Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Forever House #5

...our journey to rent free living, all the entertainment minus the headaches.

It has been a while since I posted about our forever house. Before we left Jimmy finished our leach field. It had to be done just right because we have no other way to drain our septic tank. There is no one that can come and pump it for you here. Fingers crossed it doesn't get clogged over the years.
This whole topic isn't pretty, but I am very thankful for it. In our current rental house, every time we flush the toilet the shower hick-ups and spits things out of the drain. It doesn't get much grosser than that, especially whenever someone forgets and flushes the toilet while your IN the shower!!! Not sure what we are going to do if it gets any worse. There is no drain on the one where we live now.

Jimmy also got the guys started on our 2 chambered septic tank. This is what it looked like before we left:
This is what it looks like now:
The pipes are all wrong in this picture. Lico just stuck them in there for now, Jimmy is going to go back and fix it.

This next photo is something our architect strongly suggested.
Lico filled PVC pipe segments with concrete to form these little feet. The rebar inside of each footer sits on these to keep it in the center when it is being poured. They also keep the rebar from slipping off the rocks and touching dirt which could lead to it rusting to dust inside your footers over time.

This is what our house looks like now:
I am standing at the front door and Jimmy is at the back. This is our great room (kitchen, living, & dining room). Between the two rebar columns, on either side of Jimmy, will be a large folding screen door. Hopefully that will invite a continuous breeze into our home!

This might be a little oops, not a big deal, but still sort of funny to us. It is hard to sketch out your house and see it in your head with all of the correct measurements. If this is the only thing that doesn't really come out the way we pictured it, we will be relieved.
This is the only hallway in our house and it leads to our bedroom. It's sort of dark and creepy. You can't tell with no one in there, but it is tight! 2 people couldn't fit side by side I don't think.

What did get plenty of square footage is my pantry!
I might have gone a little overboard with this, but that is what happens when you live for 3+ years in a house with no closets or cabinets. Our food needs it's space haha! Our fridge and deep freezer are going in there too.

The first time we saw this piece of land it was covered in okra plants. That was a big selling point to us because is meant it had good soil. When we bought it everything was cleared off. Okra plants must be hardy because at least 30 of them came back. Jimmy goes there every couple days now and harvests okra... okra that we didn't even have to work for! We have been eating fried okra like it's candy!
{Here are some of our okra plants. You can see our finished leach field off to the left.}

So that is where we are at. Lico did a wonderful job while we were gone. We left him with almost no one helping him in order to save some money and we didn't want him to get too far along without us here to make sure nothing was mis-communicated. Once we got back we hired a couple more workers and things should pick up pretty quickly. We are so thankful for our soon to be home and the calm town where it is located. We are thankful not to have to find yet another rental (since the owner wants ours back in Nov) and dump more money into it.

Jonah and Silas want to move in now... it's one big sandbox!

CRAZY ITEM OF THE DAY: A while back we made a trip to Guate to pick up some things for our house that we couldn't either find in Petén or didn't like the quality here. This is the basement/parking garage of the store where we bought our toilets. The cashier sent us down here to pick them up after we paid for them. I guess we figured that they knew we were coming, because we pulled up and said to the guard, "Where are the toilets?" He looked at us like we were really weird strangers off the street and said, "You can't use our toilets!"

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