Making a mosaic

My sister Indigo has painted most of the oil paintings which we have hung in the rooms. Some of the watercolors were painted by Laurie. Oil paintings are more durable than watercolors because the constant rainforest humidity doesn't affect them as much with mold and the colors don't fade as much. But mosaics are the most durable art form of all. Mosaics in Pompeii were dug up thousands of years later and still just as bright.

We decided to make a mosaic in our kitchen/living room/lounge. It wraps around the central post. We made it on plycem (brand name for a cement board product) so that Indigo could work on each panel, horizontal, on a comfortable table. She designed the panels so that when I installed them around the post it would look like the vines, sunset, waterfall, and other images wrap around the post. We glued the panels onto the concrete post using 3m 5200 and finished the corners with rows of carefully chosen glass mosaic piece.

It's really a feature now in the room.

Technorati Tags: b&b, rainforest

Building a Green Bed & Breakfast

Check out another green bed and breakfast

During our day to day operations and new construction we have done our best to harm the environment as little as possible. We aren't the only bed and breakfast to incorporate or try to incorporate green methods. It is very popular now to be green. But sometimes being green is not very practical. I'm going to list some of our efforts and explain why we have chosen them over some of the less practical green construction options there out there.

There is a TV show about an Inn in Africa called "Life is Wild". The show is about a Brady-Bunch type of family which moved to Africa to get in touch with each other while starting over as inn-keepers. If you watch the first couple of episodes you will see that there is some "bed and breakfast" stuff thrown in that is actually more true to life than often depicted in other television shows. Another example is the Tori Spelling show. It is a reality show about running a bed and breakfast a but it is completely off base because the guests of the Tori Spelling place are only there in the hopes of being on TV and the operations are a dead loss as the profit center of that place is the TV show. Both of these new TV shows throw in lots of references to "green" construction, "green" paint and other environmentally friendly devices sometimes as a source of humor.

Also there are blogs like mine that discus the popular "greening" of bed and breakfasts. Wendy's Bed and Breakfast Blog is an example. If you want to learn about some of the work that needs to be done to make a house into an Inn you can read about it in her excellent blog. Wendy is also trying to make her new place "green" in an honest effort to try to save the environment as best as one person can do while still surviving. Green Hotels and Inns are trendy.

Five years ago when we started renovating the hurricane ravaged estate that was to be the rainforestinn we weren't thinking about green construction. We were mainly thinking about how we would ever be able to accomplish such a huge task with the limited resources that we could scramble together (mainly just our wits and a little brawn). We ended up recycling building materials because it was cheaper to use all the piles of lumber, fancy antique bathroom fixtures, twisted used copper pipe and other materials that were left over from the destroyed main house. We learned as we went along what was practical to recycle and what we were better off purchasing new. The old cedar was begging to be re-cycled. The ubiquitous rainforest termites had done us the favor of cleaning the sapwood off which left just the prime quarter-sawn heart wood boards for us to sand to bare wood and varnish again before I used them to make the new high vaulted ceiling-roof for the villa. The antique bathroom fixtures, like the claw foot bath tub, were worth all the effort making weird old fittings fit to modern plumbing. We learned something about toilets though. The bowl of a modern toilet is molded so that the gallon of water (less when trying to be green and water saving) actually flushes all the stuff down in one swoosh. So we used the antique backs (which matched the sinks) and put them on modern toilet bowls. For our newest bathrooms we bought toilets which can be flushed "a little" or "a lot" depending on what you're flushing down.

The most important thing we learned about being green is that you have to know quit a bit about construction to do it in a practical manner. We collect rainwater for all our water needs. We learned that the best way to pressurize the water is to use a well pump in the cistern and fool it into thinking it's in a well by using a ten inch diameter PVC pipe to install it in. In any case always use a submersible pump as they are the most efficient (you use less electricity -- also being green) and they are quiet. We are even building our pool system with the pump house below the pool level so that we can use a quiet submersible pump. But is it really being green to collect rainwater, store it in cisterns and pump it using electricity for the necessary pressure? Perhaps if we build a windmill for the electricity it will then really be green.

