Podocarpus Day

Friday, Gary Aguirre, our cabinet guy, came and installed the vanities after we got the bathroom floors tiled for him.  While he was doing that, we went into Kona to buy sinks, faucets, etc for the bathrooms and look at extra tile for our shower and drawer pulls and Hearth tile for the wood stove.  Phew.  Below are some pics of the vanities in the bathrooms with the tile.  What do you think?  You can be truthful.

This is the guest bathroom.  Only one sink at the left.  Need drawer pulls.  We're going for what they call black oil brass.

You can kind of see it in the picture on the faucet box.

This is the master bathroom  Two sinks and 4 drawers in the middle.

Our last bathroom, the powder room will have a Koa top with a leg and a vessel sink, no cabinet. He'll install that later.

Saturday was a yard day.  We took a day off the inside of the house to plant the Podocarpus hedge before it got too big for the small pots.  The idea is to plant podocarpus along the cement rail fence to grow to about 8 ft. and provide a little more privacy so we don't see the highway and they don't see us.  So we got the team together (Luca, Tony, Crissie, and Buzzie), dug some holes and fertilized with compost and planted the podocarpus.  Tony is pretty anal about it, so he drew a string line and made circles with fluorescent paint every two feet apart.  He used a shovel to dig whereas I used the electric augur and he still dug more holes than I did.  Crissie planted, Tony mixed the dirt, Luca watered, and I staked and tied them.  Great teamwork.  Luca did so well, he got MacDonald's for lunch.  The adults preferred the Hawaiian plate lunch.

Luca and Tony digging holes.  Luca preferred watering.

Me and the electric augur.

Staking and tying the plants and filling in the fertilized soil.

The finished row.  In 5 years they will be as tall as the hedge in the background.  Yes we miscounted

the holes and didn't buy enough podocarpus, so we're going to plant some hibiscus instead.

So as you can see, in a while we won't be able to see those cars on the highway, nor they us.

Notice the hibiscus across the street.  We are going to plant two of those on either side of the driveway

and let them grow to the height of the large one next to the pillar.  They've got a pretty flower.

Tomorrow, Tony and Marilyn want to get rid of a small tree that's growing too close to their house, so we're going to dig it up and replant it in front of our  house to block the late afternoon sun from bleaching out our front door.  That's going to be a little chore.

Finally, just a little anecdote about what some tourists think Hawaii is.  So Marilyn is in charge of all the bellhops and valets at the Mauna Kea hotel, the Big Island's flagship resort.  A young couple in their late thirties staying at the hotel were waiting for their car and were making small talk with Marilyn, so Marilyn asked them where they were from.  They replied, "America."  Marilyn just couldn't resist, so she said, "Hey, me too!!"  Yes, girl was blonde (just perpetuating the stereotype).  Like you didn't have to exchange your currency or need a passport to get here.  So, like Catalonia, Scotland, Quebec, the Kurds, and Chechnya maybe Hawaii should go for sovereignty.

Tile Sunday

Today Milton Cravello and his wife, Agnes (Marilyn's mom and dad) came over from Hilo (about an hours drive) with all the tools for tiling.  Milton is a wealth of information and he has just about any tool in the book to get a job done.  Today it was tiling.  We bought the tile before we left for the mainland last spring and Milton measured the bathrooms we were going to tile, took the tile measurements, and drew out a plan for the way they should be placed.

So today we reaped the fruits of his planning and did the master bathroom.  Now we still have to grout and do the other bathrooms but we should get it done this week.  The vanities are here and we can put them in over the tile.  By using a little more tile and resting the vanities on top of it, we didn't have to make any unusual cuts.  We did have a couple of walls to negotiate and that's why we did the hardest bathroom first.

Here are the pics.

Milton the supervisor and Tony and I doing a "dry run" to see if Milton's plan will work.  It did.

Of course while we were working, Marilyn got a good visit in with Agnes and grandson, Luca.  That's

Puno in the foreground and Agnes's dog, Mele in the back.  Good to see they're enjoying the lanai.

Yes, I have knee pads.  Working the thin set and laying the tiles with the blue spacers.

It can be messy work.  Looks like I'm painting myself back against the wall.  I just turned around and went the other way.

