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| I BUILD A HOUSE Building a house, the old fashioned way! |
I BUILD A HOUSE
The house I start to build is huge. The people here think it is a hotel and keep asking what the name of it is. I am not used to metric, so I
begin by just stepping off the rooms, using 3 feet to the meter. I will soon find all the conversion factors I need in the back of my huge
Spanish/English dictionary that I brought down. I want tall ceilings, big windows - screened with wooden louvers, no glass. The people think I am
crazy to want windows so big with no glass - the spirits can get in. Santiago’s cousin Juan is in architect school, so he draws the actual plan for the
house from my drawings. No one will really use this plan he makes as they can’t read, I am soon to learn. Meanwhile, we are living in a small motel
in a larger nearby village, driving the newly purchased Nissan truck back and forth each day to oversee the construction. I am teaching Santiago
to drive. He is the acting “co-ordinator” between the work crew and I. Most of the crew speak only Maya. They do not work with women. Women
make no decisions here, of any consequence, but I don’t know that yet. At night my brain sizzles and pops. Sometimes I can’t seem to think in any
language at all. I learn about vigas and bovedillas, alambre cocido, and clavos - kilos of clavos. These are beams and concrete blocks, annealed
wire, and nails. I have designed the rooms around the tile sizes and the length of the concrete support beams. Ceiling width and height is decided
by the size of the concrete blocks. The door and window makers are in Merida, as are most of the other suppliers: tile, plumbing, bath fixtures,
lights, stoves, beds, refrigerators. Countless trips buying and hauling it home in the truck. It is amazing what you can get in the back of a Nissan
small truck - a “camionetta”, as they call it here.
There is no earth moving, nor concrete pouring machinery. We remove large rocks with huge metal stakes, pick axes, and dynamite. Somebody
yells, “bomba”, and we all run inside the thatch houses below to avoid possible falling rocks. Several come through the roofs anyway, before we
are all done. We are clearing and forming a road up to the site as well. One hundred meters of hand laid rock road bed, hand carried to the site,
3 meters wide, with sascab over the top - eventually packed hard, like white concrete. Sascab is the white limestone “dirt” we have all over the 1
hectare plot of land, along with solid rock, a hectare being about 2 ½ acres. The dirt we remove to form the large 18x18x18 foot cistern to hold
water, is laid over the rocks on the newly forming road. We must build this road to the site as soon as possible, and it must be strong and solid
enough to support the huge trucks which will bring the thousands of concrete blocks, and mountains of “polvo y grava” - sand and gravel - that
along with bags and bags of cement, will form the house. The rocks we blow up, and the ones on the property, become the foundation of the
house, built up some 8 to 10 feet behind, to level out with the front part. There is no way to level the land here, other than by hand, and the front
of the house is on solid rock, so it stays. The back part is actually built on two large squares filled in with thousands more rocks that we pay
someone to bring in by truck. I have chosen the best quality of concrete blocks, the good sand, for the construction. The men are impressed. It is
more luck than anything. I know nothing of this kind of building. In the Northwest, in Oregon, houses are made of wood, but I seem to have an
instinct for quality.
We are going to have bath tubs, wonder of all wonders, and hot water heaters. A gas stove with an oven that I will use to bake, not to store my
dishes in. They ask, “can you cook?”, “yes”, I answer. I can sew too, my sewing machine came down in the overhead luggage compartment on
the airplane, so I am sewing dresses for my new girls back at the motel at night where I have moved in two metal tables from the bar/restaurant.
One for sewing, one for design and layout - graph paper and colored pencils everywhere. I make patterns for the dress parts out of pellon to try it
on the girls. I have never sewn without a real pattern before. On one of the tables, I draw and color in the floor tile patterns for each room in the
new house when I realize the men can’t read. I have made the designs too elaborate, not just squares, and they can’t understand what I want, so I
draw each design and hand color it; color code it to the tile colors and sizes. I have complicated my life again. Over the years, I will make
hundreds of dresses: Cinderella dresses, graduation dresses, bridesmaid’s dresses, pleated skirt school uniforms, all more complicated and exact
than has been seen here. I will teach two of the daughters to sew very well, and how to use math to figure out the number of pleats to a skirt, how
to employ it in various kinds of sewing. These two will make most of their own clothes.
