Its been longer than usual since the last episode……

I could tell you I have been busy & it would be true, because I have!

I can also tell you that I was again waiting for something interesting to happen so I could then write about it, but Im not really giving this blog my respect if these are the only loose binds that barely tie me. Action was needed, so taking a page from the procrastinators handbook, I assured myself I would have something to write about before I next published if only I waited a little while longer. (insert graphic of cartoon man leaning on a lamppost, whistling while he waits).

When nothing magically appeared on the horizon, I knew I had to set a time frame.

By No Later Than…..

With the first month marker a distant memory, a new factor loomed on the horizon. I was to receive guests within the month. Still quite enough time & even though I’m super busy with the house, I don’t have anything planned for the weekends, so all good. Predictably the first two passed by in self-rewarding, relaxation mode, but when I awoke the next weekend with gritty eyes along with both a blocked & runny nose, I knew I really didn’t feel like sitting at a keyboard all day. Things didn’t improve throughout Sunday, but by Monday, everything had changed. I awoke to discover I couldn’t see. My mind was definitely awake, but a searing pain in my eyes meant I couldn’t open them to confirm I wasn’t in the middle of a bad dream. Both my eyes had gone down with some sort of infection. Its apparently very common here & is something like a super conjunctivitis, As best as I can guess, bacteria from animal feces or whatever that becomes mixed with the dust on the roads & is thrown airborne by passing traffic. The sensitivity to light & the less than appealing look of it all means I have now joined the ranks of those who wear sunglasses indoors. Maybe Ive finally become cooler…….not!

So here we are, I’m feeling a little better thank you, but now squinting at the blurry screen as I feel I should at least write something before the boys get here this weekend. I pause to reflect that I could easily have finished & published everything if it wasn’t for this recent run of unfortunate events, so its not my fault after all but really rather just a spot of bad luck old chap.

Nonsense! This was a recipe for self perpetuating procrastination, topped off with Teflon blame management..

If Id written the blog last month, ( there is ALWAYS something to write about here ), I may still have fallen ill, but I would’ve been able to rest & get better without having ‘my task’ hanging over me. In short, things will always happen.  Sometimes you can find ways this can assist you or sometimes you can navigate them to ensure no impact on you at all. But, if you allow other factors to control what happens in your life, then almost everything can be interpreted as misfortune if it wasn’t what you hoped it might’ve been.

My sequence of events saw an eye infection arise from the bacterial ashes of my cold. It’s very common here & is a gritty inflammation of the underside of the lid that lasts for 3 days start to finish. It begins just like tired eyes, then over the course of a few hours, it quickly escalates to the stab of the pick & piton of a thousand tiny Sherpa’s, attempting to scale the north face of your eyeball.

By 10pm of that night I could no longer open my eyes at all. My neck & chest were soaked with the salty fluids running freely down my cheeks. I’m usually pretty good in the dark & seldom turn a light on unless I have to, but often when we say dark, what we really mean is just low light. This however was the complete blanket of isolation that you sometimes read about, maybe try to imagine in sympathy, but gratefully are never able to empathise with. My speaking clock must no doubt have been on back order with amazon prime, so I had no means of telling the time. Not knowing meant that now seemed as good a time as any to try & fumble my way to bed. After laying there a long while with the nurofen not keeping pace against the discomfort, getting to sleep seemed the key objective. An hour after the first pill, the only thing that had changed was a wet pillow for a dry one. I need a pee & Im thirsty, so I lean over & finger walk my hand back into my bedside drawer for another pill & complete the motion by swinging legs & getting out of bed. It was only much later, when the pain had finally subsided, that I thought about the variety of “santas little helpers” I keep in that drawer & the interesting combinations of experience they could produce, but in hindsight, it now explains a lot. My last conscious memory was going downstairs to fill my water bottle. At some point later, in what feels like a flashback that follows an intense feeling of frustration, I walked hard into a door. That was the final straw, which was already weak & spindly at best. My back broke & I slumped, sobbing to the floor in a puddle of my own self pity & remembering nothing more. Amazingly I awoke the following morning back in bed. As I did a quick ‘sit rep’ I was relieved to find far less pain in my eyes than the night before, but my lids were so gummed, I couldn’t lift them. After a cleansing & refreshing shower, I could crack the lids just enough to head downstairs for my morning caffeine. Oddly the 2^nd bedroom door was ajar & not closed as it should be to prevent cat access . The room was in disarray. The clothes rack, its hangers flung to the four corners, was laid across a bed that had clearly been slept in, so it seems Id gotten more time in bed than I thought, though perhaps not with the type of clothes horse my clear mind would have chosen. There’s a joke or a message in there somewhere, probably both!

