I had to re-direct my moveable type blog to a blog I just made on vox.com because the twenty-five to thirty spam comments I was getting every day was too much to constantly go through an delete.
Kitchen dishwasher finally installed
This blog post is a series of posts written about the rainforest inn and intended for readers out there who are interested in a behind the scenes look at our bed and breakfast. Also I'd like to put a perspective on this post so you know how much work it is running a bed and breakfast. I started writing this post before Christmas -- so you can see how much free time we have during tourist season. Here is a picture I took of the main building back then. It shows our Christmas decorations.
Many of the email and comments I've received about this blog have mentioned my wife Laurie's dishwasher and berate me for not having installed it properly. And these are comments from people who haven't even used it and had the interesting surprise of the whole thing toppling over in their laps if you opened the loaded bottom drawer too far. So I finally built a beautiful mahogany cabinet which Laurie painstakingly sanded and varnished. It is a little higher than counter top height and it houses my prized Povoni coffee maker. Since I installed it next to the dishwasher I decided maybe I should put a little slab of plywood across so that the dishwasher would stop falling over. So Laurie finally got her dishwasher mounted.
I felt a little guilty after putting all that effort into a cabinet for my coffee maker so it was the least I could do to have it do double duty and also hold in the dishwasher.
Laurie also makes all her gourmet breakfasts in this kitchen. When we used to serve breakfasts on the long mahogany slab table in the kitchen our guests described it as a "farm house" kitchen and raved about how quant and romantic it was (now we serve the breakfasts on the front porch of each suite so that it is a private and more romantic experience). Actually the kitchen was just a garage where the horse feed was kept when we moved in, and I quickly converted it into a kitchen so we could eat. We have plans to do it over to a design that Laurie has been working on. She likes the central work table but wants it bigger. She also wants me to put the sink in the central work table and put a bigger sink by the dishwasher. She hasn't decided whether to put the stove top in the central work table or not. One of the designs she is considering is a U-shaped kitchen which is excellent for efficient work space but it would be difficult to get in (no way to walk through) and also would make it hard for more than two people to work in the kitchen. It's ironic that Laurie and I are spending so much thought on the kitchen design as Uncle David Humphrey who originally developed all this property was a kitchen designer and builder. He founded Orbit Kitchens and built tens of thousands of kitchens all over Puerto Rico.
It is also ironic that after I finally installed the dishwasher properly in a permanent cabinet it broke. We're waiting for the Sears repairman now...
Technorati Tags: bed and breakfast, el yunque, puerto rico, rainforest
The care and feeding of termites
Before I talk about the termites I want to do a quick explanation of how to send out a link to your TripAdvisor section to former guests so that you can "pimp" them for a good review. Go to your review section on TripAdvisor. Then copy the URL at the top. You will get something like this: http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g147324-d503287-Reviews-Rainforest_Inn-El_Yunque_National_Forest_Puerto_Rico.html
If you email that long URL to someone then half the time the word-wrap will mess it up and they won't be able to click it and go to your section. So the next step is to go to:
and enter the long URL in the space where it says: "Enter Giant URL here" add some tags and hit submit and the nice folks at elfurl will make a little URL that goes to the same place like this:
You can email your former guests that link and it will take them right to your section. Thanks go to Nathan Allan of the Swan Town inn who reminded me that this info was missing.
Now back to the El Yunque rainforest:
Our beautiful mahogany credenza had white pine parts that had to be ripped-out because of termites. We stack most of our lumber in the soon-to-be tree house suite where it is out of the rain and protected. The wood pile is a selection of the old treated long leaf yellow pine and the newer treated pine (supposedly less toxic) and several cabinet grade woods that aren't treated as well as copious amounts of cedar that we use for building the houses. If you go through this pile when selecting lumber you can get a good idea of the termite resistance of the various woods. Mahogany never has any termites and cedar doesn't either except in the sap wood. So any cedar boards that were plain sawn (not quarter sawn) from smaller logs end up riddled with termites near the edges where the sap wood was. So that wood has to be thrown away or ripped to a narrower board which only has the cedar heart wood. There is also some white pine trim in the stack which doesn't always get termites but like the white pine in the credenza will eventually get termites given enough time. The termites are very selective. They know what they like and will choose one wood over another and only eat certain woods when they are very hungry.
Take a fine hard piece of oak and bury it in the wood pile. Stack the most toxic termite resistant boards you have around it. Hide it beneath mahogany. Cover it with teak. It doesn't matter if it is white oak or yellow oak. All that is required is it be oak. That fine kiln dried oak that is used for constructing the most expensive furniture. Then stand back. Wait a week and dive into the lumber pile. If you wait long enough you won't even be able to find the original oak board. Oak is termite candy. The rainforest termites have wings and they swarm all over searching for delectable woods. And oak is like gourmet imported caviar to them. They will find it and devour it before any other woods. Their method of searching out oak is also to be admired. I had an oak table that I flow-coated with clear epoxy. It was completely sealed on all surfaces with a quarter inch of solid plastic. That table today is a study in termite boring technique. The termite tracks through the clear epoxy look like tunnels in a glass ant home.