Rose has come to join us now. She is the oldest of brother Antonio’s ten children. Mimi is her younger sister. Rose is almost the same age as my
daughter in the US, 18. She comes to help with the girls, and to help cook. To help grandmother Carmen, Santiago’s mother, who has suddenly
landed in an American whirlwind of activity. By the end of October, Rose will move in with us and become my third new daughter. My son has
come to visit and everyone instantly falls in love with him. He is 20. He will return several times over the years, and it is he who will help me to form
a water collection system using PVC tubing, to catch the rain water off the roof and store it in the big cistern for use in the house. Carmen will cry
each time he leaves. So will I.
For the construction of the house, road, and cistern, we will actually have 56 people working for the first couple of months. The main core of about
18 to 20 men, the “magicians” who make this work, usually work large projects in Merida and Cancun, but are all from the village. They have come
back to do this project, and to have more time with their families. I come to know certain people well: “Michelangelo”, the fine finish concrete
worker with the unpronounceable name of Leodegario, and his brother Julio, who will do yet another project for me in the future, both first cousins
of Santiago. Amalio, the plumber and electrician, for whom we will become godparents in the Mayan style for two of his children, not yet born.
Armondo and his brother Abelardo, who have the most beautiful gold-toothed smiles you will ever see. I will learn from Armondo that when he asks
if I want something done a certain way, he is actually giving me hints. If I say no, and he says nothing, I learn I am about to make a mistake. For
instance: Armondo asks how I want the tile wall moulding done. I can’t see why we need it. (It would be fancy wood base board moulding in the
US.) He says nothing. I start looking at hotels where we stay in Merida, restaurants, business places. They all have a tile wall moulding, about 3
to 4 inches high. I ask Armondo about it again and he tells me the way you clean tile floors here is to throw on buckets of water and “Fab”
detergent, and then squeegee it out the door. The tile wall moulding keeps the concrete wall from getting wet and falling apart. “Oh, Yes, I think
we should do that.” Now we will need more tile. Back to Merida.
We end up putting marble in the main bath, the floor and sink counters, a lovely cinnamon/peach/sand/brown combination that comes from a
nearby quarry. It is cheaper than the tile would be, and another cousin quarries and cuts it. A cousin works for the door and window company in
Merida too, so the owner comes out to take all the measurements when we are ready. Lovely solid cedar doors and window frames and louvers
that will fit perfectly when they come to deliver and install them, and cost almost as much as the whole house! However they are still in excellent
condition today, even after three hurricanes. I will think I want wood cabinets for the kitchen, and wood closets, until I learn that cockroaches LOVE
to hide in wood areas like that. We will do it all in tile and leave them open and never have cockroaches. I am learning.
The house is not without mistakes, but most of them were rectified in time. I came in one day to find this huge high opening for the main door,
almost to the 12 foot ceiling. “Why is it so high and wide?”, I ask. “Because we have heard that North Americans are very tall”, they answer. Yes,
but we are not expecting Paul Bunyan here. 8 feet will do nicely. We bust out a few concrete blocks, lower the header, the concrete beam, and fill
in the rest of the top and side space. I learn they have a plan to make all the door sizes different, 9 of them, for “variety”. I standardize them all,
except for the two main entry doors, and promptly notify the door makers. The cost goes down.
The next time I come, they are preparing the counter areas in the kitchen. The Maya here are short people, and I tower over many of them at my
“huge” 5 foot, 5 inch height, but to use these counters I would either have to be sitting down or bent way over. We raise all the counters and the
girls will all learn to stand on chairs to help cook and cut vegetables. But the main bathroom tub faucet will forever more have a strange elbow in it
where the water pipe came out of the wall, instead of behind the tub, and had to be made to work somehow. I got there too late that day, and no
one had ever seen or installed a bathtub, let alone this strange curved faucet.