 

When Karma met Schadenfreude

 

I showed you the rainfall ravine last time, but there have been several others I’ve been keeping my eye on. A whole site excavation, 4m deep & only 2m from its neighbour, slid in on itself just after they’d got the steel in place, but before they had the time to concrete. It now looks like Pompeii if Vesuvius had spouted mud. I chuckled knowingly to myself as I had predicted this when I saw them excavating without sheet piles or any kind of retaining wall. There is also another place a little further along the road & set back up the mountain, called Nativa Bamboo. I often enjoy breakfast at a corner café in town & look up at this place, just taking in how its put together. It’s a 3 tier arrangement with each tier split within itself. In simple terms these are steps, with the top step exerting some force on the step below it, which now in turn produces combined force on the step below that & so on. One day I look up to see a 6” horizontal crack running straight across the front of a patio block. Something had disappeared beneath it & so it had just dropped. Meanwhile at the bottom where it meets the main road, the 3ft high retaining wall has been pushed out nearly a foot. Workmen duly filled the crack, dug out behind the retaining wall to clean the mud from the drain holes, then simply filled the mud back in behind them again……

So where’s the Karma I hear you ask?! You recall the cheeky extra meter I snuck on to the end of the cinema room? well it came back to bite me in the Barry Normans. So the last time I had the digger on site we roughly leveled the front entrance & drive. This meant we could get delivery vehicles in & out, but also meant we had to take a pinch out of the natural camber of the approach road. No biggie, it will go back when I put the perimeter walling in & grade the driveways properly. But this meant much of the surface water that usually flowed down the hill away from me, was now taking a route across the front of my house. Most of the water was coming in under our pile of used bamboo, so we didn’t immediately realise what was happening & as we weren’t working in that area, it was maybe a week or so before I started to notice cracks appearing in the front wall. Taking the inspection internal, it was thin, but we had clear daylight between wall & column. In my defense, there was nothing wrong with my design given the original conditions, but Id failed to take into account other factors, nor calculated their risk. I now had to monitor things. Yes it had moved, but it was designed to allow for some movement, just not downwards. If it had now settled, then all I would have to address would be the walls, as the ‘soon to be installed’ perimeter walling, should rule out further risk of undermining. Perhaps somewhat predictably, it kept moving, so it now had to be addressed. Of course I could always have reverted to the original floor area as this was built accordingly, is at no risk & thus remains unaffected, so I considered my options. There exists an interesting philosophical theory on the practice of cutting losses vs seeing it through to the end & potentially throwing good money after bad. Irrelevant in this instance as I now considered the amendment as part of the original building & was only in error for not being on the plans. As I considered it a part, it was a part that now had to be corrected. The real kicker, the tuppence hapenny labourers that I bought in to break the concrete all out, managed to break my jackhammer while doing so & of course they are soooo super easily replaceable over here!

 