All done.  Just cut the square around the toilet phlange.
Back at bathroom two tomorrow.  Thanks Milton.

No more stuff on the Mainland

Short blog today but important.  All our storage locker stuff arrived.  We haven't seen it for almost two years, so I guess that means we haven't missed it because we don't even know what's in half the boxes.  So as we open them it will be like Christmas - surprise!  I worked in the garage most of yesterday cleaning up and getting ready for our stuff.  I built a 20 foot long workbench and here are the before and after pics.

the before picture.  lots of room

after picture full of stuff

Here's our life condensed into half of a garage.  Notice Crissie's little scooter to the left.  It doubles
as a lawnmower.  So when she can't walk anymore at least I'll get the grass cut.

Painting, Painting, Painting

So we started painting last week.  It's a lot of paint and thank God we decided to just go with one color or we'd be wasting a lot of time picking out colors.  It's probably better to add accent colors after we've moved in for a while to figure out what we like  best.  So we arrived to some of our kitchen cabinets already in.  No face plates for the drawers and cupboards but that's okay.

We've decided to go with antique white.  It has a bit of yellow in it and it complements our front door very well.  Hopefully we'll be done tomorrow.  Just our bedroom left and the living room/kitchen but that's still a lot of walls.  Here's some pics.

Yes, I do the cutting.  I still have a steady hand.

A look at some of our cabinets. The one with the large drawers against the wall will have a gas cooktop.  Sink is on the left with the dishwasher on the right and garbage on left.  There'll be plenty of cabinet space.  This is only half.

Crissie found this new cute gardener to mow our grass.  I think he is overdressed compared to me above.

Of course we still find time for our walks.

First Day Back to Work

So, we started with the hedge today.  If you don't stay ahead of it, you'll pay for it in the end.  So Crissie drove the truck and I stood on the platform in the back with the hedge trimmer and cut away.  Our hedge is called Podocarupus and it can grow like a tree, but we don't want that.  As long as it's small enough, it's feathery and easy to cut.   Since we live next to the highway the hedge provides privacy and sound mitigation.  We are trying to keep it about 8 feet or more tall so you can't see any pickups or cars.  The big semis we still can see, but not the driver's cab.

If you do look out from our Lanai or porch, you get a direct shot of the highway.  See the picture.  So we bought more Podocarpus to plant and let it grow tall, so no part of the highway is visible.  We also have a back hedge but that is called Olive Vine.  It doesn't have olives but the leaves look like the olive tree.  It can grow huge as well, but we're keeping it the same as the podocarpus. So basically, three sides are or will be hedge.

The only other side is between us and our neighbor, Anthony.  It's just grass between his property and ours.  So we've decided to plant 3 avocado trees - the kind that grow wide and have plenty of fruit.  That should give us free avocados (and you know how expensive they can get) and a certain degree of privacy as they grow out.  Remember Robert Frost - good fences make good neighbors.

Tomorrow we're building a work bench in the garage and starting the painting.

This is our highway podocarpus hedge.  We're going to extend it to the end of the fence.

You can see we've already started killing the grass to extend the hedge.

With the hedge growing higher than the fence, we won't see the cars on the highway.  The downside is that we won't be able to see the flowering Hibiscus.

Hello everyone,

We are back in business. After a summer of warm water, fire smoke, and repairing damage done by ice to the dock pilings at the lake, we are on our way back to our other island - the Big Island of Hawaii and the renewal of the blog.  Below is the latest picture taken in August by our good Hawaiian friend, Bernie Hite - the second to arrive as a visitor.  Sharon and Hank Hankins came in July I believe.   Of course, while it's finished on the outside, we have a lot to do on the inside.  So starting Tuesday, we'll have at it.  Let's see if two 70 year old codgers can put some things together.  We don't have much time because our first inside staying visitors come in Feb.  

So stay tuned for all the excitement of finishing our house and all the adventures we will have doing it.

Here's Bernie admiring our front door.  When we left it was just a white sheet.  The wood is called
Sepele - a type of African Mahogany. They call it poor man's Koa (which is very expensive and hard to get - native to Hawaii) because when it darkens, it looks like Koa.  I guess like fake news, it will be fake Koa.