A house to make Caribbean ghosts proud

The idea from the start was to keep the Charming House as simple and as Old Caribbean as could be. I wanted Felix and the passing ghosts of saltrakers to recognise the place. I also figured that doing things island-style would be a lot less expensive than trying to bring all-mod-cons to a desert island.

There would be no need for air conditioning and no need for glass in the windows. The cottage is perched on the island's spine to catch the Trade Winds which blow fresh from the Atlantic and rarely die. Screens keep the bugs at bay, shutters the hurricanes.

The single bathroom a short stretch of plumbers' pipe from the kitchen sink is fine by me, with a second outside for a shower and privy-style relief.

We can leave the beams exposed. I don't mind seeing the odd bit of electrical cable winding its way to the ceiling fans. The kitchen has its own footprint to the side of the house to keep the heat and the risk of fire outdoors - old island wisdom - and looking up to the underside of the tin roof is, well, authentic.

Steel shipping containers filled with nails, screws, tin roofing, coils of electrical cable, lengths of piping and our rough-cut cypress rolled their way slowly south from Miami to the customs compound on Grand Turk.

Builder Don Shope had made log houses back in Oklahoma and handles wood like a sculptor. He hired Ronald and Wilbur and Willy, migrant labourers from Haiti, and set about uprooting acacia thorns and cleaning the well. We rebuilt the coral-rock wall which keeps the donkeys out of the yard. We waited for the ship to come in.

Back in New York, I went shopping. It is easier to dream of rescuing old buildings than to assemble everything needed to actually live in them. I got kitchen counters made of galvanized iron and bought a fridge, a stove, a washing machine and half-a-ton of floor slates.

Nettie has her store for rice and beans and fresh eggs, but you cannot buy beds, tables, sheets or tea-cups on Salt Cay. I filled a removal van and drove it 1,000 miles to the Miami docks for a freighter bound for Grand Turk.

I got back to the island a day after the lumber barge unloaded at Dean's Dock, all duty paid and ready to go. The Salt Cay siesta was shattered. Rarely can such energy have been applied under so hot a sun. Don buzz-sawed timbers into lengths, barked orders in his own Creole-American variant, and drove home six inch nails in three blows of the hammer. "Been doing it all my life," he explained.

Watching the 'frame' go up against the backdrop of the ruined old Government House was as heady a thrill as even the diehard property-porn aficianado can hope for. I went home to work and in a few days Don was sending me photographs of his first shiplap walls.

"They're going up real pretty," he said. I pinned-up the pictures and gazed, more in love with the Caribbean than ever. In a few more weeks, I'd be living under that new tin roof.

NEXT WEEK: It's time to move in

Charles Laurence's Americans column will resume later this month ·