I still have one major problem. In my mind, I still can’t figure out what will hold up the ceiling. Why will the concrete blocks stay up there? We have
ordered these vigas and bovedillas, but I don’t know what they are, how they work. I know the English words now, beams and concrete blocks, but
I don’t understand why they aren’t just going to drop right through. When the beams arrive, I suddenly understand the concept. The vigas are
concrete stepped beams, about 13 cm wide, with a 1.5 cm step, or lip, on either side as part of that width. The bovedillas are a concrete block with
a sort of flange on each end that sit between, and rest on, the step of the beam. Got it. I learn to calculate out how many are needed for each
ceiling area, a detail that will soon become very important, and will prove invaluable in the future when I build a water purification plant, and years
later, convert it into a Bed and Breakfast Inn. But for now, it is just my curious mind, wanting to know things, understand what they are doing and
why. I learn that the reason we must go out into the jungle and cut about a hundred straight long poles is to form scaffolding to stand on to put the
walls up, and later, to hold the beams in place in the ceiling when the concrete roof is poured, support the beams until the concrete dries, so they
won’t sag and form ceiling cracks later on. The inside of the house will look like a striped pole forest during this phase for weeks, with a hole left in
the middle of the roof area where they will lift bucket after bucket of concrete in a long brigade for more than 36 hours straight, to pour this
mammoth 4,500 square foot roof monster I have inadvertently created.
And I will be appalled when I realize how they intend to pour the roof; there are no big cement mixer trucks here. Then I will be fascinated and
amazed when they DO do it, with the help of a small electric cement mixer we finally find in Merida, somehow manage to get into the back of the
truck using 3 guys and a “come-a-long”, rigged up in a big tree to hoist it up and into the truck. After driving this behemoth mixer back to the site,
it fills up the entire back of the truck bed and towers over the cab, we have to get it unloaded somehow. I then find no one knows how to use it,
and we spend the next several hours looking for someone who does. I didn’t realize until then, that you can’t pour a roof in sections, that it all has
to be done at once, or cracks will form where the sections meet. The wet concrete won’t adhere to the dryer section. All these things I am learning
every day, every minute, in two languages, taking care of two small girls, helping with the cooking for the core crew of about 8 now, mostly related
family, who eat with us everyday, plus the actual family. The main meal is served at about 1:30 P.M. and at 3 P.M. work begins again until dark
falls. This main meal easily involves 18 to 24 people, eating in shifts everyday for about three months, and I help with the shopping, preparing,
serving, and washing up. The guys even build a concrete block area, about three feet square and two feet high, where I can wash dishes by the
old “pila”, the water storage area, instead of washing them on the ground as I have been doing. Both the pila and the concrete block structure are
still there today. Later I will even cook some of the meals completely, much to the families surprise. The Gringa cooks too!
The men are working from 6 A.M. to about 6 P.M., sometimes longer with an hour and a half for lunch; Saturday only until 2:30 P.M. with Sunday
off, unless we have a complication. We started this project on July 1st, and we moved in the second week of October, 98% of the details
completed. That is incredible when you consider the size and lack of equipment and tools. They use no levels, no plumb bob lines. Just nails
dangling from fishing line, and chalked fishing line strung between stakes for determining levels. When I finally buy a level and a square, I will find
that all the walls are perfect, the floors level, the room square. How do they do that?
The night pour of the roof was the most amazing feat of engineering and human endurance I have ever seen. We started at dawn, worked all
through the day and night, and finally finished the main part after dark the following day. Bucket after bucket after bucket being passed from hand
to hand, in three stages, three levels of people, up through the hole to the roof, there being dumped and spread with rakes and boards as fast
and carefully as possible. A wire netting called maya, has to go down first over the bovedillas and beams for the concrete to adhere to. So not
only do you have to lift these huge long concrete reinforced beams into place onto the 15 foot high roof by hand, but also the hundreds of
concrete bovedillas, get them all correctly in place, put the tubing down through the blocks for all the electrical wiring going in later on, but then get
these giant rolls of wire netting up ON the roof and then spread flat, BEFORE you can even start to pour the actual roof.
