The Second Guest Room

Before I dive in, I do want to provide an update on the sprinkler leak from last week.

The "leak" we had after the sprinklers were turned on last week wasn't a leak, it was an uncapped sprinkler pipe about 4 feet in the ground. The landscape company came back out, added another pipe and a sprinkler on top in case we want to use it (we don't, it's in the flower bed inside the pool cage).

Unfortunately that wasn't the only problem. Saturday morning Scott went down to the dock to fish and noticed water leaking out of the retaining wall in the cracks that are in the facade. We are fairly certain we know what's happening; zone 4 is ran through the pool cage to the opposite side of the house from the sprinkler system. The pool and retaining wall were put in after the house was built, so we think there are other sprinklers (like the one we already dug up) that were just never capped off, causing water to push out behind the retaining wall.

This sounds super scary but actually explains the movement we've had in the retaining wall and stairs down to the dock. So, if this is the problem, it's fixable (or at least managable). For now, we turned off zone 4 and found no water leaking out of the retaining wall. We'll get a sprinkler company out to confirm that's the case and have them expand zone 3 to cover the three heads that are in zone four.

On to the rest of the story: work this week continued on the second guest room. We are sticking to the goal of having this room "done" (floor in and stuff put back) before Scott's mom gets here later this week. I have backed down on the overall expectation just a smidge, originally thinking we'd get the crown and trim up as well. We hit a tiny snag when leveling the floor that's going to take some extra time, so I'll be happy with just floors in.

This week we sprayed a coat of white on the ceiling and a coat of Warm Putty by Valspar on the walls. This is our neutral throughout the house. Scott would eventually like an accent wall, but we don't have furniture or anything picked out, so that'll come later.

After the spraying, we touched up the walls with a roller. The sprayer is awesome because a room is painted in like 10 minutes, but the paint was the bottom of the 5 gal bucket that's been in the garage for four or 5 months, it was pretty thick and didn't cover too evenly. Nothing the roller couldn't fix!

The pictures don't do a good job of showing the color, it's just a really light tan.

We also finished sanding and re-painting the bed frame. Toby supervised the painting from his grass.

This week we'll be able to put it in our room, so exciting!

While the paint dried on the bed we turned our attention back to the guest room and primed the floors.

The primer will help the self-leveling concrete stick.

We haven't had the best luck with the self -leveling concrete. It definitely would be easier with a few drills mixing at once, but we did the best we could.

We set up a work station on the lanai, measured 5 qts of water in 5 buckets and cut open the 50lb bags of concrete. I mixed and Scott carried the concrete in, dumped and smoothed. Somewhere along the way a bucket either didn't get enough water or didn't get mixed enough so we were in panic mode shoveling lumpy concrete off the floor. It was not pretty. We were left with half a smooth floor and the remainder will need some places ground down and some filled in. It's not impossible, just annoying and time consuming.

We has a couple visits from wildlife; an iguana was down by the boat and this morning a manatee swam by. I got great photos of the iguana, but the manatee, not so much.

Today we got some lights for the outside of the pool cage (solar!), that we needed 1" spacers to put up (I don't have a pic of the lights, but the way they attach they need to be held out away from the cage). We looked at actual spacers at Lowe's and they were about $1/each and we needed 50, so we improvised and bought some 3/8" pipe and cut it into 1" pieces. Scott used the nail gun to put nails through a board and we threaded the pipe pieces on so they could be painted. It worked beautifully!

Next week we'll get the lights up and ready for our VIP guest :)

Mom and Dad came over Sunday to help run a switch for the fan in the guest room. Currently, the switch works for an outlet, and the previous fan just had pull chains. Dad climbed in our (extremely hot and small) attic and ran a fish tape (a thing that pulls wires through walls) so we can run a wire. We still need to put a box in the ceiling as there isn't one there currently (no clue how the old fan was up), then we will be ready for the fan. Mom and I put the fan together while the guys did the electrical, so hopefully install will be quick and painless.

We went for a quick sunset cruise to cap off the evening, Padre caught one fish, a good sized mangrove snapper (that lure is a good 6+ inches long, for comparison) and we enjoyed a gorgeous sunset.