Separating grey water is a good idea too especially if you have some gardens to water with it. It is a very bad idea to mix your gray water into the rainwater collecting cisterns as it is hard enough already to keep those sterile (we use a little chlorine once in a while which even in very small amounts kills the deadliest amoebas instantly). If you use the right detergents in your laundry (lots of phosphates) the gardens will bloom magnificently from the gray water irrigation. Using a detergent with lots of phosphates will also make your bed sheets much cleaner. Stay away from "green" detergents as they are expensive and don't clean as well. If you aren't connected to a sewage line where the phosphates would wash into the sea and cause algae bloom then you don't need to worry about phosphates.

Using solar heat is a very practical green method especially with the new vacuum tube solar heaters. They are very efficient and used in conjunction with a demand heater (for the times when every guest is showering at once) they will actually pay for themselves too.

Outdoor lighting is best done with LED lamps powered with small batteries charged by solar cells. They are cheap. They work well and you don't have to run wires all over the place. Also replace all your incandescent bulbs with the new energy saving ones even if they are expensive and sometimes buzz loudly.

By all means put compost buckets in all the guest's rooms. It will cut your garbage generation in half as well as help you build lots of new rich soil for your garden. They also make it easier to keep animals out of your garbage as there won't be anything interesting for them to root out. Separate cans for paper, plastics, and aluminum are also a good idea.

Those are pretty much all the practical green methods that we have proven out here. I have heard of some other things to try but most of them are very "gimmicky". Don't waste any money on "green" paints as they are just latex based paint that can be purchased at better quality and lower price without the "green" label. It is also very difficult to make a light colored paint without using titanium dioxide and it is impossible to make a long-lasting paint without adding a little fungicide. Of course the low-cost recycled paints are fine.

Please if anybody has any other suggestions for cost-effective green strategies please let me know.

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Since I posted this we found out about http://www.chezsven.blogspot.com/ . This is Chezsven Bed & Breakfast in Wellfleet, Massachusetts and they are even more green than we are! Their also much better about updating their blog. Very interesting reading.

Raising a Dog to be a Proper Bed & Breakfast Assistant

We were spoiled by our old German Shephard "Addie". The guests all loved her. She was friendly to everyone but still knew how to be a guard dog and would protect Laurie when she went on her long walks on deserted beaches. It's difficult for a naturally protective shepherd to learn that the strangers who come into our home so quickly and for such short times are honored guests that she should welcome into her "pack" but she made the distinction and would still bark when someone was at the gate who wasn't supposed to be there. She was very "in tune" to our feelings. She was highly trained (having won obedience trials) and the dog that I had taken everywhere with me including on board the trading vessels I worked with before we opened our bed and breakfast. So she knew what work was all about and how to greet people respectfully and when a guest was a dog lover and she could bask in their attention happily; or when a guest that wasn't so much a dog person she knew how to be admired from a distance. Being a good bed and breakfast dog is a fairly hard job for a naturally protective pack animal.

Our new dog is also a shephard but this time we decided on a Belgian Malinois because they are just as smart and trainable as German Shepards but the breed is also known to have fewer hip problems and be longer lived. I had decided on a Malanois a couple of years ago but the recommended breeders that I could find were charging over a $1000 for the dogs and with shipping that would have been quit an investment so I was waiting for exactly the right puppy.

Laurie (my wife and the boss lady of our bed and breakfast) also knew how much I wanted a Belgian and she was looking around too and luckily found the perfect dog. The big Navy base here in Puerto Rico (the one that had the practice range on the island of Vieques) closed about four years ago under pressure from local activists and the K9 outfit on the base was breeding some Belgian Malinois for war dog training. These dogs had no AKC registration and were not part of an "official" military program so the relocating base personal had to find new homes for them. The bitch, which was the mother of our new puppy, ended up being given to a local base contractor and he raised her welp of puppies for sale. My wife found out about the puppies being for sale and suggested I go check them out. I was amazed to find out what incredible dogs they were. The bitch was a tremendous alpha dog that wouldn't let a stranger within ten feet of her. She, and the puppies, had perfect confirmation and I picked out the best female puppy in the litter feeling very lucky to get such an incredible dog on the island. Local breeders tend to specialize in smaller dogs.

