Big Maho Pavilion walkways

I know we seem to be posting quite a bit on our crushed glass and concrete projects lately, but we have one more interesting development last week:

Once the Maho Pavilion area is opened to the public our glass & concrete counter tops will be on display, which we're looking forward to seeing. We'll also have a lot of our glass being used (but not seen) within the concrete walkways surrounding the pavilion area. All of our clear bottles collected on camp during the season get washed, scraped, crushed and melted to create works of art. All of our colored bottled and pretty much anything else glass gets crushed and put in it's own separate pile. Understandably this pile of crushed glass gets pretty big over the course of a season at Maho (thanks for drinking all that beer!). The National Park asked us if we'd be willing to use some of the crushed glass as fill for their concrete walkways, which we were more than happy to help with. Scooping crushed glass is quite a bit of work, considering each shovel full weighs about 8 pounds! While it's hard to estimate how many bottles or how many pounds of bottles were used for this project, we're working on it. We do know it was just about all the colored glass we collected for the season, and it feels great not to be putting it all in the landfill! (St. John doesn't recycle glass). Pictured below are two of our volunteers this summer, taking a break while standing on the forms and glass that has been distributed before the concrete pour. Pictured above is the same section, after the concrete pour.

More counter tops

Just a couple days ago we mentioned how guests staying in our Harmony units may notice new sink counter tops. Starting soon you won't have to stay with us to check out our new crushed glass & concrete counter tops. The new pavilion being constructed at Big Maho will feature the above counter top, and its big: this one weighs about 450lbs! It took 6 people just to load it into the truck when we moved it from camp to Big Maho.

The estimate for how many glass beer bottles went into this one counter? about 1,000! If we figure to have used about 100lbs of concrete it would leave us with about 350lbs of glass. If we then figure about 3 beer bottles per pound of glass we get roughly 1,000 bottles! That's a heck of a lot of glass bottles not going into the trash (St. John doesn't recycle any glass).

The two counter tops sitting just behind the big piece on the rack each weigh a bit less than the big one, but if you combined all three it would be roughly 1,000lbs of glass, or about 3,000 beer bottles.

As a side note: when we delivered the counter tops today the workers were painting the outside shutters on the main building (notice the red shutter in the picture). However, that doesn't mean they're putting the final touches on the whole project, not even close! My own estimate is about 2 or 3 more months.

Harmony Studios & counter tops

Those of you that have stayed with us before and are planning a stay with us in Harmony Studios this winter may notice something a little different in your units this year.

"building" on the theme of using as many crushed glass bottles as we can around Maho and St. John, our latest project includes making counter tops like the one pictured above. The process of collecting glass, crushing the glass, creating a mold, mixing the cement with crushed glass, pouring, curing, and finally sanding/polishing the final result takes a great deal of time, but the final result speaks for itself!

You may notice a few pieces of glass within the counter top that don't exactly look like crushed glass; our talented glass blowers have created many different unique "pulled glass" pieces that have then been sliced like bread and carefully placed in the cement before it hardens. And of course the soap dish was made here as well!

If you're curious what it is we're working on directly across from the glass studio then come ask us, we're probably working on a counter top like the one above.