To give you some idea of this undertaking, the majority of the beams we used were 6M (almost 20 feet) long and weighed about 200K (440
pounds). It took 4 men to lift, hoist, lever, and shove them into place. We used hundreds, as they are placed every 51 cm (20 inches) apart, the
length of the bovedilla. The bovedillas, those concrete blocks with the flanges that rest on the beams, thus forming the roof/ceiling measure
51x25x15 cm. (roughly 20x10x6 inches), and weigh about 15K each, (some 33 pounds), all lifted and placed from hand to hand, ground to roof
top. In one 6M channel, you would have 30 bovedillas. In the widest part of the roof, 22M (72 feet), you would have 35 beams, so in one 6M
section, that gives you 1,050 bovedillas. Multiply that by roughly 3, as the house is 18M long, and think of how long it took 28 men and boys to lift,
carry, and place over 3,000 of these blocks, weighing 33 pounds each! Not to mention the 4 monster support beams at over 16 feet long, 20
inches deep and 9 inches wide that had to be hand formed out of our tiny precious hoard of boards, 2x12’s, formed one at a time and hand
poured in concrete to form the major support beams for the house. Staggers the imagination. Think of how many concrete blocks we used if the
walls are 4 M high, roughly 18M long, if each block is 40x20x15cm. Thousands. Each weighing 22 pounds, all hand loaded at the factory, hand
unloaded and piled in neat 2M high stacks at the site, then carried one by one to wherever they have to go on the walls. Imagine balancing on a
bouncing scaffolding of poles and a few 2x12 boards, the scaffolding tied together with vines and bits of wire, putting up and cementing into place
these thousands of blocks as the walls rise higher and higher. Vertigo anyone? Our very own acrobats, balancing blocks at 30 feet in the air. I
sat day after day and watched and was amazed. And humbled. We, with all our technology, machinery, and tools in the “modern world”, and look
what they do by hand, with nothing but manpower and ingenuity, in blazing sun or torrential rain, laughing and joking all the way through it. It was
a sight to see and I recorded as much as possible with my camera. The house became theirs as well as mine, and they poured their hearts and
talents into it to make it superb. For years, they would bring visiting relative to see “our” house; the house we all built.
I wouldn’t understand until well into the project that no one could actually calculate out anything this large. Tiny one room houses, yes, but not
this. They all worked under an engineer and architect. We had neither. Santiago and I would have to become both. At first it was just clearing
and foundation work involving zillions of rocks, ant trails of humans leading all over the property, passing rocks from hand to hand. We had one
wheelbarrow. I would soon find another, not much help. But when they began with the concrete blocks and beams, I was just told to get “trienta
vigas y mil bloques, cinco metros de polvo y grava de primera calidad”. 30 beams, 1,000 blocks, 5 cubic meters of sand and gravel. At this point,
I began asking questions. How many in all will we need? They didn’t know. The price they had originally calculated, this involving about 8 of the
key men, I knew couldn’t possible be correct, and mentally tripled it. Then I quadrupled it for good measure to see if I could afford it. Then I
decided to jump off the bridge and go for it. The house would come in slightly under my worst scenario calculation, a fact I was to keep in mind
during our future construction projects. Meanwhile I realized that I was the only person with enough math to calculate this whole thing out. You
had to subtract for the doors and windows, but remember of course how much cement would be thrown over the blocks to form the actual wall
thickness to get the finished room size. I drew and redrew designs, covered page after page with calculations in metric which I had never used
except for high school math. I swore fluently in three languages as I wadded and tore and tossed pages of useless figures that didn’t work
because of some detail I didn’t know. “Oh, over THAT cap of cement we have another 1.5 to 2 cm layer of final finish cement”. Great. So in one
room, I have just had the size reduced by 6 to 8 cm, on each side, depending on who is “throwing” that day. Back to the tile design. I thought my
brain would blow up.
The completion of the roof, when at last we got there, would take 5 days. During the initial first pour of 36 hours, when 28 men worked around the
clock, chanting and singing to keep their energy up, we would slaughter and prepare on the grounds a huge pig to make tortas for food, along with
several dozen cases of beer and coke. People ate in shifts all night long. I have photos of all this, from the pig to them wrestling with this huge roll
of wire netting, laying it down on the roof. Photos because I knew I would never see it again, and later, never believe that I, we, they did it. By
hand. These people are incredible. And I had won their respect for my mathematics.
I had now been here almost 5 months. I would soon have a house, 3 new daughters, a man I was living with, a future mother and father in law, 14
new family members just in the village, not counting cousins, uncles, and aunts. A whole new life. What in the WORLD had I done?
