April 2005: The Bath Room Remodel, Phase I

April 18th, 2005

Early Spring, 2005

By now our long-term guests have gone home and we are spend­ing more time on the land after let­ting it go for the major con­struc­tion phase of the last two months. We’ve been mak­ing use of our rototiller— a gift of Robin and James— to break up the weed party that’s been goin’ on in the veg­gie gar­den. The soil is slowly get­ting more fer­tile and we’re begin­ing to see the cycles of growth and map­ping out areas of the gar­den that favor the dif­fer­ent plants. The earth is so chal­leng­ing and reward­ing to work with here!

Lisa and I con­tinue to work at the Blossoming Lotus, although our roles have shifted some­what: I am now on the line at lunch, a job I enjoy greatly— it appeals to my love of serv­ing food, and there is an excit­ing per­for­mance aspect to the job. Lisa has moved into more of a mange­ment role, over­see­ing the prepa­ra­tion of food in the kitchen and the order­ing of the wide range of foods used in the restau­rant. The Lotus con­tin­ues to chart an inter­st­ing course between chaos and order, but it has become our fam­ily and we accept it’s odd­i­ties and ambi­tious tan­gents with with love and some crit­i­cism while keep­ing our feet on the ground, help­ing to build it into the truly fine restau­rant it is and could con­tinue to be.

Over the last two months our main focus has been a major remodel of our bath­room (of the American mis­nomer) into a two-room water closet/bath room facil­ity. The design con­cept has been kick­ing around here for some time, and James came in and made it prac­ti­cal. We started by clear­ing the area out­side the bath­room and lay­ing out the gravel bed for the con­crete pad. The idea is to build an exten­sion off the house for the tub and shower, while leav­ing the inte­rior room for the toi­let and vanity.

We’ve installed a grey­wa­ter sys­tem, partly to give the old cesspool a break, but mainly to reclaim as much use­able water as pos­si­ble— after all, we’re pay­ing for it! At the moment, this all drains out over a bank through a perf pipe, but will even­tu­ally go into a small pond stocked with plants (such as water hyacinth) capa­ble of puri­fy­ing the water. Small fish, invert­ibrates, insects and bac­te­ria com­plete the ecosys­tem. The plants are then har­vested and com­posted to reclaim the nitro­gen and other nutri­ents, while the water is used for irrigation.

The exposed wall of the house will be opened up to allow access to the new bath room.

The idea for the new bath­room is to open up the exist­ing roof and put on a shed roof of trans­par­ent poly­car­bon­ate. The new space will be light, open and com­fort­able— every­thing the old bath­room was not.

Of course, we wanted to play with the con­crete, so we embed­ded it with designs of stones and glass. The shower gets a kind of swirly design and the entry a five-pointed star.

It’s look­ing pretty rough here, but we have a work­ing shower— a vast improve­ment over the old fiber­glass box we were using.

Jonathan and I put the roof on and enough of the inte­rior to make the space fully use­able. By now, James and Robin have gone home, so we will be mov­ing for­ward on the fin­ish work as time becomes avail­able. The screens are cov­ered in reed mats for pri­vacy, but even­tu­ally we will have the bath house largely screened in by vegetation.

On the agri­cul­tural front, I just har­vested our vanilla pods. They begin the cur­ing process and will be ready for use in a week or so. The house is filled with the aroma of the pods as they cure in the dehy­dra­tor. We are using a sim­pli­fied, accel­er­ated process devel­oped recently in Mexico to cure the beans— the tra­di­tional process takes months and is really imprac­ti­cal on a small scale. This is one of the agri­cul­tural prod­ucts we could be pro­duc­ing on the land here, a legacy of my grand­mother, who orig­i­nally planted a vanilla vine as a curios­ity. I found the vine, grown huge, and cut it into 5 pieces and planted it around the prop­erty. I will be cut­ting more pieces for trans­plant­ing after the flow­er­ing season.

These last months have been an intense time of devel­op­ment around here, a time of spend­ing a lot of money and see­ing many improve­ments while estab­lish­ing foun­da­tions for improve­ments to come. We now have a full com­pli­ment of tools, along with the invalu­able prac­ti­cal knowl­edge gained through all the work.

As always, we know this is all a gift of Spirit, and remem­ber with grat­i­tude all who have made this pos­si­ble. Thank you and namaste.