Finished Foundations!

Getting exciting now - the foundations are now done and you can actually tell it's going to be a house! The water tanks are their full size and although they're yet to be finished they're already doing their job.

The guys needed some more wood so we decided it was best to take down one of the trees that would have been hanging dodgily over the house.

The spaces between the foundations are filled in too meaning that we can now walk around at the actual height that the ground floor will be at. There's a photo here taken from what will be the kitchen window, obviously the current cement mixing patch will turn into a vegetable patch, and flowers should line the path down towards the garage.

Water!

It shouldn't be too long before we can actually let the rain start filling up the water tank(s) now. We're soon to confirm what our water pump will be; the current plan is to use a conventional electic pump when necessary but more often than not, a bike-pedal pump!

There's also a pic of Steve standing exactly where the composting toilet heap will be... "Where he belongs!" says Daisy!

Finished curves

This was done a little while back now but it's nice to have left behind the front section and to be concentrating on the house... Well, almost.

We'd say Hector has done a great job of creating lovely smooth curves. From some angles it looks like a work of art!

Once the plants or flowers are in it should look nice, and nice and easy to walk (or ride?) up and down.

The swimming pool...?

The water tank now has its full depth, (a max of 3.3 metres below the level of the ground floor of the house) which seems perfect for diving into for us! No can do though. Shame. Over the next few days we have to decide whether the water pump is going to be solar powered or electric. The former... right? Even though it is three times the price or so.

Here's a snap of José and his brother taking the last few barrowloads of earth out.

And here's the windy path leading up from the garage, now that it has walls, yet to be finished and we're hoping it'll look much friendlier when we put some greenery in.

The House stage has begun!

It's been a while since we last updated this, but things are moving on well, thanks in part to much better weather and we've now got three great builders on the job.

As you can see in the photos, the winding path which we showed earlier isn't yet finished but now leads into a path that heads straight up to the house. The house's layout and position is now finalised and perhaps you can make out in the photos the strings which mark the level of the (ground) floor. It's nice and high so that we get a great view from all parts of the house and hopefully it'll poke out into the sunshine too...

The big dug out section is going to be the water tank for all the lovely Xalapeño rain water!

Up, up and away

Now we're out of the garage, it's time to find a way out of the hole and up into the world above. Not an easy task considering how steep the slope is, but Horacio has managed, with the help of his 'A-level' (nothing to do with secondary school qualifications), to mark out a path which as well as getting us out of the hole, looks nice!

Ok, it might just look like layers of mud at the moment, but one day (and hopefully not too far off), we should have a nice winding path up to where the house will be.

(You can see our latest purchase of 4,000 bricks peeping out from the garage, as well).

And we´re out of the garage!

Early March 2010

Phew! After five months we seem to have finally reached the stage where work can be done outside the garage, even though the garage is by no means finished; (the idea, if there´s any money left, is to use the space above the garage as a gorgeous sun-trapping patio).

The garage walls are now more or less done, space is left for a window, and you might just make out the first signs of the place being owned in part by a mountain biker - six hooks to hang up the bikes in what will be a secure part of the garage, (back right wall).

The garage feels pretty huge - even Steve´s new non-too-subtle truck only seems to take up about a third of the space. Should be nice for gatherings!

The architect (Horacio Albalat) joined us today to make sure the tyre steps idea came together nicely, and to start plotting the route that the winding path will take up to the house. Between five of us a good bit got done: digging, string placement, tyre cutting, positioning and filling!

We´re still very interested to find out how Horacio is planning to maintain a shallow (sub 10%) incline up the whole winding path... I guess that will be one of the next installments.

Clever walls

Mid February 2010

The garage walls as you can see are

almost there now. The drilled tubes

under the gravel ´filters´are already

doing their job nicely too.

The weather has been so

miserable recently hence the plastic sheet helping the wall to dry out and protect Hector and José a bit.

Not far off being a useable garage!

The views

I don't think we can really call this building, but just over the hill behind where the house will be (i.e. 2 minutes away) there are some pretty spectacular views.

Just like the rest of the northern hemisphere, we've also had incredibly low temperatures recently, meaning that the mountains have more snow on them than we've ever seen. Steve took advantage of the sunny mornings last week to take a few photos. Here you can see the Pico de Orizaba (left, Mexico's highest mountain) and the Cofre de Perote (right, our 'local' big mountain).

Courses, Christmas and computer viruses seem to have gotten in the way of updating our blog, but finally we've found the time to get round to it. Since our last post at the end of November there has been a lot of progress: foundations are down, drainage systems have been put in, we have running water and the garage walls are now being built.

We've not got a picture of the walls yet, but here's what it looked like a week ago...

There's also a very exciting picture of our drainage system in the garage! The brick box will have a grate over the top of it eventually and should collect the water that runs down the hill before (we hope) it goes into the garage. The tube that you can see at the bottom of the picture will be behind one of the walls - the holes are so that water can drain into it through a layer of gravel into the tube and help prevent the wall from getting too wet (something the house we're living in at the moment could really do with!).

A shopping list

Today

Perhaps slightly more expensive than your average shopping list!

Ditches and Marbles

Once the level of the garage was decided on, more digging was still to be done this time in the form of ditches for walls and foundations. The neighbour's dogs, "Canica" and "Tuerca" (Marble and Nut), did their best to get in the way, but they were probably just trying to be friendly!

Measuring up

Mid November 2009

Hector showed us that you don't need a spirit level and in fact a long hosepipe and some water does an even better job! The first set of strings were put up for the garage and we started contemplating just how low the garage should go.

Nothing goes to waste

Early November 2009

Two large trees that Hector and Artemio felled were put to use, although our dreams of using the trunks as pillars in our house were put to an end when we were told it's illegal to remove wood from your land even for treating, and it's common to be fined for doing so. Nevertheless, a neighbour brought round his chainsaw and turned the trees into a big bunch of planks and posts, which could be used in the short term.

Digging goes on...

Early November 2009

Our keen builders Hector and Artemio seemed to make light work of finishing off the digging of the garage space, which made our months of occasional work look rather pathetic! The problem was getting the earth out - lorry drivers feared the steep access track especially as we had weeks and weeks of rain.

Planning Permission Palaver

A substantial part of Summer 2009 was taken up by trying our best to get the plans approved and get planning permission. After our millionth trip and paying someone 500 pesos for their signature, not to mention handing in plans that bare rather little resemblance to the house we're going to build (at least on the inside), we finally managed to get the all-important bit of paper.

Our new wheelbarrow

April 2009

The trusty Tracker places a new wheelbarrow on its back and we continue with the digging-out of the garage/car park.

Only after having shifted several tonnes of earth by hand, we found out that in the 1980s the plot of land next to ours had belonged to a friend of Steve's mum, who had taken it upon herself to dig out enough earth to build her house on and plonk it right on the great mound we had been trying to get rid of!

Cardboard: beats 3D virtual tours!

January 2009

A couple of meetings with Horacio and some long conversations later, he showed up with the first version of these plans. "I'm afraid I don't know how to make 3D Virtual tours so I stick to cardboard instead!" And a fine job it does! Here you can see the revised plans and some photos of the early model.