I understand that termites don't eat mahogany because of a natural toxin that is in the lumber. When you are cutting and sanding mahogany it is important to not breath the dust (wear a mask with carbon filter cartridges). Termites don't like teak because of the very high silicone content. The hard silicone gives them a tooth-ache. Cedar also has natural bug-resistant toxins. That is why cedar is used in closets to prevent sweater eating moths from visiting. Cedar is also very expensive. We use Western Red Cedar for all our construction but we are lucky as there was a three story mansion here entirely built from Cedar that was destroyed in a hurricane so we were able to save all the Cedar and recycle it for use in the new houses.
TripAdvisor Tips & Techniques
If you have lots of Trip Advisor reviews with the same important keywords they will come up in Google searches.
Particle board furniture and the rainforest
Most of our favorite furniture are re-furbished old pieces. We can't use any furniture here that uses particle board as it just disintegrates. Even the expensive furniture from fine furniture stores doesn't hold up in the constant high humidity because most modern furniture uses particle board for the substrate which the laminates are applied to. And the laminates are on both sides so it is very difficult to tell. They (the furniture store people) don't usually don't let you drill holes in the furniture before you buy it although it is easy to sneak a portable drill in the store. Furniture that was made before the invention of particle board (which began to be used extensively in the 1950's) can be found in antique stores but is priced out of our budget. But we do find old pieces in thrift shops and we re-furbish them. For example, the wet bar in the villa is a mahogany credenza that was built in 1920 or so and we ripped out the insides and installed a sink in it. That mahogany credenza is one of our favorite pieces and we were able to purchase it very cheaply because the backing and pieces under the drawers was stained white pine that was riddled with termites.
When we were re-furbishing our dining room armchairs we took the seats out so Laurie could reupholster them. So the chairs were still in the kitchen and any human height animal could see that the seat was just a gaping hoop. But our household also includes dogs. One of our dogs, Lizzy, had a habit if she saw Laurie standing beside a chair where she would jump up in the chair so that Laurie would pick her up. Lizzy is a small dog. She is a ten-pound or so Silky/Yorky mix. She is also a very athletic dog and jumps very high for her size. Well Laurie was looking at the fabric on the table and she stood beside the chair while doing so. Lizzy came along and wanted Laurie to pick her up. So Lizzy leaped up very adroitly and very high. It was a perfect jump and since the chair was missing a seat it was also a perfect "swish". Lizzy went right through the loop and crashed to the floor beneath the chair. Her expression was very surprised. Laurie and I laughed about it for most of that afternoon. We haven't noticed her jumping on any chairs since.
We recently received a comment about this blog which you can read here on the Youngstown home renovation blog. And sadly to say for Laurie the dishwasher is still falling out of the wall but I will try to write more about our construction techniques as he suggested. I think that this discussion of particle board is a construction technique and I also want to say something about choosing lumber which is also a construction technique at least the first part of any construction except when you're not building with lumber (which we are usually not as houses in Puerto Rico need to be hurricane proof which means concrete). I also ordered some water-soluble oil paints for Laurie so that she can switch from water colors (which do not hold up well in the rainforest either) to oil painting. Maybe the gift will help take her mind off the falling dishwasher. My next blog entry will delve into the art of feeding termites. Our next podcast is about sailing on a Captained charter boat in the Caribbean.
tags: rainforest,travel,nature,bed and breakfast,b&b,b&b,el yunque,puerto rico
Our bed & breakfast building techniques
When we moved in and started building there was no electricity, no water, and the one mostly finished building was full of destroyed furniture and had a leaky roof. The property had been abandoned for five years after hurricane Georges destroyed the main house. As I have told many guests when giving them tours of the property, we filled five 30 yard dumpsters of garbage when cleaning up the hurricane damage. My immediate goal was to finish the villa and chalet so we would have rentals to have some income as soon as possible to help with the monthly home depot bills. Laurie's goal was to clean up the property and make everything look nice. You can guess which one of us does the accounting. We finished the chalet first and started renting it out that summer (2004) and had a few guests while we worked on getting the villa ready for the season which starts after Thanksgiving. To help keep us on our toes I had the first renters booked in the villa November 15th so if we didn't have it finished by then we would have had some explaining to do. It worked out that the day our first renters showed up Laurie was still sweeping sawdust out the front door as I was leading our new guests in the back door after checking them in. Now that we had two rentals completed and enough income to defray the constant Home Depot (we call it Home Despot) bills our next goal was somewhere for us to stay. The chalet was built over a large garage. We cleaned out the horse feed, tack and god-knows what else and I built a temporary kitchen on one side. The kitchen was fairly important as we bill our place as a bed and breakfast so Laurie needed somewhere to make the breakfast. In the wall dividing the new kitchen from the rest of the garage I put in pantry shelves. This temporary kitchen is the one we still use today and our guests comment (when seated on the long mahogany table) that the farm house style kitchen is so romantic. They don't know that if you open the dishwasher door all the way it may unbalance and fall over because I haven't installed it completely only just resting it on the packing pallet which it came in and hooking up the pipes and power. I installed the stove top in a mahogany cabinet that was part of my shipping agency office (very nautical) in the distant past and the oven is on blocks. The central work table we made from an antique examining table from a pediatrician. I finished it with a large cast iron sink mounted beside the dishwasher. On the other wall we have two large refrigerators, one a commercial unit recycled from Laurie's flower shop and the other a very nice two door well-known name brand "Elite" machine with an ice maker that is only capable of working 91 days or until the end of it's warrantee whichever comes first.
