We are well aware that the summer has been very hot and humid back in Minnesota- unseasonably so…And everyone on Facebook was so kind to let us know about it since when we were up in San Jose it was actually hotter in MN than it was where we were. Well, let me tell you- down here in Uvita is a completely different story! It’s been kind of hot—in the mid to upper 80s most days, but it really is the humidity that is a killer!
(Disclaimer: Ramie would not stop laughing when he saw this and had to add it)We are typically staying in the 80-95% humidity range- and at this point, when it’s 80% humidity it feels really good comparatively! You can just imagine how much of a frizzy mess my hair is!!! (Most days I’ve pretty much given up on taming it, so when you come to visit us, just be prepared for the lion’s mane! No, I will not post a picture, you’ll just have to come visit and see for yourself!)
Oh, and don’t forget, on top of this high humidity it rains. And when it rains here- it’s usually a torrential downpour! This might last anywhere from an hour to several hours. Sometimes it rains all day or all night. (You thought the weather casters in MN had a hard time predicting weather, they would have absolutely zero chance of predicting with any sort of accuracy down here!!) When it rains overnight, the mornings as the sun comes up feel especially muggy. I still follow a couple of the weather casters from MN on my facebook and once in a while they have a post showing the humidity levels and what is comfortable, what is uncomfortable, and what they call “tropical”. I now laugh when I see these because comfortable is in the 50-65% range or something like that, and tropical is in the 70’s. Man, humidity in the 70s would feel amazing!!!
Yesterday (Monday 6/14) was 11 days since we’ve been here. We’ve mostly been relaxing but decided it was time to do some work around the house. The dryer vent needed fixing, and there were a few areas that the cleaning lady didn’t clean up very well before we came, so that was what was on the agenda today. While it was a driving day for us, we heard that the internet installers might be coming this week and we wanted to stay home to make sure we didn’t miss them.
We started out cleaning behind/under the bed, boy was it icky back there with bugs (both dead and alive) and… Is that mold? Crap! After some more looking around, sure enough, there was mold starting. Good thing we bought bleach! We started scrubbing down any surfaces that we saw that white residue and then scrubbing down a lot of other stuff. We looked through our closets and found some mold starting on a few things, we took those out and scrubbed them as well. Yep—it sure is the humidity down here! While yes, there is AC in the house, electricity is very expensive down here and you only run the AC when you REALLY need it (typically at bed time). Otherwise, fans and open windows it is—which doesn’t do anything for the humidity but just makes it slightly more comfortable for us to live in. But now that we know it’s here, we are just going to have to keep air flow going through things, keep the closet doors open, flip our clothes every few days, and just stay on top of cleaning things in general. (Real time note, as of 8/18 we have only ran the AC once and that was not even for our own comfort, it was attempt to get some caulking in the bathroom to dry since it had been nearly a week since we put it on and it was still sticky).
Ok, so the scrubbing and bleach is done, time to fix the dryer vent. With only a few tools, and of course not the correct ones for the job, Ramie started trying to fix it and only ran into more issues. What started out as the exterior flaps not opening, turned into they are broken. I guess it’s time to remove the entire duct and fix it. Low and behold, the duct wasn’t even attached correctly. So now that we know what the problem is, we tried to pull the washer/dryer combo out of the cabinet that it was in to be able to fix it. Guess what—the cabinet appears that it was built around the machine after the machine was installed. There is no way to get it out! Ok, so I guess we’ll do this the hard way. But first- a trip to the hardware store. Good thing it’s a driving day. We had to pick up some duct tape and a ladder, and other misc items. Of course, the first store had lots of things for other shoppers, just not what we needed.
So on to the 2nd hardware store and we finally got what we needed. Back to the house to work on this dryer vent again. We had to take the top panel off of the cabinet that was built around the machine so we could see what was going on behind it and guess what we found--- more mold and ants. I’m pretty sure this has never been cleaned since the house was built in 2014. So- we scrubbed what we could get at, and after a 20-minute project that turned into over 3 hours, Ramie finally had the vent duct cut to the proper length and secured to the back of the dryer. I know that we have been warned about this kind of thing, and we knew it would happen. We are just now experiencing it for the first time. Chock it up to another learning experience, I’m sure we’ll have many of these!
Pura Vida- Welcome to Costa Rica!
P.S. Happy Birthday to our Nephew Will and our Niece Elodie (I know these posts are not coming out on the dates they are happening, but I wanted to drop this in here anyway) :)
Good thing Ramie knows how to do all that stuff!
ReplyDeleteThanks Karla, and Im glad I know how to as well. It would be a real pain trying to get some of this stuff done here and in a timely manner at that.
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