Kristine,
Flycatcher Inn, Santa Elena,
15 minutes southeast of Uxmal in Yucatan, Mexico
The house I start to build is huge. The people here think it is a hotel and keep asking what the name of it is. I am not used to metric, so I
begin by just stepping off the rooms, using 3 feet to the meter. I will soon find all the conversion factors I need in the back of my huge
Spanish/English dictionary that I brought down. I want tall ceilings, big windows - screened with wooden louvers, no glass. The people think I am
crazy to want windows so big with no glass - the spirits can get in. Santiago’s cousin Juan is in architect school, so he draws the actual plan for the
house from my drawings. No one will really use this plan he makes as they can’t read, I am soon to learn. Meanwhile, we are living in a small motel
in a larger nearby village, driving the newly purchased Nissan truck back and forth each day to oversee the construction. I am teaching Santiago
to drive. He is the acting “co-ordinator” between the work crew and I. Most of the crew speak only Maya. They do not work with women. Women
make no decisions here, of any consequence, but I don’t know that yet. At night my brain sizzles and pops. Sometimes I can’t seem to think in any
language at all. I learn about vigas and bovedillas, alambre cocido, and clavos - kilos of clavos. These are beams and concrete blocks, annealed
wire, and nails. I have designed the rooms around the tile sizes and the length of the concrete support beams. Ceiling width and height is decided
by the size of the concrete blocks. The door and window makers are in Merida, as are most of the other suppliers: tile, plumbing, bath fixtures,
lights, stoves, beds, refrigerators. Countless trips buying and hauling it home in the truck. It is amazing what you can get in the back of a Nissan
small truck - a “camionetta”, as they call it here.
There is no earth moving, nor concrete pouring machinery. We remove large rocks with huge metal stakes, pick axes, and dynamite. Somebody
yells, “bomba”, and we all run inside the thatch houses below to avoid possible falling rocks. Several come through the roofs anyway, before we
are all done. We are clearing and forming a road up to the site as well. One hundred meters of hand laid rock road bed, hand carried to the site,
3 meters wide, with sascab over the top - eventually packed hard, like white concrete. Sascab is the white limestone “dirt” we have all over the 1
hectare plot of land, along with solid rock, a hectare being about 2 ½ acres. The dirt we remove to form the large 18x18x18 foot cistern to hold
water, is laid over the rocks on the newly forming road. We must build this road to the site as soon as possible, and it must be strong and solid
enough to support the huge trucks which will bring the thousands of concrete blocks, and mountains of “polvo y grava” - sand and gravel - that
along with bags and bags of cement, will form the house. The rocks we blow up, and the ones on the property, become the foundation of the
house, built up some 8 to 10 feet behind, to level out with the front part. There is no way to level the land here, other than by hand, and the front
of the house is on solid rock, so it stays. The back part is actually built on two large squares filled in with thousands more rocks that we pay
someone to bring in by truck. I have chosen the best quality of concrete blocks, the good sand, for the construction. The men are impressed. It is
more luck than anything. I know nothing of this kind of building. In the Northwest, in Oregon, houses are made of wood, but I seem to have an
instinct for quality.
We are going to have bath tubs, wonder of all wonders, and hot water heaters. A gas stove with an oven that I will use to bake, not to store my
dishes in. They ask, “can you cook?”, “yes”, I answer. I can sew too, my sewing machine came down in the overhead luggage compartment on
the airplane, so I am sewing dresses for my new girls back at the motel at night where I have moved in two metal tables from the bar/restaurant.
One for sewing, one for design and layout - graph paper and colored pencils everywhere. I make patterns for the dress parts out of pellon to try it
on the girls. I have never sewn without a real pattern before. On one of the tables, I draw and color in the floor tile patterns for each room in the
new house when I realize the men can’t read. I have made the designs too elaborate, not just squares, and they can’t understand what I want, so I
draw each design and hand color it; color code it to the tile colors and sizes. I have complicated my life again. Over the years, I will make
hundreds of dresses: Cinderella dresses, graduation dresses, bridesmaid’s dresses, pleated skirt school uniforms, all more complicated and exact
than has been seen here. I will teach two of the daughters to sew very well, and how to use math to figure out the number of pleats to a skirt, how
to employ it in various kinds of sewing. These two will make most of their own clothes.
