26th April

We are in the midst of the dry season now, and everywhere (except the building site!!) could do with a good storm of rain. We are trying to make the most of it on site, aiming to get all the ground work finished by the end of May.

The swimming pool is cast. A big day, about 25 cu yds (wonderful for us old fogies still being on the imperial system here!) mixed and cast in the day. That should be our last big one. We now need to put a Xypex coating on to waterproof the concrete and then we are going to try a product called Diamond Brite instead of tiles or paint for the finish. We have looked at a couple of pools done with it and they look very effective.
The spa is coming along. It has been slightly on the back burner lately, with so much else going on. However it is at the stage where it is ready to have the jets put in, and we are hoping to get round to that in the next couple of weeks.

We have got all the services in for the cottages with the exception of the last cottage which we haven’t started yet. It is a labyrinth of pipework, electricity, water, telephone, irigation and sewage. Just as long as we have not made any wrong connections!!
The roof timbers for the 7th cottage are on, and we finished the blocks for the duplex yesterday. The floor for the 8th cottage is cast and we will start the blocks on Monday. That just leaves the lst cottage and we hope to get the footings dug for that in the next couple of weeks.

The Purple Heart floors are finished in the two bedrooms below the bar/ restaurant and the tiles are down in the bathrooms. The walls and ceilings are painted and the doors and windows are being hung . So then it’s just lights, basins, taps etc and then some furniture!!!. What a difference a coat of paint makes – it transforms the rooms from a building site to something quite spectacular.

We have built a 10,000 gal underground storage tank for the irrigation water. As most of this water will come from the treatment plant it needs to be kept oxygenated. Therefore have decided to put a pump in the tank and pump the water up to some form of water feature by the bar. From here it will run back down via a stream and into a pond and then back into the tank.

As, I think, most of you know, Annie and I are getting married next weekend. We are much looking forward to the event and to seeing friends and family who are making the journey here. A big thank you to all of  you who have sent good wishes and we hope we will see a lot of you out here in the next year or so.

9th March 2008

The bar/restaurant/kitchen roof was finally finished on the 29th February. A huge sigh of relief on everybody’s part. We have put two jack roofs on, both to break the line of the roof and to give some ventilation, especially in the kitchen. The result is (I think) aesthetically pleasing and hopefully practical as well. We might have to put some baffles or closeable shutters in them for times of rain with storm winds, but we will probably leave them as they are for the time being.

The hinges and hangers etc for the folding doors have arrived from UK and Brent, our joiner, is busy making up the doors. The balustrades have been fitted round the deck in front of the bar/restaurant. The two bedrooms and bathrooms underneath the restaurant have been plastered and have the first coat of primer on them.

All the plumbing kit, pumps, filters etc have arrived for the spa and pool, so at the moment we are madly reading up on “How to build your own Spa”!! The book says anybody reasonably competent can do it………….! En va voire.

19th January 2008

For those of you who heve been avidly awaiting this update, my apologies for the delay. For the other 99.99%........... Happy New Year.

First some really good news, Annie and I are getting married in May – the 4th to be precise. We will get married up here at Mount Rodney, as we can’t think of anywhere that would be more appropriate or prettier.

We had a very jolly Christmas and New Year here, with friends and relations from UK staying with us for a couple of weeks. We spent Christmas day on the beach, and then 9 of us sat down to roast turkey and all the trimmings in the evening. Very memorable.

On to more mundane matters. The building work is coming along in leaps and bounds. We have got all the roof timbers on the bar/restaurant/kitchen and we finished casting the ring beam yesterday. So with luck we should have it tiled by mid February. I suspect that will be an occasion for another celebration.
The container load of roof tiles ordered from Trinidad arrived just before Christmas. We couldn't get the container down the road, so we had it dropped of about 1/2 a mile away and loaded them all into the pick up and brought them down to the site. 28 pick up loads!!
We have dug and concreted the footings for the swimming pool, and started laying blocks. Where we are building it there is a natural slope, so there was very little excavation required other than the trench for the footings. The 4th cottage has finally got tiles on the roof and numbers 2 & 3 have got doors and windows in – progress!!

19 November 2007

A milestone has been achieved this last month. We have concreted the deck for what will be the bar/restaurant/kitchen/office. We managed it in 4 days, finishing on the 9th November. So only about a week late on our schedule. About 18 tons cement plus the requisite sand and gravel. We gave a decking out party for everybody the following day. Annie and Sandra (our lady what does!) spent the previous day cooking and preparing lots of local Grenadian dishes. My contribution was to get lots of local Grenadian beer!!! Both seemed to go down extremely well.

