Week Four

Well, despite my bumbling of yesterday, I've managed to make it to an internet café today (Monday) with last week's pictures. Hope you like them!

Here's another one for your collection: April 15, 2008.

This picture shows what will be the back of our house (and a Coca-Cola truck). On the left will be our dining room, and on the right our living room. Where the guy is standing, there'll be a patio / deck / porch / whatever. The blocks shown in this picture rise to the height of the eventual floor.

Putting more blocks up to form the foundation/retention walls around the house.

Well, eventually we'll have this view from our bedroom. You can see the Gulf of Nicoya as well as the Nicoya Peninsula in the distance (that's where the province Guanacaste is located).

Now this kind of seems like a "duh" moment, but I was wondering why they were bending all these steel bars. Then they pointed out that the bars are about 4 meters tall, but the workers were less than 2 meters tall. So, they have to bend them to get the blocks put on.

For a person used to wood-frame houses, this is interesting. Here is a corner of our dining room. They build all the walls, and then they pour the steel-reinforced concrete columns at the end.

April 19, 2008. This was a bit of a slow week, but that's OK. There was a country-wide sand shortage, apparently (or else all the construction supply dealers were full of shit), so that took slowed down concrete mixing, and there were also spots of inclement weather. Still, slowly but surely she's going up, and I guess the house is still right on schedule. So, be sure to check back next week to see what's new!