The backstory: it's uber-duber hot in CR. When we get home from work each day it's about 90 degrees inside our house, and we don't have A/C. Fortunately for us, we sort of live in a natural wind tunnel, so if you put everything that could conceivably blow away (paper, puzzle pieces, glasses of water, your wife) under a rock or weigh it down, then you can open up all the windows to the house and the temperature will get comfortable pretty quickly.
The problem: the wind comes and goes in gusts, and when it's not gusting (especially after dusk) the bugs use the opportunity to invade the house in droves.
The solution: screens... on everything. Over the past few weeks we've screened in all of the windows in the house as well as the back door. The latter being the story worth mentioning.
You see, in this endeavor, there were a number of forces conspiring against us. First, our dictionary doesn't have the right word for screen (as in the material) - so when we first went to the hardware store we were asking them over and over for something akin to a portable divider wall. Second, buying materials here is an interesting adventure. The lumber that we bought... 1"by 1/2" gets sold in three lengths: un barra, dos barras, o tres barras. What's a barra you ask? I can't help you, I don't know. It looks to be about 30 inches give or take 6. We bought 10 sticks of 2 barras each and the length varied by about 2 feet. Third, we don't have actual tools. Here's a picture of all the tools we used to make the screen door and another one of the screen door itself.
To build it we had a hammer, scissors, a pencil, a tape measure, a dollar bin target multiscrewdriver, a leatherman, and a hacksaw blade that we found in our backyard (used both for cutting the wood and chiseling the inset in the door for the hinges).
All things considered, we're pretty stoked with the outcome. We now have access to a much cooler, relatively bug free evening and the fact that the door is already beginning to sag doesn't bug us too much... The closer it gets to the ground the tougher it is for spiders to crawl under.
What's going on in your life? Love,
TeamWander
3 comments:
Reading your blog always makes me smile. I love your door.
I thought of Miah last weekend as I was skiing in Durango, CO and watching all of the really good snowboarders doing their thing.
I'm still running, and about to put in my requests for my next base. Texas is still hot, but I doubt it's as uber hot as CR.
How's the building outside of the home going?
I love the handiwork! Mike will be so impressed! Speaking of Mike, he is running the Krispy Kreme Challenge tomorrow. I will be as far from this area as possible as I have a slight aversion to vomit.
Miss you!
un barra sounds a lot like a cubit, which was historically the length from the tip of one's second finger to his elbow and later stabilized at I think 28 inches. In the intro to chemistry course I'd pull up someone Leslie's size and a basketball player and put their forearms side by side to compare cubits. It illustrated the virtue of setting and using standard units.
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