Which leads us nicely into, the build……

I last left you at us having poured the roof & we have come on a step or two since then. We filled in all the external walls, which included my adhoc redesign on the window reveals, completing the external shell. Next came the internal walling for the bedrooms & their respective en-suites. Meantime I got on with installing the windows, assembling the frames & fitting the sliding, patio style doors to the 2^nd & 3^rd bedrooms. Ive managed contractors on site fitting these things before, but no actual hands on experience, so I had specifically requested “idiots guide” instructions. What I got essentially boiled down to “assemble frames, fix them in place & then fit the doors”. The top & bottom of the frames are obvious & easy, but I later discovered the sides are both reversible & interchangeable. They were not marked in any way to indicate this or to caution checking. It so transpires that the single determining factor for their orientation, is the door set. The same door set that one instinctively leaves safely in their bubble wrap until the frame is properly fixed, cemented in & ready for them. On a ‘first one we come to’ basis, I chose the one Id gotten wrong. It wasn’t until we had tried all combinations of all four doors that we attempted to install the second set. These went in without a hitch & it was then that the error was understood & the implications realised. I’d also assembled the larger, downstairs patio door, but Id not fitted it, so it was somewhat easier to correct. With the other walls now in place, we had formed the reveals for the big bi-folds. After much examination & theorising, these could only go one way. One set has a pedestrian door, so again, logical identification on the frame. Same principle with the doors, but there are twelve of them, so discounting the easy to spot pedestrian door, the other eleven are 3 sets of identical triplets & a pair of twins. It took some work, but running all the probabilities, I settled on an order & began to hang the doors, starting with the pedestrian. They are a 1m wide & 2.6m high, so even without their glass, it was a lot like carrying a vertical ladder trying to move them into position. They are all precision hinges with machine drilled screws, so in spite of it not being particularly easy, it went smoothly enough. Anyone who has done anything that required blind communication to complete a task, will understand why I chose to do this by myself rather than attempt it in another language. My Spanish improves daily, however, “up a scoche, no hang on, there, no, back a smidge” requires a special kind of understanding. With the last door fitted, I tested the glide. It was smooooooth & virtually effortless. I was pleased with myself & set about closing the doors for the celebratory photo. What the deuce? For some inexplicable reason, the two leading edges would not meet. I re-opened them & tried closing them again but this fool got the result he was expecting. I went over all the combinations again & was sure I had it right, or rather I couldn’t come up with any workable alternative, so it was time to bring out the tape measure.

The second door in, the one with all the heavy sliding & hinging gear, is pretty much the backbone of the system, so each set contains one. Two of them are 95.5cm wide, the one I hadn’t fitted turned out to be 97.5cm & can only be used in conjunction with the pedestrian door, or at least that’s what the frickin label should have stated, if only there had been a label. Id gotten pretty blase by the time I got to the set for my master suite, however, I had begun to notice other important factors, that lead me to recheck the first set I installed………..door one is inside out, doh!

 

Let ‘em In

 

With all the holes in the walls filled except one, it was time to fit the front door. Its pretty big at 1.5m, split between a main & an opening leaf. Its stylish, it makes a statement & Im very pleased with it. It’s a security composite, so as heavy as you like, which meant it wasn’t an easy task having to go around the outside, over rough terrain to get it from basement storage to its rightful place. It wasn’t going up the stairs for its own protection, even though it was still mostly in its travel wrap. We got it inside, unwrapped it & I began fitting the furniture. It came locked & of course we needed to access the frame, so I spent a good hour trying to make the Polish instructions gel with the selection of parts I had before me. All finished & its resting against the wall whilst I prepare some mortar to bed it onto, when I’m called away by Jose to the other side of the building. Whilst in the middle of things with Jose, there is an almighty crash from the other side of the wall. Instantly, with a growing mix of nausea & rage rising in my gut, I quick walk/run around to the entrance ……& there is my proud portal, all face down & forlorn on the floor. Amazingly the glazing gods must think Ive had enough window shenanigans to last a lifetime, so let me off with no damage to the externally mirrored panels. Not so the door itself though. A dent above the top panel & a chip through to the undercoat beside it, both more or less directly where you will look when waiting for the door to be answered. Im confident I can repair it later down the line, but for now, I am devastated.

What happened you may ask. All I can say with any certainty is that when Jose & I came around the corner, the other 5 guys were all standing around the fallen door. Rapid fire Spanish ensued, which basically translated into “it wasn’t us!”.

What does one do in that situation? Well, when the piercing glare produces no obvious culprit, you take a really deep breath, let it out slowly & move on.

 

Back of the Pan.

 

Way back at the end of December I told you about a timber wholesaler who can also get me sanitary ware & a host of other items. We communicate at least weekly, however, I still don’t have an actionable pro-forma, even though I have now reduced my order to just wood & plasterboard. Anyway, I happened to see the same sanitary ware catalogue on the desk at my local builders merchants & so inquired within. If ordered before Friday, they would be a week to arrive with free delivery. As contrary to the norm, I didnt have to pay up front, I took the plunge, ordered everything & am now the proud recipient of toilets that outflow to the rear through a 4” pipe. No more putting soiled paper in a bin for me. Incidentally, I’m also putting urinals in my en-suite & the ground floor restroom as I think the majority of use will be male, so why waste seven gallons of water every time our ageing bladders urge voiding.

