This weeks progress on the house was all about the things that don’t make for good pictures. The walls are ready for paint, the outside of the house is all sanded and clear coated and the floors are getting a good sanding. The interior mahogany doors are being finished and getting ready for installation along with all the window molding. The stairs have been put in place as well as the two small buildings for the water heater and the butane tank. The windows came on Friday afternoon and they managed to start installing them right away. The initial clean up has started and stuff is starting to be hauled away. Next week should be a big week of progress. The interior should be completely painted, the floors should have a nice finish on them, the railing around the porch will be up, the cabinets will arrive and hopefully, we will be able to turn on the lights. It should be a very exciting week.

Now, this house is not all that big and the only thing getting drywall is the walls. So the builder brings in a guy who all he does is drywall work, great! So I’m thinking a couple 5-gallon buckets of ready-mix drywall mud should be more than enough. No, he says that he needs five, so I buy three just so I don’t have to return any. After a couple days he says that he needs five more buckets and I’m thinking is this guy just eating this stuff. So now he has used eight 5-gallon buckets of mud, that’s 40 gallons of the stuff. But wait that’s not all, he still needs two more buckets. The finish on the walls is very smooth and the builder tells me that once the paint is on we will love it. Just as I thought it was ready for paint, guess what, that’s right… one more bucket. So a total of eleven 5-gallon buckets of mud, that’s a total of 55 gallons of ready-mix drywall mud. And I thought it was an overkill on all the cement they used on the garage.

This seems like exactly what happened last week. Saturday we get out there and built the other half of the gate. And I have to say, it amazed me that it fit perfectly considering that each section was 10’ and the hinge pins were cemented into the post already. Anyway since it was a perfect fit, we decided to take it easy for the rest of the day and wait till Sunday to give it some paint. Well you guessed it, it rained all night and now we have to wait for the wood to dry out before we put some paint on it. So it’s looking like this afternoon we’ll be heading over to Remo’s for some Sunday football and beer.

It has been about a month since we signed up and got our PO Box, but we still hadn’t gotten our keys. It turns out that the new cylinder and keys for the box had to be ordered from England. I think these PO Boxes were here back when Belize was still British Honduras and are still using the same locking mechanism. Anyway, we finally got our keys and unlike the states where the key usually says on it “Do not duplicate”, these did not say that.  Now I’m not a locksmith, but I really don’t think I could take these down to the local hardware store and have duplicates made. Always something interesting down here.