Rose has come to join us now. She is the oldest of brother Antonio’s ten children. Mimi is her younger sister. Rose is almost the same age as my
daughter in the US, 18. She comes to help with the girls, and to help cook. To help grandmother Carmen, Santiago’s mother, who has suddenly
landed in an American whirlwind of activity. By the end of October, Rose will move in with us and become my third new daughter. My son has
come to visit and everyone instantly falls in love with him. He is 20. He will return several times over the years, and it is he who will help me to form
a water collection system using PVC tubing, to catch the rain water off the roof and store it in the big cistern for use in the house. Carmen will cry
each time he leaves. So will I.
For the construction of the house, road, and cistern, we will actually have 56 people working for the first couple of months. The main core of about
18 to 20 men, the “magicians” who make this work, usually work large projects in Merida and Cancun, but are all from the village. They have come
back to do this project, and to have more time with their families. I come to know certain people well: “Michelangelo”, the fine finish concrete
worker with the unpronounceable name of Leodegario, and his brother Julio, who will do yet another project for me in the future, both first cousins
of Santiago. Amalio, the plumber and electrician, for whom we will become godparents in the Mayan style for two of his children, not yet born.
Armondo and his brother Abelardo, who have the most beautiful gold-toothed smiles you will ever see. I will learn from Armondo that when he asks
if I want something done a certain way, he is actually giving me hints. If I say no, and he says nothing, I learn I am about to make a mistake. For
instance: Armondo asks how I want the tile wall moulding done. I can’t see why we need it. (It would be fancy wood base board moulding in the
US.) He says nothing. I start looking at hotels where we stay in Merida, restaurants, business places. They all have a tile wall moulding, about 3
to 4 inches high. I ask Armondo about it again and he tells me the way you clean tile floors here is to throw on buckets of water and “Fab”
detergent, and then squeegee it out the door. The tile wall moulding keeps the concrete wall from getting wet and falling apart. “Oh, Yes, I think
we should do that.” Now we will need more tile. Back to Merida.
We end up putting marble in the main bath, the floor and sink counters, a lovely cinnamon/peach/sand/brown combination that comes from a
nearby quarry. It is cheaper than the tile would be, and another cousin quarries and cuts it. A cousin works for the door and window company in
Merida too, so the owner comes out to take all the measurements when we are ready. Lovely solid cedar doors and window frames and louvers
that will fit perfectly when they come to deliver and install them, and cost almost as much as the whole house! However they are still in excellent
condition today, even after three hurricanes. I will think I want wood cabinets for the kitchen, and wood closets, until I learn that cockroaches LOVE
to hide in wood areas like that. We will do it all in tile and leave them open and never have cockroaches. I am learning.
The house is not without mistakes, but most of them were rectified in time. I came in one day to find this huge high opening for the main door,
almost to the 12 foot ceiling. “Why is it so high and wide?”, I ask. “Because we have heard that North Americans are very tall”, they answer. Yes,
but we are not expecting Paul Bunyan here. 8 feet will do nicely. We bust out a few concrete blocks, lower the header, the concrete beam, and fill
in the rest of the top and side space. I learn they have a plan to make all the door sizes different, 9 of them, for “variety”. I standardize them all,
except for the two main entry doors, and promptly notify the door makers. The cost goes down.
The next time I come, they are preparing the counter areas in the kitchen. The Maya here are short people, and I tower over many of them at my
“huge” 5 foot, 5 inch height, but to use these counters I would either have to be sitting down or bent way over. We raise all the counters and the
girls will all learn to stand on chairs to help cook and cut vegetables. But the main bathroom tub faucet will forever more have a strange elbow in it
where the water pipe came out of the wall, instead of behind the tub, and had to be made to work somehow. I got there too late that day, and no
one had ever seen or installed a bathtub, let alone this strange curved faucet.