Bring on the Bubbles

In a moment of fortunate timing, I got talking to my neighbour who has embarked upon some construction of his own. He’s from the slightly odd part of California & is something of a rube, so Im offering him a helping hand. He asks a lot of questions, but as one of them was what I thought he should do with his fitted but unused, fibreglass bath, I naturally offered neutral counsel. I didn’t trust it to arrive in one piece if I left it to his local team, so I took it out myself & soon realised they don’t use legs on baths here, they build a box of bricks, fill the bottom with sand, then fill the rest with concrete once the bath is in place. It took me all day to get it out, but whilst the bath is dusty, it is unscathed except for a small chip that will be set against a wall, so wont show. It even comes with taps & shower attachment, result!

So with sanitary ware in place I could see how the layouts were going to work. This is something I only sketched in for the main design with little prior knowledge of what was available for shower cubicles etc over here. A downside to this is that I wasn’t able to lay any pipework under the basement slab, so in plumbing terms, its better for the bath to go downstairs in bed 4. I hadn’t planned for this, so of course the room was too small for my preferred orientation of the bath. $600 worth of free bath meant it was worth the half day to drop the wall & rebuild it. So to anyone getting to sleep in bed 4, if everything outside the window feels 5” closer than it should, take a relaxing bath & forget about it.

Fiddling on the Roof

Talking of water, the rains also managed to make their way inside the house & we still aren’t fully dried out. The roof concrete is waterproof, but its also flat & has a 3m x 3m hole in the middle of it. The blockwork slows it down a little, but I needed to get it off the roof before it had the time to get inside. It had been apparent early on that we weren’t going to be able to pour concrete to a slope, so I needed to add it afterwards. Fairly straightforward, a course of bricks to the inside set higher than the course to the outside & fill in between with concrete. Make sure outside course is set back from perimeter wall to form a gully leading to all outflows, seal everything & walk away. In due course I will fake grass this for all the reasons you can think of, but it will also break up the flow of water, slowing it down & thus enabling it to exit the building in an orderly & proper manner.

A Spark of Light

With all of this taken care of, I began the electric pre-installation works ahead of Stevie’s arrival. Chasing walls, fitting back boxes & what feels like endless drilling through concrete.

I could’ve put ducts in for this, but its complex, I couldn’t ensure any kind of accuracy & mostly because I don’t really have an electrical plan.

Yes I know what I want & where, but not necessarily where the cables will need to go to make it work. Im also trying to double up the benefit & halve the work by using the same routes for the plumbing….safely of course 😉

Rendered Speechless

With all the construction complete except for the garage & pool, the guys moved on to rendering the outside. A fairly perilous looking bamboo scaffold meant I wasn’t going up there myself, so we discussed my expectations at ground level & I let them get on with it. Making sure they at least were fitting handrail poles to prevent anyone falling off. The method they use for rendering is similar to the one they use for blockwork here. In essence it removes all the skill required & enables more or less anyone to arrive at a passable finish. They don’t need to be able to use a trowel & hawk, because they throw the cement at the wall. Of course it goes everywhere, but eventually enough of it builds up onto the wall in a myriad of peaks & mounds. They drag a long straight edge across this, then ‘polish’ whats left with a rigid sponge. It works & looks fine enough…..if you are doing a fairly small area. On anything more than about 4m square, the bit you did before will have dried such that you cannot achieve an invisible join. When painted this will look atrocious. In addition, the render beads I supplied for the windows were bent to fit the block work rather than drawing a perfect straight line from one corner to the other. I was disappointed & now under pressure to find a solution. Doing further research, it seems that the cement here doesn’t contain lime, which in turn means its not very sticky & really doesn’t want to stay on the wall in any kind of meaningful fashion. I remembered the wall I’d rendered for Roey last year & the trouble I had with that was now making sense. The only practicable solution for now was for the guys to only apply the base coat & I find a solution to the finish coat later down the line.