I think I better make a new paragraph. I didn't realize that describing our quant farm house kitchen would take so many sentences. The worst part, the embarrassing part, is the bedroom which Laurie and I slept in for the first year of operations. So our bedroom was behind the wall of pantry cabinets, basically on the other side of our quant farmhouse kitchen. There were several things about this location for a bedroom that were annoying:
1. Whenever the commercial refrigerator's compressor kicked-on you stopped being able to hear yourself think which would disturb my REM sleep patterns (Laurie was more annoyed by other things further down in this list but since I am writing this I will order the list with the things that most annoyed me first). The lesson to learn from this is that no matter how cool it is to have an expensive commercial refrigerator in your kitchen remember that the people who make the household units know a thing or two about what you might want in your home as opposed to your factory and being startled out a sound sleep by the jet-taking-off sound of a commercial refrigerator's compressor kicking off is not a selling point.
2. The bathroom we used was not very close to our bedroom. For our first year the only working bathroom was under a tarp in the north wing of the main house (which became the villa). Running through the rain on the slippery tile floor was hard to get used to. Sometimes we would get stuck inside waiting for a rain to subside. Remember that we live in the rainforest. Later I built a bathroom in the south wing (we call it the Anderson wing after the volunteer who did most of the masonry work). But access to that bathroom still involved walking through the kitchen and then across the south breezeway. We decided that having a bathroom adjoining your bedroom is not a luxury.
3. The roof over our heads was the floor to the upstairs. That is a convoluted way of saying we were living downstairs. I know that lots of people live downstairs but I never was a very good apartment dweller (witness the fact that I moved a mile into the heart of the rainforest) so I didn't suffer the pitter patter sound of feet upstairs very well. Sometimes in the middle of the night my imagination would take over and I would try to deduce what the sounds coming from upstairs were--perhaps heavy fishing boots and a game of musical chairs? I didn't know but I laid awake anyway.
4. Occasionally guests would ask us where on the property we lived. Our place is a rambling mansion of five houses in various stages of repair so a wave in almost any general direction usually dismissed this question but Laurie was never comfortable with it. We certainly weren't going to say: "Our bedroom is the squalid nine-by-nine room with the cement floor on the other side of the pantry."
Laurie just came in--interrupted this writing--to tell me the dishwasher fell over. She bought some new cutlery that is very heavy stainless steel and you really can't pull the drawer out all the way when it is loaded with that weight. She has already forgotten how bad our first couple of years were and wants me to mount the diswasher. Now that we live in the south "Anderson" wing of the house and have our own private bathroom and a front room with weight training equipment and all sorts of other luxuries but it is all in your expectations. Maybe if we had spent our first year staying in the stable down below with a straw floor and a mud path to an outhouse, maybe then the dishwasher falling over wouldn't be so serious.
Laurie and I still have conflicting goals. I want to finish the jungle suite (it has a huge bedroom high in the tree tops with tree ferns and epiphytes at eye level). I want more rentals available for next season. Laurie wants me to finish repairing the swimming pool (like that isn't a hole for throwing money in) and she spends hours working on the grounds tying orchids to trees and planting heliconia. The rainforest is so prolific that, lucky for me, she just concentrates on the paths between the buildings and the yard in front and is willing to let the rest of the acreage be wild. Sometimes she will be working on the grounds and forget about everything else, like dinner...
Complaints from our rainforest bed and breakfast
Living in the El Yunque rainforest is wonderful.
The sounds of the coquis or the call of the Puerto Rican screech owl (straight out of a Tarzan movie soundtrack) make every evening relaxing and special. We are so high in the rainforest that these wild sounds are the only ones to break the perfect silence.