I still have one major problem. In my mind, I still can’t figure out what will hold up the ceiling. Why will the concrete blocks stay up there? We have
ordered these vigas and bovedillas, but I don’t know what they are, how they work. I know the English words now, beams and concrete blocks, but
I don’t understand why they aren’t just going to drop right through. When the beams arrive, I suddenly understand the concept. The vigas are
concrete stepped beams, about 13 cm wide, with a 1.5 cm step, or lip, on either side as part of that width. The bovedillas are a concrete block with
a sort of flange on each end that sit between, and rest on, the step of the beam. Got it. I learn to calculate out how many are needed for each
ceiling area, a detail that will soon become very important, and will prove invaluable in the future when I build a water purification plant, and years
later, convert it into a Bed and Breakfast Inn. But for now, it is just my curious mind, wanting to know things, understand what they are doing and
why. I learn that the reason we must go out into the jungle and cut about a hundred straight long poles is to form scaffolding to stand on to put the
walls up, and later, to hold the beams in place in the ceiling when the concrete roof is poured, support the beams until the concrete dries, so they
won’t sag and form ceiling cracks later on. The inside of the house will look like a striped pole forest during this phase for weeks, with a hole left in
the middle of the roof area where they will lift bucket after bucket of concrete in a long brigade for more than 36 hours straight, to pour this
mammoth 4,500 square foot roof monster I have inadvertently created.
And I will be appalled when I realize how they intend to pour the roof; there are no big cement mixer trucks here. Then I will be fascinated and
amazed when they DO do it, with the help of a small electric cement mixer we finally find in Merida, somehow manage to get into the back of the
truck using 3 guys and a “come-a-long”, rigged up in a big tree to hoist it up and into the truck. After driving this behemoth mixer back to the site,
it fills up the entire back of the truck bed and towers over the cab, we have to get it unloaded somehow. I then find no one knows how to use it,
and we spend the next several hours looking for someone who does. I didn’t realize until then, that you can’t pour a roof in sections, that it all has
to be done at once, or cracks will form where the sections meet. The wet concrete won’t adhere to the dryer section. All these things I am learning
every day, every minute, in two languages, taking care of two small girls, helping with the cooking for the core crew of about 8 now, mostly related
family, who eat with us everyday, plus the actual family. The main meal is served at about 1:30 P.M. and at 3 P.M. work begins again until dark
falls. This main meal easily involves 18 to 24 people, eating in shifts everyday for about three months, and I help with the shopping, preparing,
serving, and washing up. The guys even build a concrete block area, about three feet square and two feet high, where I can wash dishes by the
old “pila”, the water storage area, instead of washing them on the ground as I have been doing. Both the pila and the concrete block structure are
still there today. Later I will even cook some of the meals completely, much to the families surprise. The Gringa cooks too!
The men are working from 6 A.M. to about 6 P.M., sometimes longer with an hour and a half for lunch; Saturday only until 2:30 P.M. with Sunday
off, unless we have a complication. We started this project on July 1st, and we moved in the second week of October, 98% of the details
completed. That is incredible when you consider the size and lack of equipment and tools. They use no levels, no plumb bob lines. Just nails
dangling from fishing line, and chalked fishing line strung between stakes for determining levels. When I finally buy a level and a square, I will find
that all the walls are perfect, the floors level, the room square. How do they do that?
The night pour of the roof was the most amazing feat of engineering and human endurance I have ever seen. We started at dawn, worked all
through the day and night, and finally finished the main part after dark the following day. Bucket after bucket after bucket being passed from hand
to hand, in three stages, three levels of people, up through the hole to the roof, there being dumped and spread with rakes and boards as fast
and carefully as possible. A wire netting called maya, has to go down first over the bovedillas and beams for the concrete to adhere to. So not
only do you have to lift these huge long concrete reinforced beams into place onto the 15 foot high roof by hand, but also the hundreds of
concrete bovedillas, get them all correctly in place, put the tubing down through the blocks for all the electrical wiring going in later on, but then get
these giant rolls of wire netting up ON the roof and then spread flat, BEFORE you can even start to pour the actual roof.