Since then we have almost finished putting up the blocks for the kitchen/office and are well on the way with the bar/dining area walls. There is not a lot of block work to go here as it will be mostly glass doors and windows.

We have at last got all our woodworking machinery from the states. The final consignment arrived at the beginning of October minus all the parts to put it together!! These finally arrived two weeks ago. No amount of explaining would convince the customs that I had already paid duty on these parts and they were simply missing from the original consignment. I was told I should have checked it on the docks before taking delivery of the goods. So I suppose I should have assembled the jointer, planer, shaper etc on the docks, to make sure all the parts were there?? Ah well, write it off to experience!   However, Brent the carpenter is now producing some lovely doors and windows in Purple heart and Kabukali. 

The roof timbers are going on the 4th cottage and we have the footings in for the 5th and 6th. The wet season is helping all the planting and sowing we have done so far, but as we still have all the services to put in to the cottages, there is a limit as to how much landscaping we can do at present.

The top of the range Italian ice cream maker arrived last month. Annie has put it to full use, enjoying practicing on all the fruits that are in season at the moment. My son J and his girlfriend are out for two weeks and so far we have been regaled with Banana, Mango, Passion Fruit, Star Fruit, Papaya, delicious Lime sorbet (a large teaspoonful with gin makes an excellent cocktail!!). The top attraction however, seems to be the rum and raisin, made with raisins that have been soaked in local rum for 24hrs. Out of this world!! The herbs and vegetables at Mount Rodney are all coming along very well. The stick beans are in full production and we had our first pick of Spinach yesterday.

October 14th 2007

The wet season has finally arrived with a vengeance. No work on site last Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. The weather station at Mount Rodney has recorded just short of 5” rain in those 3 days. It appears to have been worse further south as they have had land slides and some quite extensive flooding, both of which we have been spared so far.  It must be admitted however, that we do need some rain (apart from the construction site of course!!), August and September have been very dry. 

The sewage treatment plant arrived on the 25th September, so we have managed to get that in and “planted” whilst it was still dry underfoot. As soon as we heard that the treatment plant had arrived in St George’s we dug the hole - 23’ long, 11’wide and 9’ deep, and got the base concreted. We picked it up the following Wednesday with a lorry and crane and brought it up to the site and dropped it straight in the hole. All very easy, and no fuss. Very pleased it didn’t arrive two weeks later, or it would have been a very different story!!

The roof is on the third cottage, the walls are up on the fourth and we have started digging the footings for the 5th and 6th. Sadly they are a little “damp” at the moment, to say the least.

All the walls for the rooms below the bar/restaurant/kitchen are completed and we are over half way to decking out the top of that. We had set a target to have the top concreted before the end of the month, but sadly, I think that the weather is going to have something to say about that.

Annie has come out at last, and joined me here in Grenada. She is already getting on well with organizing the gardens at Mount Rodney. We have cleaned and gapped up the banana plantation. The citrus, of which there is an enormous variety, we have also cleared around and gapped up and all the mature trees are just coming into season. We have made a pergola and trained passion fruit over it, which is fruiting very prolifically. We hope to eventually be able to produce at Mount Rodney, most of the fruit, vegetables and herbs that we will need at the hotel.

September 9th 2007

Once we managed to get carnival week out of the way, we have made good steady progress. Most of the team took the whole of that week off, and for those that didn’t, Friday was wet, so we didn’t do anything that day anyway. However everybody was back to work with a will the following Monday, and things have gone well since then. Have taken on a painter, and started painting the maintenance building/staff accommodation building. Well that is what he is supposed to be painting, but it rather looks as if he is the recipient of most of the paint!!

The tiles are on the 2nd cottage. The roof joists are on the third and we should be ready to start the roof tiles on it in about 10 days. Footings are dug for the fourth and we are planning to concrete them tomorrow.

 We have at last concreted the base for the two bedrooms, bathrooms and store room that are going under the bar/restaurant. The views from these two bedrooms really are fantastic. We have set up a workshop to make all the door frames (and the doors and windows!), and have the door frames in place and we are well on with the block work. We should be able to start decking out by the end of this week.

Will soon need to start thinking fairly seriously about the swimming pool. It is going to be adjacent to the bar and will probably share one of the retaining walls. We are thinking of putting a spa pool on the end of the swimming pool…….. being able to sit in the spa pool and enjoy a G & T or a cold beer whilst being massaged by jets of water sounds quite appealing………?