There are some, not so wonderful, things that we have to put up with living so high in the rainforest. We have a nice library of books. Including those expensive computer reference books as well as novels and many, many, books about carpentry, masonry, wiring your house, decorating, building a septic tank--the books we need for all the work we do here renovating the inn. I like to sit down and enjoy reading a novel but living in the rainforest sometimes the words are missing. Not all the words, just a few select ones that the termites found the most tasty. Once or twice a year the termites up here swarm and when they do they dive into everything including our books and boring in one side and out the other eating a word or two out of every page--only the words they find interesting. There is no defense for them as we are the visitors in their rainforest home.
https://www.ppdl.purdue.edu/PPDL/images/termiteswarm3.jpg
We also have a CD collection and a DVD collection. iTunes saved our CD collection. After about a year the aluminum that is sandwiched in the mylar of the CD's develops a corrosion that looks like worm tracks and the CD is unusable. I thought CDs were supposed to be industructable compared to vinyl records but not up here. We added every CD that was still good to our iTunes database and we keep that 500 gig hardrive backed up to another hard drive (no point in burning the data to CDs or DVDs to back it up as those back ups will just fail with the same problem).
Technology has just recently come to our rescue for the DVDs too. There is a wonderful device called a media gate (made in Korea) which we use to watch our movies and TV shows. It has S-video as well as a USB port and an Ether net port. We load all our movies and TV shows into its hard disk (either Divex or MP4) and it plays them like magic. It even comes with a little remote and the sound out is a fiber optic cable that connects to our speakers. The only problem is the time it takes to convert DVD's to Divex that we can save on the hard drive. Of course buying huge hard drives to store all the movies is expensive too but not as expensive as buying DVD's and finding out a year later that they are corroded and unplayable.
The new products from the iTunes store are nice too. We have a little microwave dish pointed at the antennas which are on the peak of El Yunque (and only a mile or so from our house). This dish feeds to our network giving us internet access better than a T1 line which we send out to WIFI for the whole property.
I am describing all this technical stuff because it is kind of ironic. The high tech devices like CD's and DVD's don't work up here but the even more high tech devices like WIFI and our media gate player work great. We do a few things differently with our electronics though. We leave computers and WIFI nodes etc on all the time so that the internal heat keeps the high humidity from corroding the circuits. We also have pretty good UPS systems to protect us from the occasional losses of power during a tropical storm. I built it using a large sine wave converter (from a ship) and marine batteries.
In one of the next blogs I will describe our attempts to get even more off the grid.
Bill
Living in the rainforest while building a bed & breakfast
Subtitle: And while also renting out to guests.
I want this blog to be interesting but I'm operating under a lot of constraints. The biggest one is who might be reading this? There's a chance my wife Laurie might read this, especially since I depend on her editing skills and suggestions. So the pathos and ennui and character development which comes from hearing about relationship struggles will have to be left out (sorry, I hope you keep reading). Then there is my friends and family. Some of them might read this (although probably not all the way through) so I can't talk about the stuff (or link to it) that I learned reading someone's myspace blog (which sucks because we would both increase our hits with a cross-promotion and I want to increase my readership and they have to let more people find out about all that personal stuff someday). And the friends who might read this preclude lots of other interesting stories (especially when they are about friends or relatives or guests). It is just impossible to put any gossip at all in one of these blogs...
Am I using too many parentheses? Are asking rhetorical questions, which I will never answer later in this dialogue bad grammatically? Sure sounds weird. I warned about my grammer in the blurb I wrote about myself. This shouldn't really be a new paragraph either because I am still trying to hammer out what I can write about.
The other constraint, and a fairly important one, is the potential guests who might read this blog and since that is one of the purposes of this blog (all the earlier mentioned constraints stop this blog from being one of those cool get-your-suicidal-thoughts-out-there blogs) this could be a real showstopper if I let it. Most of the guests we have had have been fairly literate. In fact they run toward scientists, doctors and educators. Which means that two-thirds of my guests are literate. So I have to be careful what I say about the Rainforest Inn, about Puerto Rico, about El Yunque, about politics, religion, shit what am I going to talk about?
1. Cool things to do in Puerto Rico?
No, already do that with the podcast Laurie and I do.
2. What it is like rennovating a family home to make it into a bed in breakfast?
Ok, I will go into some of that. Today I am building shelves in our laundry room. The laundry room is in the same building as the villa. It is in one corner off the breezeway. September is our slowest month. In fact there are two weeks in September when we have no guests at all. Since we can't do any work while guests are here (guests that might be reading this please look the other way) then we have to work madly when they're not here. That is why sometimes when we're dining with guests enjoying my wife's gourmet breakfasts and talking about things to do while staying at the rainforest inn I usually suggest things to do that involve not being here relaxing and reading a book, or lazing in one of our hammocks, or bird-watching from the back porch. Instead I suggest going on a hike far far into the rainforest so that we can pound a few nails without disturbing anyone. Now I better get back to installing those shelves.
