progress report

for dear GB, who's not in town to see for himself

first our bathroom. the tile on the floor is ungrouted, but on the side of the tub it's grouted. the grout makes it less... loud. of course it's all filthy right now as well. And isn't that vanity cool?!?KITCHEN!
the cabinets are almost all installed. this is the island (not in the right place), but you can see the cabinets

the hole on the left is for the stove.

corner drawers adn lazy susan, and oil/ spice cabinet

One upper in. the 2nd one will go on the left. This one has pumpkin handles :D

sink base and then trash drawer. the fridge will go to the left of the trash drawer

pantry (which we've seen before) in its spot

David and Lynn did an awesome job on the cabinets. Each face was carefully selected to look beautiful. I'm thrilled :D

cabinets!

Cabinets are either in or coming in!

Here's the powder room vanity. this photo is a little dark- the actual cabinet is a little more reddish than it shows heremaster bathroom vanity
the angle is odd.... I couldn't get farther into the room because the tile was fresh and I couldn't walk on it

tiled and grouted shower. sideways...

they were having a wee bit of trouble getting the kitchen cabinets thru the door. This is the corner lazy susan cabinet, and it's large and unwieldy. When I left they were making the doorway bigger (for the 2nd time) to accommodate it.
Here's the pantry, sitting in the middle of the kitchen- it's hard to tell in the photo this small (click to make it bigger) but we got some really cute veggie and fruit knobs for the uppers. This one has tomatoes on the top and bell peppers on the bottom.

some drawersThe koi pond is mostly all framed up

other things completed that I don't have pictures for.....
walls are all sprayed, flooring is there (though not installed), and it all looks great :D

pulling more weeds. Aka miconia

GB is out of town, but unfortunately the weeds continue to grow even when he's not here. What's up with that??

So Ra'am and I set out and pulled and macheted the miconia. It was super mosquito-y- so we did a bit less than I would have liked, but I think we got all of the big ones.


and for GB.... this is Paul standing at the original framing for the fish tank. He's way taller than us- and see how the bottom of the tank would have been way above his belly button. We fixed that.

tile!

Update for today!
Ramen has been hard at work on the tile. I've had several phone calls wondering whether we really want to put this river rock tile on the floor. Personally I'd be fine putting a different one on the floor, but GB is really attached to this one- and it IS really cool. It's just a wee bit.... masculine.
Guess I'll have to buy some pink towels to offset the manly feeling in there ; )

And siding is almost complete in the whole house. The guys should finish it all today or tomorrow and then the painters will be there probably on Friday, clear-coating the cedar. woo hoo!

Noam's room is all prepped for coating.

unsticking the tractor's mower bed

back in November, GB wrote about his mower bed getting stuck in the mud. We've had soooo much rain since then, that attempting to get it out of the mud seemed futile.

Finally we got in a dry spell (a drought of sorts). GB was ready to unstick the mower and I reluctantly came along to help. Personally, I don't feel like unticking farm implements from mud is my forte, but I wanted to help, and the grass was getting pretty out of control all over.

We drove down to the lower part of the property where the mower bed sat.

First we tried using the tractor's bucket to lift the mower a bit out of the mud. GB is here using tow straps to attach the 2 things.somehow I didn't feel like either machine or implement was designed for this. There were no handles for attaching things!

After several attempts, the tractor DID lift the mower enough for us to get some boards under the mower and make it more even (it was leaning heavily down into the mud on one side)

Here it is all lifted up. Now all we had to do was attach the mower correctly (to the back of the tractor) and drive forward.

SUCCESS!

As you can imagine, we were THRILLED! It only took us about an hour or so, so not TOO bad!

First glimpse of cabinets

cherry with black walnut around the edges

Invasive Species Eradication, aka pulling weeds

I searched the blog to see if we had written much about miconia... and found that we haven't.
Miconia is an invasive species that's ALL around our land. It's a plant that has supposedly taken over a lot of Tahiti. Our area is really overrun with it.

We hired some helpers back a couple of years ago to pull and poison this plant. This weekend, while GB, Tom and John were fencing, the kids and I set out to pull some miconia.

I wish pulling weeds was a more glamorous job. But it's not. We traipsed thru the jungle, hung from low cliffs and got scratched and stung by various plants and animals. I discovered that we have a caterpillar here in Hawai'i called the stinging nettle caterpillar- because it feels just like that when it touches you with its venomous spines. In my recollection, stinging nettles (which we don't have here) stings don't last all that long. This sting lasted at least 1.5 hours and I still have a red mark 2 days later on my arm. Bummer.

Mike Pacheco commented that weeding miconia is likely to be a lifetime pursuit. Unfortunately I think he's right. Unless the Invasive Species Council steps in and starts again with trying to control it, we will always be surrounded by stands of it that are making thousands of seeds. One thing about living in such a warm and wet environment is that EVERYthing grows.... not to mention the fact that the native plants that evolved here don't know how to fight against invasive species very well- it just wasn't an issue for them as they evolved here because of our relative isolation.

All that is just too depressing to think about sometimes. A lifetime of weeding. ugh.

On a WAY happier note, we were SOOOO thrilled to get this AWESOME gift from Tom and Eve:

Tom put it together and Eve dedicated it. Right now it's sitting in our garage (not a permanent locale) while the work is going on at the house. I forsee MANY awesome meals and good comraderie at this table. MANY MAHALOS Tom and Eve. We LOVE it!

And at the house....A new sliding glass door out of the kitchen!

Prep for upstairs lanai tile! Slanting for drainage

Walkway in front of the boys room- waiting for more concretemaster shower

Fencing!

Is almost complete! With a little (lots, actually) help from our friends, we now have an almost goat enclosure. We're waiting on some gates to finish off the area.
We had mucho help from Tom, who after fencing most of his property, is an expert to us, Buck, and John. Many mahalos. Our future goats thank you from the bottoms of their hearts (or hooves?).



Yes, curls are all over his eyes. And yes, that night he had a trim. He's looking very dapper now.