We raised our puppy using the methods outlined by the Monks of New Skete. She stayed in a crate right by my bed and I took her everywhere I went on a leash (including to the docks of San Juan where I work as a ship's agent). She was always a big hit with the ship Captains and the stevedores. Gradually we taught Maya basic obedience training. Laurie went on long walks down our driveway (about a mile each way) and taught her to heel. Maya proved to be easy to train and had very good behavior. Even in her puppy phase she didn't wreck too many things and picked-up right away what was "her toys" and never to chew on U.S. Customs papers (except once). But Maya is an "alpha" dog so we have to keep after her behavior.

When new guests arrive, after check-in and complementary pina colada, I usually lead Maya out to great the guests. I tell Maya to sit while she is being petted and discipline her if she paws them or jumps up. Occasionally we get guests who don't like animals (or dogs anyway) and then it is harder. I have to train Maya to lie down and not molest those guests. Maya hasn't figured that out yet and keeps a very wary eye on the guests that don't want anything to do with her. My biggest worry is that she will growl or act menacing towards a guest that surprises her walking down a driveway or by coming in the property from our jungle paths. The training is coming along though and as she gets older she is learning to keep her territorial instincts in check.

I wanted to include a you tube video of what Maya does when someone gets near her food bowl but I decided that it was a little too scary. We are also working with her on that. I put a food bowl down and then tell her to sit and not touch it while I pick it up again. If she growls then she is told "no" and not given her food back until she sits quietly. This is fairly advanced training as most people know better than to touch a dog that is eating but just in case we want her to have perfect "nice" behavior in all situations. A good bed and breakfast dog is a special animal.

Bird Watching in El Yunque rainforest of Puerto Rico

I was just looking through the guest registry for the villa. Our guests write wonderful comments about their stay. Some even put drawings in the guest book. One drawing I'm including in this blog is of one of Laurie's flower arrangements. This flower arrangement was on the breakfast table on the villa porch and one of our guests presented us with a watercolor of it.

We have many guests who come here for the bird watching. A recent guest made the following list of birds she confirmed siting while staying in our El Yunque hideaway. If you go out on the island, of course, you may see many more but these were birds that visited our bed and breakfast:

Red Tailed Hawk (Guaraguao) Mangrove Cuckoo Puerto Rican Lizard-Cuckoo (Coccyzus vieilloti) Puerto Rican Woodpecker Scaly-naped Pigeon (Patagioenas squamosa) White-winged Dove (Zenaida asiatica) Green Mango: [Anthracothorax viridis] hummingbird Puerto Rican Emerald Puerto Rican Tody (San Pedrito) Gray Kingbird Pearly-Eyed Thrasher Red legged Thrush Bananaquit (Coereba flaveola) Cape May Warbler Black Throated blue warbler Black-Cowled Oriole Shiny Cowbird Striped Headed Tanager Antillean Euphonea Indigo Bunting Black-faced Grassquit (Tiaris bicolor) Black Whiskered Vireo

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My favorite is the Lizard Cuckoo both for it's long elegant striped tail and for the cool sound it makes. I also love listening to the Puerto Rican screech owls at night as their call added to the night sounds makes it seem like a Tarzan movie sound track.

This photo is of a green heron that one of guests saw hiking off of our property. We have a path that leads to an isolated pool at the top (right at the top with an incredible view) of the Espiritu Santo waterfall. We have this photo because none of us could identify it at the time so our guests emailed it to us for identification. I always thought of herons as sea coast birds.

