We had left the house as weatherproof as we could before having to return to work. Then in Early Summer 2018 I got a very nice offer from my work to take 2 months off for half pay. They didn’t have to tell us twice, so in the middle of June we arrived back on Water Island with our customary four 49 pound checked bags of building supplies. A little aside about this, while I love what the TSA does for us, especially given my job, I hate the way that they do it. Of course I expect that bags full of tools, building supplies and hardware will be looked at closer than normal. What I don’t expect is for items to be taken with no way of getting them back even when you return home. An example is the “Ask TSA” website. In this case I had several packages of epoxy glue (about $150 worth) that I needed to secure the foundation anchor bolts. They were significantly cheaper on Amazon than at the local St Thomas building supply. I went to the “Ask TSA” website, uploaded a link and picture of the epoxy packages, and asked if they would be allowed in checked bags. The answer “Yes, enjoy your trip” can back quickly and for once I was impressed at our Federal Government at work. Unfortunately a month later when we arrived at our house site and opened our bags the epoxy had been replaced with a flyer saying that the TSA had removed the hazardous materials in our luggage. Off we go to the local building supply to replace the epoxy at a much higher cost. When you get to a point like that sometimes you just have to look out the back door and say “Serenity Now” several times….
Having got over our crisis the next day began to long slog to finish the exterior walls. At this point all of them had concrete board attached, the joints were filled with silicone caulk, and about half of them had a six inch fiberglass tape installed on the joints glued down with Total Wall Easy Noncemetious Base. This stuff is a premixed “mortar” (it really isn’t mortar) that is a little stiffer than drywall mud but a lot less stiffer than traditional Portland cement mortar. It’s nice stuff, but with the Sun and wind on our site it dried way too quickly unless I could put it on the shady part of the wall. That was about a quarter of a day for each of 13 wall panels. The process was to tape the joints with the fiberglass tape and Easy base. Wait a day. Next was to take 40″ by 50″ panels of fiberglass mesh and Easy base and coat the entire wall surface. With 20 knots of wind it was a real joy to handle those big fiberglass mesh panels, several times I almost became a mesh mummy. Wait a day. Lightly sand high spots then coat with the Total Wall Finish Coat. This stuff was thinner than the Easy Base, really more of a thick rubber paint than a Stucco mortar. It had to be applied in one shot, keeping a “wet edge” or obvious lines would appear in the wall. Since our scaffolding took several hours to move from wall to wall in practice it meant that each wall took about 3 days of site time to finish. For me having built several large limestone walls over the years it wasn’t too terribly bad, but from time to time I was wishing we had just gone with Hardiplank siding!
In the “downtime” while waiting for the Sun to be in the right spot for whichever wall we happened to be working on, I chose to have fun with my two favorite things, high ladders and wet slippery paint. Not being a dummy like last time I brought a proper safety harness and strong, new ropes. The roof needed 3 coats of Topcoat, the rubberized paint that waterproofs roofs down here. I also needed to install and tape the internal gutter system we had come up with. Each roof coat took about 7 gallons of the Topcoat, it goes on thick. The great thing for me was that I got to spend each day on the roof during the hottest part of the day. For Buttercup it was a real boon to her “supervising” in that she knew at all times where I was and what I was doing. As long as she heard “mousy” steps on the roof she knew I wasn’t screwing off. A decision I made was to do this barefoot. This paint is extremely slippery when wet. I was afraid that wearing shoes I might not realize that I stepped in a wet spot, thus ending up on “Mr Toad’s Wild Ride” on the way to my demise. During this time I also finished the little cupola on the very top of the roof.
By now it was getting to early August. We were lucky in that we only had one small brush with a Tropical Storm. Now that the walls were mostly finished the last thing to do before the big storm might come is to install the Hurricane shutters. Before we get to that, here’s another reason we like the place….
