¡Tenemos ventanas y puertas y agua!

on JUNE 2, 2018

So with walls, doors and water we can totally move in, right?!? Well, that’s just what we did, but there is one very important detail missing – plumbing. Until the toilets are installed, I feel like it isn’t quite livable. We can find workarounds for just about everything else, except that. Graciously, our wonderful neighbors were sweet enough to offer their spare room bathroom, which is just up the hill (Thank you Mayra and Greg!), but I’m excited to have the plumbing installed. Latest update is that they are sealing the floors and walls today, then plumbing on Sunday.

Thursday night, we moved all the stuff already down in Mexico over to the house. I have to stop here and say a thanks that with every trip up to the Bay Area, Switch had been moving stuff down gradually. That made my moves up here WAY easier. However, since our bed and other bed-like furniture is still on its way (arrived in San Diego last night!), we stayed in the trailer.  As if I needed one more reason to appreciate buying that thing.

The house is looking great! I was skeptical about the window frame colors, but they look really good against the brick walls. I’m especially happy with the big sliding doors in the living room. If you recall, I wanted the feeling of inside/outside and didn’t want to block the view. I am happy to report that you still get the feeling of being outside in the living room – view barely obstructed. Check this out!

view for days

I was also skeptical about getting plastic window frames, but wood expands and contracts in the humidity (and gets bugs) and aluminum will pit in the salty sea breeze. These windows and doors from Germany seal tight with some seriously over-engineered hardware and will hold up to the harsh conditions. Hurricane proof!

One detail we weren’t aware of was the metal tracks at the bottom of each of the interior doors. We now have a toe stubbing hazard in the entry way from the courtyard and into the bedrooms/bathrooms. There are several things we could have done if we had known they existed (extended the cement tile to the door thresholds, dig in the tracks so they would be flush, etc). Now that we know, we’ll have to deal with this using moulding or something, but I would have preferred not to deal with it that way. This does give us an opportunity to extend the tile in the second bedrooms to the wall though, which I am excited about. It’s going to look awesome. Here’s the tile in the bedroom – all installed and waxed up.

installing the sliding patio doors

picture window in the living room