Promoting your Bed & Breakfast on Google maps

I think google maps is a great idea so I submitted my bed and breakfast to their directory. In order to prove to Google that our business is legitimate you put your mailing address in the application and google mails out a confirmation post card. This is where the reality of Puerto Rico comes in. Nearly everyone who lives out in the country in Puerto Rico has a mailing address that is no where near their physical address, either because they have a post office box in town like us or because they use rural route directions which were invented by someone who was confused by maps and maybe dyslexic too. If google could offer the option of sending out the confirmation cards by UPS or FedEx that would have worked or Google could allow the incorrect address to be edited (which they don't even when you put in your confirmation number from the mailed-out card).To make this even more interesting we had some of the google map employees themselves stay with us as guests a couple of months ago (the rainforestinn tends to attract guests that are scientists and professionals and even Google geniuses).

I explained the problem to them but so far they haven't implemented a solution. This means that the correct location for the rainforest inn -- see this URL http://tinyurl.com/2bwd3y does not match the directions that come up when you search businesses for lodging in the rainforest. I'm not even going to go into all the large hotels which come up in that search and the fact that none of them are in the rainforest. The El Yunque rainforest is a popular tourist attraction now and everyone is claiming to be there. But I wouldn't be writing this blog if I hadn't found a solution to share with you. First off if you look at your google maps business listing (or someone else's) you will notice that there is an option to write a review about the place but no one seems to have any reviews written about their place. This is an indication that maybe google maps business directory has a way to go yet before it is that important for your business. Maybe more people are using google earth. The nice thing about google earth is that it works with http://www.panoramio.com/ to let you place a photograph of a location. Go there and sign-up for an account. After you add the photo you are then given the option to place it on the map. Be sure you find the exact location (easiest done by typing in the name of a nearby city and zooming in to move the marker). I ended up with: http://www.panoramio.com/map/?user=898653#lt=18.336103&ln=-65.813384&z=0 Now the next step is to just wait until google earth is updated and your photo is placed. Too bad google business isn't that easy.

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Since I wrote the above blog Google maps improved their business listings. Now you can edit posts and show the real location of your business when it is placed according to your mailing address instead of your physical address.

Secrets of Renovating a Bed & Breakfast

Lots of other bed and breakfast operators have been reading my blog. Some have asked me how we manage to complete all the construction work we've done here so I thought I'd let everyone in on our secret. When Laurie and I first bought the property we were looking at an estate home that had been ravaged by two hurricanes and left abandoned for six years. Just so we could walk around the property safely we filled six thirty-yard garbage dumpsters of unusable material. The beautiful cedar from the main house we recycled to build the vaulted ceiling on the new villa. Some of the antique furniture we repaired and re-finished. But how did two people, one who is still running his Caribbean shipping agency (probably the smallest in the world but still the down island trading ships arrive at 3 am or Sunday or whenever their schedule demands and they are demanding) cope? The scope of the tasks we have accomplished and some of the pending projects would be considered insurmountable by many. We certainly couldn't have accomplished so much in the usual manner. And we know about the usual manner because many of our guests ask how come we have been working on this place for nearly five years now and it isn't finished.

But, the usual manner would have required truck loads of money to pay the teams of contractors that come in and get it all done in a professional and seemingly effortless stream of busy workers and material deliveries. If we had the cash flow to do it like that we would probably elect to stay in someone else's beautiful romantic hideaway. But we are doing it on the cheap so we can live in our own paradise hide-away. Still, there is (and was) far too much work here for one busy couple to do even without sleeping and certainly cutting into the average American's six hours of television viewing time (luckily we don't have TV).

I think it was Laurie who came up with the solution to our problem. It was certainly her that had to do most of the extra work involved so she was motivated. Our solution was to advertise for volunteers to come and stay with us for two or three months. We would feed them and house them and even teach them a trade in return for the work they perform on one of our projects.

For the past two months we have been closed and lots of working is getting done with the volunteer's help. Pictures tell a thousand words so the subsequent posts will show pictures of our volunteers working. We have also added some new short videos to our youtube site. Go to rainforestinn's youtube videos -- we will keep adding new ones, mainly showing our volunteers in action.