Had a narrow escape with hurricane Felix a week ago. He came right over the top of us here, but luckily was then only a tropical depression/storm. We recorded winds of 40 – 50 mph for about 5 hrs with a max gust of 54 mph. 18 hours later he was a full blown hurricane and 18 hrs after that was a category 5 hurricane with winds of over 165 mph. YUK! Luckily we had very little damage here, a couple of trees blown down and a lot of branches broken off, but no damage to any of the buildings. The worst was that we lost about half the avocado crop. All blown onto the ground and sadly not quite mature enough to ripen!

August 4th 2007

Have had a good month and made much progress since the last report. Weather has been very gentle so far, nothing dramatic, and we have lost very little time to rain. However still a lot of wet season to go yet!!

An old Plantation House – Mount Rodney House – came on the market earlier this year. Whilst have been vaguely looking for a house to buy, this was a bit grander than had planned on. However, fell in love with it at first site and completed at the beginning of July. It is a lovely old house, in true colonial style, with stunning views and only about a mile from the building site. It needs a lot of work doing to it, but for the time being it is habitable, and will attack it assuming have any money left, when the hotel is finished!! It came with 6 acres (all very overgrown), but we have made a start clearing that and hope to be able to grow a lot of fruit and veg for the hotel eventually.

All the original timber order has arrived from Guyana. I say the original, as when I was in Guyana, they had some lovely purpleheart planking which will look great as paneling in the cottages, so have ordered 4,500bd ft of that, which will be here sometime this month. Of course there will be some room left in the container - and they have an offer on greenheart – which we will need when we start restoring Mount Rodney House. So have topped up the container with that!! Will have to find some storage room for it all somewhere. The first cottage and the store room are both full of timber already.

We were finally connected with our temporary electricity supply last week. A huge help not having to run the generator all day, plus don’t have to buy 5 gallons of gas every other day. Sadly I had left the drum, with the about 100 ft of the 75mm cable still on it, at the top of the drive. We will need this when we get our 3 phase connection. I thought it was  too heavy and awkward for anybody to steal. Wrong. They came one night and managed to unroll it off the drum and load it onto a truck.. My own fault for leaving temptation in place.

The roof sheeting for the maintenance building/staff accommodation finally arrived, and it was a relief to get that on. The plastic we put on as a temporary measure whilst waiting for the sheets was getting decidedly ropey. We have started plastering the crinkle crankle wall. Gave the masons free hand to do “something different” and rather like what they have come up with! The second cottage is up to roof level. The roof timbers are on and we are busy boxing up the ring beams. We should cast them in a couple of weeks and then can get the tiles on the roof. We have cast the floor for the third cottage last Friday, so can start throwing up the blocks for that next week. We hope by the end of next week to start concreting the floor for the two bedrooms and bathrooms that will sit under the bar restaurant. That floor will also contain a kitchen storage area as well as the loos for the bar. That will be a lot of concrete to cast, and will probably take most of a week. Problem is carnival is 13/14th  Aug, so not a lot will happen that week!!!

 June 24th 2007
Progress continues.
Last Friday (22nd) we poured the floor and walls for what will be the 2nd water storage tank. This is going to sit under part of the Kitchen and the office. The new concrete mixer certainly came into its own, as it was quite a big operation. About 24 cu yds of concrete to mix, and of course, it all has to be done in one day. Did have the generator and some portable lights ready, but in the end we finished at 7pm, just as the last of the light was going. We certainly all did justice to a few beers in the local bar in Sauteurs on the way home!!
With the tank done, we can now start the rest of the floor area for the two bedrooms and bathrooms that will sit under the bar/restaurant. The whole building is “L” shaped, with the long part of the “L” parallel to, and overlooking the beach. This will have two bedrooms and bathrooms on the lower floor, and the bar and restaurant over. The other part of the “L” will contain a kitchen storage area, staff changing rooms and the water tank, with kitchen and office/reception over.
Have got the tiles on the roof of the first cottage and very pleased with the way it looks. We will start cladding the sides as soon as the carpenters have finished making the shutters for the maintenance and storage building. Need to make this secure in order to store all the timber, tools, plumbing and electrical “bits”. We are very much outgrowing our original site hut!! Have also nearly finished the footings for the 2nd cottage, and hope to concrete the base slab for that at the end of this week.
Talking of electricity, we have run the cable for our electricity supply underground down the side of the road along with the telephone and water. Had a huge game with the cable. It weighs about 3lbs per ft (still good old imperial here!) and we had about 900 feet of it. 900 x 3 = far more than the Bobcat will lift. However 7 hours and much sweat later we managed to get it unrolled. Have paid for a temporary electricity connection, so hopefully will have that in a couple of weeks (or months!), which will be much easier than working from a generator. Putting the cable underground is more expensive, but it does mean we don’t have to cut any trees down along the side of the road. We have started to landscape down the road now, with croton and palms and it is starting to look very pretty.