When they got to the entrance lobby, I spent quite a bit of time explaining what I wanted. 30mm of door frame all the way around. Not 29 or 31, 30mm all the way around. After Id finished explaining, he confirmed he understood, but I made him explain it back to me just to be sure. 30mm all the way around, we were in agreement. I left him to it & got on with other stuff, coming back about an hour later to see how he fared. I called him over to talk me through how he thought he had done. He repeated our 30mm mantra & felt he had delivered the brief. I took out my tape. 12, 35, 24, 68. W.T.F.?! The confusion on his face & our subsequent discussion leads me to believe he actually doesn’t understand why it is an issue. There is no value in perfection for him, so his approach to the task is wildly different from anyone who feels they are assessed on merit.

It’s the communistic aspects of socialism that understands work as an obligation in exchange for food tokens, not as something to take pride in or grow from & advance your status in life. You get up, you do what you do & get drunk in between until you die. Its frustrating, but it seems you either allow for it, or continually beat your head against a wall.

I was chatting with a local developer who had recently bought in a specialist crew from Guayaquil for something or other. To save money & as the house was mostly already finished, the crew agreed to stay in the house. The following morning Mariella (the developer) discovered the crew had put up mosquito nets….by drilling through brand new tiling & in the grout, so they ruined 2 tiles for each screw. Now I get why you would have to put up a sign to say shoes off, or no smoking, or even only use the downstairs loo, but in what frickin universe do you have to tell someone not to drill into the walls of a house, any house, not just the new ones??!! This reminds me of when I was working for Dacia in Romania, a car was rejected for only having 3 of its intended 4 pistons. The workers on the line couldn’t see the problem as it still ran & for them, that was enough. Under Nicolae Ceaușescu, a person would have to pay the equivalent of £80,000 up front, wait for up to 5 years on a list for the next one to become available. These were invariably the ones foreign importers had rejected, so riddled with any number of faults. When this is your norm & any thoughts of “this could be better” are crushed, many of the finer human qualities get left by the wayside.

 

What if its not a black cat that crosses your path?

 

I was doing another little weekend job at yet another bakery & I needed a tool Id left on site, so I hop on the bike to go get it. It had been raining the day before, but today was glorious, so it was an enjoyable ride that put a smile on my face.

As Im breezing down the approach road to mine, there’s plenty of mud in tyre track patterns criss-crossing the road & Im on a long straight looking ahead to plan my route through them. I didn’t have my shades on, so my eyes were a bit watery, but even at quite a distance, I was sure a lump of mud was moving of its own accord. I slowed down, right down. To my horror, this lump of mud, about the size of my clenched fist, had 8 legs & appeared to be on a mission to follow in the chickens footsteps.

I cursed having left my phone at the bakery & sat there transfixed. I cant deny, that once it was over the white line, I was hoping for a speeding taxi to come along the other way. No such luck & of course I wasn’t going to attempt to challenge it on just my bike, it would’ve kicked the crap out of me, cocooned me for later & taken the bike into the bargain. I watched it disappear into the hedgerow, no doubt to later tell his pals over a beer & fresh bbq chicken, how a puny human stopped to let him cross the road.

 

Police Stop Camera Action

 

The roadside police checks have become a lot more frequent of late & of their preferred sites, I pass two of them each way to work. Since last summer they had begun to wave me through, I was known. More recently, they’ve been stopping me again & were starting to ask questions……..

Where was my passport – if you drive on a foreign license you must always carry your passport.

How long have you lived here – you can only use foreign license for 3months.

Where is your matricular – a photo is not acceptable.

A laminated sheet of A4 is not an acceptable license plate.

Their lists became increasingly longer, but amazingly they always gave up & never even hinted at a backhander, even after I suggested it on one occasion. Then one day as I pull out of the Dos Mangas road & onto the main highway, I get waved over by the patrol standing outside their own gates. We go through the whole violations Q&A & this guy is out for blood. He cant grasp that I can understand some of what he says, but not other parts. I was playing the denial & ignorance game for all it was worth, but he was having none of it. The balance tipped & he stated it was now a confiscation situation & indicated the bike should go into their holding pen. I got off, took the keys & began to walk away, if he wanted it then fine, it was a fair cop, but I wasn’t going to push it in the compound for him. Wrong move apparently, as his hand resting on the butt of his revolver, silently reinforced that for me, so I pushed it into the yard. He was now going to write me a ticket & explained that after I paid it, I could collect the bike.