Hurricane Season at the Rainforest Inn

Thanks everybody for thinking of us and sending emails about how we were doing. Hurricane Dean passed well south of us. We got some rain and a little gusty wind but that was it. One of our neighbors lost a roof but that couldn't have been a very strong roof.We spent about a week doing preparations so now we have our generator installed (great thing that is as many of our guests haven't lived in Puerto Rico for thirty years like us and don't ignore as easily little inconveniences like no water and no electricity that happens so often here). Having the new genset installed is one more step towards making our small bed & breakfast more serving of our customer's needs (don't worry we aren't going to ever become a big resort). We are also taking advantage of the slow season to build a pool and jacuzzi as well as completely re-build the bathroom in the chalet. When we moved the lumber pile down below the new pool deck we found a cute little pair of boas living there.

I think the may have eggs somewhere but so far we haven't seen any. The new pool deck is truly giant. I used twenty yards of concrete (two big, very noisy, cement trucks) to pour the new deck. I'm glad we were closed as I had no idea how noisy a cement truck is. We are looking forward to season when we can stop doing all this construction and enjoy the rainforest sounds and having guests again.

Posting reviews about the Rainforest Inn on TripAdvisor

Lately, TripAdvisor can be the single most important internet presence for getting new customers to your guest house. As I reported in my first post about TripAdvisor, many hotel owners are promoting their bed and breakfasts by making up their own wildly positive posts or having friends do it. The only way that the TripAdvisor mavens can tell that this is happening (if you use different email addresses) would be by the IP address always being the same. Sometimes guests log on while staying at your place and post from your IP address (we have WIFI access everywhere using our microwave connection directly from the El Yunque peak towers). If we know, we usually ask them to wait until they get home before posting a review and most times this takes away the spontaneity and a review never gets written. Our guests here at the Rainforest Inn in Rio Grande tend to be internet-savvy people who are familiar with web 2.0 and some of the drawbacks of the new social networking. So when they see a bed and breakfast listing that has a hundred or so perfect glowing reviews they suspect something is awry and check further. One way that TripAdvisor offers is a simple click on who is posting the review and then look at their other postings. From this you can see right away that it is a real vacationer and you also might learn about other cool places to stay (or places to stay away from) when you're visiting Puerto Rico. Another of the drawbacks with web 2.0 is the omni-present spam bots. It is the reason why I'm blogging to you on Typepad right now (my Wordpress blog died under a bot inundation). To run a successful social web app you have to put traps in place to stop the bots. This means blocking certain IP address and having mult-step login processes with a "captcha" picture that can't be read by the spam bots. The drawback to complex login processes are that sometimes it becomes just too hard for someone to post a comment or a review and they give up. For example, the following review was sent to me by one of our guests that had given up but emailed it to us because they still wanted their review seen. Here is what our last guests at the Rainforest Inn had to say:

"We visited the Rainforest Inn for our spring break in March 2007. We arrived very late at night, our plane being delayed, and to our surprise we were graciously met by Bill. He showed us to our room, really the Chalet. As you can imagine we were quite tired and ready to hit the bed. The Chalet is charming; nice large living room/kitchen, our bedroom overlooked the rainforest with windows on 2 sides which made for great breezes and great sounds of tree frogs (coquis). We had a lovely porch overlooking the premises on the front of the Chalet. The next morning we had a super breakfast prepared by Laurie. She told us about all the various things we could do and if we wanted to simply relax that was just fine, too. What we liked about the Rainforest Inn--wonderful, quiet location, great breakfast, very nice folks to spend a week with and get to know. I would recommend it to anyone."

-- Marcia, Winnetka, IL

Laurie and I always love to read the comments are guests make after staying with us. It makes every effort we put in to make their vacations special worth it.

