House Updates; Thanksgiving in Belize

I've had a very busy week so I'm overdue to catch up!

A few readers have asked about our beach house, so here's an update on it:

Our architect, Alex, has dialed back the living space to a more agreeable size, and I've gone from having two living floors to 1. My original plan had two master bedrooms stacked on top of each other. In the U.S., it's cheaper per square foot to build up a story than to spread out on one floor. Here, that is not the case (not in concrete, at least). Our compromise is that we still want roof-top access for the view, so we'll have stairs to the roof. That will also help with roof maintenance. We expect to have the final floor plan draft and first round of elevation renderings in the next day or so, I can't wait to see what he's come up with!

Nathan found a YouTube video of a company that has built a few homes out of ICF here on the island and we've made contact with them, since that is our first choice for construction materials. They also have rebar that is made of fiberglass and, therefore, WILL NOT RUST! After paying $5,300US to repair and replace rusted rebar on our villa's front porch, I'm all in on this improved rebar! We're waiting for a reply from the owner of that company regarding pricing...I asked last Tuesday but with Thanksgiving, we'll give some leeway. But I also fear that they assume we have the AmEx Black like many expats and will agree to move forward without pricing. Sorry, not us.

At our villa, construction-Alex's crews have most of the exterior paint complete, we're waiting for the new stucco on the porch to cure before painting, and then they need to do some touch-ups. 

We received our first bill with the mini splits installed; it was BZ$350, when the previous month's bill was BZ$610! So switching from central HVAC was a good call, indeed! The bill had around a week of the central system in, plus construction-Alex's crews are obviously using our power for their tools. We're still trying to figure out how to use the "Dry" mode - allegedly it pulls all the humidity out and is even more economical, however, it's dropping the room temp on the unit. We keep it at 28c and if we switch to "dry", it drops to 24-25c over a few hours, which doesn't sound economical. 

My concept of time got away from me last week with U.S. Thanksgiving, I missed Flower Friday again but have a boatload of pictures to catch up this Friday! 

Since Nathan was off, we had Alex's crews come inside on Thursday to demo the ductwork and remove the air handler. Removing the ductwork is purely aesthetic - we wanted to open up the rooms since the villa only has 9' ceilings. Drop-down ducting brought those areas down to barely 7'. Our Great Room has a concrete support beam that we're keeping for obvious reasons, but we might dress it up with a wood wrap. Then again, I'm sick of dumping cash into a rental home. You can see how much space that ductwork used to take up!

On either end of the beam you can see grey where the duct used to be

Kind of like the photos you see after a city is bombed...

The second photo is looking from our room to the Great Room and hall to the secondary bedrooms. The air handler was in that right-hand door. With it out of the way, I now have a true pantry! I was stashing paper towels, dry goods, and lesser-needed items on top of the cabinets for lack of space. Having a pantry again is GLORIOUS.

The crews were out of the villa by lunch so I had the Lions game on while we cleaned - we draped old sheets on everything but there was still quite a bit of dust to sweep up, and then we mopped the whole home. 

Satisfied with our "bombed out renovations", we went to Overseas Bar & Grill for dinner. They're over the water, and we're not big on turkey or ham, so having a traditional Thanksgiving dinner wasn't important to us. I had a chicken burrito with a side of mashed potatoes though, heh! And Nathan had a lobster fajita. My burrito was okay but not great - everything else I have had there has been amazing! Their pricing is fair, too, especially for being over the water. 

Thanksgiving drinks at Overseas

Black Friday we didn't shop - we had beers on the beach at Moon Bar! Nathan was accidentally camouflaged.

Where's Nathan?

We ordered their Fungi pizza for lunch, we modified it by adding pepperoni, and it was fantastic. We really enjoy going there; it's adults-only, very clean, not crowded.

We had inadvertently turned on our back porch lights while cleaning. When we got home that night, we were in for QUITE a surprise!

The lid of our entire patio looked like this!

They look like some cross between mosquito and skinny fly. Do they bite? Probably! We've had some on the lids of our porches and we're not sure if they are from the tropical storm, or seasonal, or they like the construction materials here, but this was....soooo gross! Even worse, we didn't see any of our resident geckos - did these bugs eat them...?!

In the morning, most of them had fallen dead. We swept them into the lagoon, which the fish loved!

Saturday we went on a mainland adventure, I'll report back on that tomorrow, I have a few things to handle today and don't want to drag on too much longer.