Fine, but Im not coming back for it, Im not paying, so you can keep it.

We can attach an order to your salary.

Yeah right……

He gets a call on his radio, begins to stride towards the gate & barks “come with me”. I follow & once outside he gets into the back of a police pickup. No way, I am NOT getting in the truck. With the door closed, he looks out the window & sees me standing there as if it’s a surprise to him, he winds down the window just enough to tell me to leave now & take my bike with me, though he may’ve also suggested some rather unpleasant ways of doing this that I shan’t repeat here. No argument, my biking days were definitely numbered.

 

How many pheasants could a pheasant plucker pluck if he was just a filthy trucker?

 

Following this most recent brush with the law, I knew I could no longer continue, but I really didn’t want to go back to being a bus wanker. My first option was actually pretty easy & workable. I caught the bus to the turn off & parked my bike behind the police station to run back n forth to the house & also to the builders merchants etc. As long as you don’t go through a check point you have nothing to worry about, I just couldn’t get home. I duly upped the pressure on finding a vehicle – my previous sure thing had fizzled because the guy wanted more than he’d paid for it 5yrs ago, because he’d put money into it. He’d had it serviced, replaced the tires & all the usual stuff it takes to run a vehicle, so I pulled out of the deal. I was asking everyone I knew to no avail when Jarrett’s digger develops a major fault. The specialist mechanic that comes out from Guayaquil had been thinking it might be time to get a new truck, so was interested in talking. He has a 10yr old Chevy Dmax with half a million clicks on the clock & its worth more than it costs to buy a brand new one in the UK. Sure its got a few lil dings & it doesn’t have all the “look at me” bulkhead bars & running boards, but mechanically its appears better than could be expected. We agreed to a deal based on a few conditions, one of which being, I had to be in legal possession before Easter. Reliant on his vehicle for work, he had to have the replacement lined up, so I feared being dragged into a chain that would lead me to frustration & misery. Not to worry as he is buying new. Unfortunately when he checked that the vehicle was free & clear, he owed some back taxes that ate heavily into what he had saved for a deposit. This meant he had to apply for a larger loan, which his credit rating couldn’t support. I was too close to give up. I suggested I loan Jarett the difference & he then loan same to Mario the mechanic (no lie!). We were back in business.

 

If you are married in Ecuador, then your spouse must co-sign all legal documents, so it was like a family outing as we all set off for the hour drive to the notary. As my mother will attest, these are seldom efficient or pleasant experiences, but this one was amazingly empty, so we breezed through, relatively speaking. We almost stumbled when they wouldn’t accept Jarett as a translator, so I would have to prove I could read Spanish as I had just claimed. All or nothing right?! The clerk points to a word on the page & asks me to read it. Maria. Ok, & the next. Louisa. Next. Lopez. Ok, you can read Spanish. Ill be sure to let Rosetta Stone know they are doing it all wrong. 🙂

So having had to apply thumb prints to multiple copies of paper & ensure each & every signature exactly matches the one on my cedula (Id been through this at the port customs), a brief three hours later I walked out the relieved owner of my first pickup. Like Messrs  Michael & Wallace, I screamed Freeeeedom!

 

Los Tres Amigos

 

Jeff & Steve arrive in a couple of days & I still have an amount of prep. Its Santa Semana, or Holy Week because of Easter, which means we aren’t allowed to work Friday, but like any good economy, all the shops are open…& now I can easily run around picking up stuff in my truck. Stevie is coming over to install my electrical system. In simple terms, I don’t trust a local who is only used to 110volts, to not kill himself or me when working with my 220 volt. There’s also now the inevitable dilemma of face plates not being straight, light patterns non symmetrical – you can imagine the horrors & the shrugs of incoherence & indifference. So not only do I get to spend time with a friend I miss & haven’t seen in ages, but I also get the piece of mind knowing everything has been done properly. Its also great fun working on site with mates. As a double bubble brucie bonus, Jeff is also popping down for the weekend, like only really famous people can do. So we can all spend some quality time before works start on Monday, which isn’t included in the official time off calendar. Easter is the last of the seasons big festivals, so Olon & Montanita will be heaving with people & they will likely be joined by three more….

I will tell you all about that next time!

Si x