Our Resident Coqui

We have a coqui named Pedro who lives in a glass jar in our "farm house" kitchen near the sink. There are also coquis everywhere, under leaves in the garden, in the trees, hanging out in the heliconias but even with our over-abundance of coquis sometimes one of our guests wants to see a coqui and can't seem to find one for a photo or a quick look. Following the sound of the coquis outside is deceptively difficult because their call is loud and echos so that you're never really sure what leaf to look under or even what tree the coqui may be coming in.Our Three King's day present was the return of Pedro the coqui. We saw him right back in his jar on the kitchen counter just to the right of my Pavoni. We thought we had lost him just before Christmas when a guest staying with us who is a professional photographer needed a subject in the short hours before he had to return home to catch his flight. We set up a banana leaf and a yagrumo leaf on the big mahogany table in the kitchen and Steve took many pictures, using a flash, and from all angles. Pedro didn't seem to mind but when I put him back near his jar he hid out for several weeks and we didn't see him again until three king's day. You can go to Scott Kilgore's web site to see some of his excellent nature photographs and perhaps soon one of the pictures he took of Pedro -- our kitchen coqui.

* * *

This post was recently moved from our typepad blog. I'm sorry to report that Pedro turned out to be a girl! We should have known because she was so quiet (only mail coquis call). And later that year she had babies and moved on. We have a sign out announcing a vacancy in our big cast iron kitchen sink hoping a new coqui will come visit.

Coqui Eggs

A baby!

The best website about El Yunque

The best Web site about El Yunque I would like to take this moment to recommend a web site that is "chock full" of information about the El Yunque rainforest of Puerto Rico. This web site is more important for planing your Puerto Rico vacation than eating dark chocolate is for your health. It is constantly updated and has sections on the bio-bay (both the one in Fajardo and the one in Vieques) as well as snorkling, hang-gliding, out on the island driving tours and many other activities.

It is elyunque.com and go ahead, leave my blog and go directly there. You will find the web site and the links to the information are laid out exactly the way a tourist visitor would want it. And it doesn't stop at just El Yunque (what are you doing still here? -- go check it out) there is extensive information about travel in Puerto Rico. Places to stay (like that cool Rainforest Inn place) things to do, restaurants, travel advice, etc.

Technorati Tags: b&b, bed and breakfast

The bed and breakfast owners go on vacation

Tomorrow Laurie and I will be celebrating the first day in three months that we have no guests. It has been a busy season with nearly 100% bookings. I also have no ships until Thursday so we will be relaxing. Our last vacation was a disappointment. I decided to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary by taking Laurie to a bed and breakfast I'd heard about that is right on the beach in the Condado (San Juan). We scheduled it for the 17th and the 18th, which was the only two nights that we could get someone to watch our inn. Because this blog will contain some negative comments about the place we stayed in I'm not going to mention the name as many people have stayed there and had a much better experience than we did. Perhaps our experience was a fluke or just resulted from our own twisted high expectations. The first thing that went wrong happened on the 17th. A ship in Fajardo decided, last minute, to take a charter voyage to St. Thomas that we had to enter late that night. To avoid checking in after they were closed we made a special trip to San Juan to check in early before driving all the way back to Fajardo for the ship arrival that night at 9 pm. So that also spoiled our first evening's romantic dinner (I think we had subway sandwiches). The boat was also late so we didn't actually arrive at our room until 1 in the morning or so. When we arrived there for our special early check-in (earlier that day at 4 pm) we discovered the second thing to go awry. The place was on the beach all right and it was a popular beach. There was no parking anywhere near the hotel and the hotel did not have a parking lot for guests (or for anyone). Laurie dropped me off to check in and she drove around the block looking for parking. It wasn't an auspicious sign. The clerk who checked me in was cordial but the rates turned out to be much higher than only a light reading of the web site would reveal.

On the Condado Beach Inn's web site--if you read the fine print--you will see that rates are based on single occupancy and that there is a $20 extra charge for the second person (I didn't notice that). I also didn't notice that on top of the room tax they are charging a city tax and they also charge a 15% service charge! We know about the 9% room tax in Puerto Rico because we have to charge it to our guests and that many resort hotels in Puerto Rico also charge other fees, parking fees (which this place wished it could charge) and resort fees (which this place couldn't charge as there was no resort). I ended up paying much more than I thought it would be. I think this practice of adding fees to the advertised price is kind of sneaky. It could also destroy someone's travel plans that had a carefully worked out budget.