To give you some idea of this undertaking, the majority of the beams we used were 6M (almost 20 feet) long and weighed about 200K (440
pounds). It took 4 men to lift, hoist, lever, and shove them into place. We used hundreds, as they are placed every 51 cm (20 inches) apart, the
length of the bovedilla. The bovedillas, those concrete blocks with the flanges that rest on the beams, thus forming the roof/ceiling measure
51x25x15 cm. (roughly 20x10x6 inches), and weigh about 15K each, (some 33 pounds), all lifted and placed from hand to hand, ground to roof
top. In one 6M channel, you would have 30 bovedillas. In the widest part of the roof, 22M (72 feet), you would have 35 beams, so in one 6M
section, that gives you 1,050 bovedillas. Multiply that by roughly 3, as the house is 18M long, and think of how long it took 28 men and boys to lift,
carry, and place over 3,000 of these blocks, weighing 33 pounds each! Not to mention the 4 monster support beams at over 16 feet long, 20
inches deep and 9 inches wide that had to be hand formed out of our tiny precious hoard of boards, 2x12’s, formed one at a time and hand
poured in concrete to form the major support beams for the house. Staggers the imagination. Think of how many concrete blocks we used if the
walls are 4 M high, roughly 18M long, if each block is 40x20x15cm. Thousands. Each weighing 22 pounds, all hand loaded at the factory, hand
unloaded and piled in neat 2M high stacks at the site, then carried one by one to wherever they have to go on the walls. Imagine balancing on a
bouncing scaffolding of poles and a few 2x12 boards, the scaffolding tied together with vines and bits of wire, putting up and cementing into place
these thousands of blocks as the walls rise higher and higher. Vertigo anyone? Our very own acrobats, balancing blocks at 30 feet in the air. I
sat day after day and watched and was amazed. And humbled. We, with all our technology, machinery, and tools in the “modern world”, and look
what they do by hand, with nothing but manpower and ingenuity, in blazing sun or torrential rain, laughing and joking all the way through it. It was
a sight to see and I recorded as much as possible with my camera. The house became theirs as well as mine, and they poured their hearts and
talents into it to make it superb. For years, they would bring visiting relative to see “our” house; the house we all built.
I wouldn’t understand until well into the project that no one could actually calculate out anything this large. Tiny one room houses, yes, but not
this. They all worked under an engineer and architect. We had neither. Santiago and I would have to become both. At first it was just clearing
and foundation work involving zillions of rocks, ant trails of humans leading all over the property, passing rocks from hand to hand. We had one
wheelbarrow. I would soon find another, not much help. But when they began with the concrete blocks and beams, I was just told to get “trienta
vigas y mil bloques, cinco metros de polvo y grava de primera calidad”. 30 beams, 1,000 blocks, 5 cubic meters of sand and gravel. At this point,
I began asking questions. How many in all will we need? They didn’t know. The price they had originally calculated, this involving about 8 of the
key men, I knew couldn’t possible be correct, and mentally tripled it. Then I quadrupled it for good measure to see if I could afford it. Then I
decided to jump off the bridge and go for it. The house would come in slightly under my worst scenario calculation, a fact I was to keep in mind
during our future construction projects. Meanwhile I realized that I was the only person with enough math to calculate this whole thing out. You
had to subtract for the doors and windows, but remember of course how much cement would be thrown over the blocks to form the actual wall
thickness to get the finished room size. I drew and redrew designs, covered page after page with calculations in metric which I had never used
except for high school math. I swore fluently in three languages as I wadded and tore and tossed pages of useless figures that didn’t work
because of some detail I didn’t know. “Oh, over THAT cap of cement we have another 1.5 to 2 cm layer of final finish cement”. Great. So in one
room, I have just had the size reduced by 6 to 8 cm, on each side, depending on who is “throwing” that day. Back to the tile design. I thought my
brain would blow up.
The completion of the roof, when at last we got there, would take 5 days. During the initial first pour of 36 hours, when 28 men worked around the
clock, chanting and singing to keep their energy up, we would slaughter and prepare on the grounds a huge pig to make tortas for food, along with
several dozen cases of beer and coke. People ate in shifts all night long. I have photos of all this, from the pig to them wrestling with this huge roll
of wire netting, laying it down on the roof. Photos because I knew I would never see it again, and later, never believe that I, we, they did it. By
hand. These people are incredible. And I had won their respect for my mathematics.
I had now been here almost 5 months. I would soon have a house, 3 new daughters, a man I was living with, a future mother and father in law, 14
new family members just in the village, not counting cousins, uncles, and aunts. A whole new life. What in the WORLD had I done?
Kristine,
Flycatcher Inn, Santa Elena,
15 minutes southeast of Uxmal in Yucatan, Mexico
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