Remember how when asked a few months ago I was hoping we would move in for Christmas? Yeah. Santa is long gone.
Then we were hoping to move in February. Hum.
So now we are looking at April. There is going to be a serious inauguration party, that much I can promise.
I know pretty much nothing about construction. Turns out diving is much easier.
I don’t even know where to start with this. After building our road as you may remember , we had a stretch of not much happening on the building site for a couple of months as we were busy getting ready to open and our lovely architect was busy finishing up the sexy construction plans. (I know sexy might be an overstatement, but I promise they are.)
Then after weeks and weeks of getting ridiculous quotes we finally found a contractor, and we signed a contract, and they broke ground. The man was confident it was going to be done in 4 months, but we agreed on 6 just to be safe. And 6 months later…here we are still with a construction site on hands.
So it is coming along, but not exactly as fast as we would like.
Issue number one has been getting the materials over, as the ferries are temperamental around here and so when the workers are out of cement to work…well they can’t work. Then we had workers issues. As the rainy season was very late this year, it was unbearably hot when the big work started…even too hot for indonesian workers who are used to work under the sun. So we had a team quit.
So our contractor brought in other guys (or should I say kids because some of them really looked like they were 18). The problem with 18 years old is that they want to have fun.
A few weeks later, he had to fire part of the squad because they had turn their shack into a late night casino, and were gambling all night long with a bunch of other guys from the neighbourhood. Here is an idea if diving doesn’t work I guess: Purple Casino, for all your gambling needs. Oh wait, that is illegal here.
So another week or so with not enough people working…you can see why we are getting delayed.
But we are getting there, we have almost a pool, some walls, a bunch of storage and recycling tanks for water, soon enough we will have roofs…
With a bit of imagination you can see our sexy pool
In the meantime, we are also broke as shit (of course, who expects a construction to cost what was budgeted right?) so we are now going into plans B to furnish and embellish the place.
Julia has taken over the garden and she is cutting and planting and watering and growing anything that we can avoid to buy.
Casually hoping on the speedboat from Bali with a bunch of plants and a few banana trees, like one does.
Antoine got a serious carpenter set up going on now, and he is making furniture, starting with a bed or two as a trial. I am finally going to stop sleeping on a mattress on the floor, how grown up of me.
And me? Well I am not as talented as these two with my hands (guess why I spend all my days in front of my laptop as “boss of the admin crap”?…) but I like recycling stuff, so I have looked into that and I am making stuff out of crap that no ones wants. Namely broken tiles and old tyres. My first trial at mosaic wasn’t great, but next up is a table with tyres and mosaic. Stay tuned.
Nowhere as good as I was expecting, but it's a learning curve!
Maybe if diving doesn’t work out we can set up a little shop selling plants and furnitures and weird other stuff.
We are also gearing up for next high season, there are lots of new things happening in the pipe...It turns out that when you are done with one thing there is always the next thing. Not one boring day, let me tell you.