The room was small. It had air conditioning and a TV. We don't have any TVs at the The Rainforest Inn so it was interesting to re-affirm that not having hundreds of channels of 24 hour entertainment but having fast internet instead really gives you more choice (with podcasts and I was surprised to learn that they didn't have WIFI. The room did have one nice feature that we liked; it is difficult for us to go to other bed and breakfast inns without noticing improvements for our place and we are always looking. There was an electronic safe in the bathroom closet (and I won't even go into the concept of a bathroom closet except to say that there wasn't also a normal closet in the room). The safe was large enough to put my laptop computer in--which I always have to take with me but not necessarily at the dinner table or to the movies. We have already ordered similar safes for our bed and breakfast. They were only $120 each on eBay. The furniture in the room was modern, made of compressed bamboo. There was also a small fridge loaded with some things like bottled water and soda with price list that was high enough to let us know to replace anything we might consume before checking out.

The next morning we got up to enjoy the breakfast. It was served continental style on a table in the restaurant. The hotel was wrapped around a small restaurant that served dinners on beach side tables. The restaurant is well known and gets good reviews and was one of the reasons we picked this hotel to stay at. The breakfast was coffee, pastries and fruit. One of the pastries was ok and they did have decaf coffee. The fruit wasn't ripe but it looked decorative.

After breakfast we relaxed in the lounge chairs on the beach. I had my laptop computer out to get some work done (finishing NOAD reports for U.S. Customs). Laurie got me a towel to roll-up and use as a pillow after I finished. There were no beach towels in the room. This is when the third thing happened that spoiled the vacation for Laurie and made it so we could never recommend this place to any of our guests. The hotel had about ten beach chairs with umbrellas put out for guests to enjoy. There was also tables and chairs set-up for the restaurant. There were also six or seven other guests lounging like us or sitting at the tables eating their breakfast. Just after I laid down the hotel manager called out to us from the pool area (in the next paragraph I will describe the pool because it needs describing). He yelled loud enough for all the other guests to hear, saying "are you two guests here?" asking us what we were doing on his lounge chairs. I don't know what made him think we weren't guests. Then he went on to berate us for taking one of the towels out of the room. When we explained that there were no beach towels he got us a couple of ratty beach towels from somewhere. This unnecessary public disturbance upset Laurie and put a large spoiler into our anniversary vacation.

We have a swimming pool at The Rainforest Inn. It is badly damaged and we have been trying to decide what to do with it. Some of our options are:

1. Repair it as is (small kidney shaped pool) 2. Make it smaller and more interesting looking. 3. Put landscaping, rocks etc and use black concrete and add a waterfall to make it a natural swimming pool and then have a very large Jacuzzi above it which is what everyone will end up using (because it will be heated) and it is usually a little cold here for swimming.

4. Make it much smaller and just a decorative garden pool not for swimming.

5. Fill it in and make a Zen garden there and also install a Jacuzzi.

We are probably going to go with option three. We are in the rainforest and even if a natural pool would not look as fancy in our advertising photos as a torques blue typical pool we still like the idea. It fits with our recycling, collecting rainwater, and composting garbage low impact environmental methods.

The pool at the Condado hotel was just a bit bigger than a plastic kiddie pool. It was set in the hotel's tiny courtyard so that walking to and from the beach or the main gate involved carefully skirting the edge of the pool so as not to fall in. No one swam in the pool while we were there and its very public location in front of the sliding door to the restaurant and its tiny size made it very unappealing. I think the pool was just built so that they could say in advertisements (like the web site description) that they had a pool. The dead crab that was lounging on one end the entire time we were there may have also discouraged bathers. We learned something else from this short vacation. When your day-to-day life is in the most incredible vacation spot on earth (at least that is how we feel about being lucky enough to live at the Rainforest Inn) then staying anywhere else, no matter how nice, will always be a disappointment.

Technorati Tags: bed and breakfast, puerto rico, travel

Dealing with spam

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:

http://elfurl.com/

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:

http://elfurl.com/tcgux

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.

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.

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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.