coat turned out pretty good. It's definitely labor intensive but it worked as well as I was hoping. The second coat will be a long time coming and then finished with a paint job. Somewhere down the road I'll get a new electric power washer which will make the prep that much easier. The wire brushing and sanding was horrible and took forever.
Slowly but surely....
With the marble tile now being six weeks late and Home Depot on St Thomas showing no respect I took to social media and left negative comments on their Facebook page. BOOM!!! The next day I received a private message asking for my telephone number. The regional director in Atlanta wanted to chat. Profuse apologies followed with his personal guarantee that the product would be on STT when I returned from San Francisco in late August. The betting was against.
Finally boarded the flight I kept putting off waiting for the tile that never came.
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