Went to Guyana last week to look at the timber we are importing for all the roof construction. They have most of it in the timber yard and it looks ok. They still have a load to bring out of the forest, and at the moment are having slight difficulty because of heavy rains. Having never visited Guyana before, was surprised to find it was so flat, and a lot of the country below sea level.  Slightly reminiscent of Holland in that respect, and that a lot of the water has to be pumped up from the dykes into the rivers and the sea. Apparently Guyana is an Amerindian word meaning “Land of many waters” – it certainly is!!

May 5th 2007

After 6 months waiting, the concrete mixer finally arrived mid April. It has made a huge difference on site in that we can mix faster, and being able to tip directly from a wheelbarrow into the hopper has taken some of the hard work out of mixing concrete. The shippers had added an extra $500 to the original quote they gave for delivery – never quite found out what this was for - something to do with storage in Miami, where it had no need to go in the first place. Had a long wrangle with them, arguing that the freight price should be a lot less, not more, owing to the extra expenses incurred hiring a mixer whilst waiting for this to arrive. After about 3 weeks the best they would do was agree to the original price they quoted. When went to clear the mixer from customs had to pay $450 in storage charges, incurred whilst arguing with the shippers.…………. Some you win and some you lose!

The building is progressing well.
Have built a Crinkle Crankle wall between the maintenance shed / staff cottage and the rest of the site. Pleased with the way it looks. Currently filling up behind it, so can get some planting done there in time for the rainy season.
Nearly got the roof on the maintenance shed / staff cottage.  That has come on very well, have managed to fit three nice bedrooms in, with a bathroom and kitchen over the top of what will be a general storage area and laundry room.
No further progress on the first cottage. Was planning to do the roof joists in a timber called Kabukalli, but despite of ordering them at the end of Feb and being told delivery would be about 2 – 3 weeks no sign of them yet. Might end up having to do it in a different timber in order to get on with it. In light of the above have ordered all the wood that will need to finish the project direct from Guyana. This should arrive in about 3 weeks, so that will give us a deadline to get the roof on the storage shed. Not sure how we are going to get the 40’ container down here to the site, but have 3 weeks to think of an answer!
Nearly finished concreting the footings for the main building, which eventually will be the bar / restaurant / kitchen / reception, with two bedrooms, bathrooms, loos, and kitchen storage area under. It is looking good and will have stunning views over the beach and out to the offshore islands.

Have got a very good crew working on the site now. Have just taken on a third mason, which brings us up to 17 (when everybody turns up!!). Will be needing a larger pickup for transport if take on any more - it is deinitely standing room only at the moment!!

Finally managed to get a quote for the waste water treatment plant. All the waste water will go into this plant and can then be reused for irrigation, so with our catchment tanks from the roofs as well, we should be largely self sufficient in water. Was hoping to get this treatment plant here and in by now as it has to be buried and needs a hole 20’ long, 7’ wide and 7’ deep. They are quoting 12 weeks delivery, which puts us into mid August, and the wet season, not to mention the hurricane season!! Having had experience of digging large holes in the wet season, and not sure that want to repeat it, but then do we want to wait till next January to install the plant? Decisions decisions!!

February 26th 2007

Project progressing well. We finished putting a concrete road in just before Christmas. About 280 yds and all mixed by hand. Took about three weeks from start to finish and then another two weeks to put all the drainage in. Then luckily as we finished that the weather decided that the dry season had finally arrived and at long last we managed to get the base of the water tank concreted. We are putting a water catchment tank under what will eventually be a general maintenance and storage building with staff accommodation over.

The walls for the tank are now built and plastered and last Friday we concreted the roof, which will be the floor of the maintenance and storage building. That was a lot of concrete - over 4 tonnes cement and about 25 tonnes sand and gravel and all mixed by hand in one day!!

We have also got the footings and basement slab in for the first cottage. The plan is to build the first one completely and then we can decide if we need any alterations and then build all the rest to that spec.
 
Still no sign of the concrete mixer that I bought from India. Keep getting hand wringing apologetic emails from the manufacturer, who swears this has never happened before. The latest one, just over a week ago, was full of hope –he said that it was definitely going to arrive in Miami on the 14th February, and would I email him when I had got it. I replied pointing out that Grenada was approximately 1500 miles southeast of Miami, so he would have to get it a bit closer than that. Haven’t heard back yet.
 
During the next few weeks we hope to get the maintenance shed and the first cottage finished. Also we will cut the ground for the main bar and restaurant, so then all will really begin to take shape. Unfortunately we have had to cut some biggish trees down but have managed to find a local sawmill who will plank it up. Will be nice to make a few bits of furniture from timber from the site.