November Update

We finally decided to cover our ferrocement roof with anahaw palm leaves to absorb the heat from the sun. Our roof absorbs so much heat due to the El Nino that we feel like we are inside an oven sometimes. With the one layer anahaw leaves covering the entire roof and a temporary tarp covering the skylight because the polycarbonate started to leak a bit, the temperature indoors dropped nicely. Now we no longer feel much of the heat. We spent about thirty-five hundred php for the anahaw and nylon ropes to tie them up. A good price for something that keeps us cool all day. We recycled the old netting we had that covered the old thatch roof. This job took only less than fourteen days. Btw even with the tarp covering the skylight, we can still get a bit of light but not too much to heat up the inside.

Update

It has been almost 2 months since the last post. We have been concentrating on planting a variety of plants for cover storey, mid-level storey, bushes, ground covers. We ty to pick plants that are native, non-hybrid, plants that were thought to be weeds but in fact are very precious like the amaranth or locally called kudyapa. We planted a lot of pineapples, local bananas, taro, native coffee, and kudyapa. The plants we recently bought from the plant sale in town are all thriving. Thanks to the ITCZ or intercovergence zone which brings local rains almost everyday.

Our ferrocement roof is holding really well. Although when the temp goes up we definitely feel it inside. It is like we are inside a tagine with small vents. Thankfully we get nice, cool breezes.  The El Niño has definitely made the heat even more unbearable during the peak hours. At least the rains cool the roof off pretty quickly.

Update

My parents came for a weeks' visit to celebrate my and my mom's birthdays. We invited our cousin and his family over for lunch on the 18th. His birthday and his youngest daughter's were sandwiched between mine and my mom's so it was just fitting to have a birthdays celebration together. I prepared a Hawaiian feast of Kalua Pork and Cabbage, Chicken Long Rice, and Haupia for dessert. I managed to cook the kalua pork on my trusted pressure cooker, cutting the cooking time into half.  It was a great success. 😊

Anyway, we have been busy planting and replanting all over the property. Thankfully, some rains poured whenever we did some transplanting, which made all the trees happy. ☺

My mom lalso planted a lot of seeds to germinate. Hopefully they will all grow. We will find out soon enough.

House renovations done...farm work resumes

Here is the 2nd load of plants on the elf truck.

The week we finished our floor repainting we got hold of a family friend who promised us 10 Golden Tree (my favorite tree in Maui, the one with bright yellow flowers) seedlings. The original seeds did come from Hawaii about 50 years ago. Our friend was gifted some of the seedlings from the parent seeds which she managed to multiply.

We scheduled to pick up the Golden trees on a Thursday. We brought one of our workers to help carry the pots. To our surprise we got more than what we expected. We got 22 Golden tree seedlings, lots of assorted Heliconias, some black bamboo, yellow bamboo, brazil nut seedlings, Fox tail palms, McArthur palms and many more. We thought that was it. Well, it wasn't!

Our friend has this adjacent lot to her house which is filled with an assortment of plants. She needed all of the plants gone so she can level the land and ready it for lease. This meant we had first pick at any plants we wanted for FREE! Wow! So much abundance! So we picked and picked until we loaded our truck bed full of plants 9 times, and an additional 14foot Elf truck 2 times. Now you can imagine how much we got! LOTS!

We even uprooted some of the bigger trees like the Ficus and a few Banyan! Score!

So now we are busy replanting them in our property. I just can't wait to see all those Golden trees bloom.

 We also got these lovely, delicously creamy avocadoes from her tree!

Video

You can now view the video of our finished projects. Here is a link to our video: http://youtu.be/CNXapAM-rXk Thanks for watching!

Floor back job

I mentioned in our previous post that we needed to redo our floor because the paint started to peel off after only less than a year. Turns out the paint used was latex and not the epoxy paint with hardener. Because the bedroom was completely emptied out we took this opportunity to do the floor correctly. We got the right epoxy paint with hardener this time. The old latex paint was easy to remove so after a day of scraping the floor clean we painted the new crimson red floor paint. This took a day, two coats. We then left the floor to cure for 3 whole days. Moved the bedroom furnitures on the 4th day. Now we started scraping off the paint in the living room, thought we just redo the living room floor as well while we're at it. Thought scraping off the old paint would be as easy. We thought wrong. There was a very small portion that was really hard to scrape off, with our substandard scraping tools, ittook us 2 days just to almost completely scrape off all the floor paint. Towards the end of today we just gave up on scraping off everything. At least we managed to scrape off the 2nd coat. Tomorrow we begin repainting the floor. The color will be dark brown like the old paint.

Day 26

On Wednesday, June 11, we have completed our ceiling renovations. It was the 26th working day. Add this to the 75 working days of the roof renovations, we actually worked 101days for both. About 1/3 of the year. We added red primer paint to the compression ring and the rebars holding the bamboo posts on the bond beam to keep it from rusting. Then we installed the polycarbonate sheet that sits right on the compression ring tubes. The scaffolding came down next. While our bedroom is empty of furniture we decided to repaint the floor. This will take 2 to 3 days to cure so we will just have to wait longer before we could move back into the bedroom.

We plan to cement the floor of our tool shed to keep vermin out. Down the line we plan to ferrocement the walls to further protect the shed.

I promised pictures , unfortunately my tablet has been diagnosed with a motherboard problem which, without receipt, will cost 80% of the purchase price. We, therefore, decided to just find a new and more reliable tablet. Thankfully, I was able to retrieve all the pictures before it finally died. Turns out most of the stuff here have a very short shelf life. :(

Anyway,  will post the pictures the soonest possible. Thanks.