Forever House #3

...our journey to rent free living,

all the entertainment minus the headaches.

There are so many perks to living in this country when it comes to building your home. For several months Jimmy and I kept a list of the functional features of a house that were most important to us. Then we drew it all out, EXACTLY like we wanted it. Who gets to do that! We then took that drawing to our architect, Julio. He is a Christian, who only charged us about a tenth of the price that is normal around here. We were very surprised and thankful! He took our sketch, tweaked it and turned it into blueprints with a list of materials needed.

{Julio, Jimmy, and Lico}

Then he came to our land and went over the plans with Lico, our mason. They roped it all off with fishing line. It is hard to picture exactly how large your land is until the house is on it. We ended up being very happy with how much yard was left after our house was roped off. We opted for a small front yard in order to have an extra large backyard for our boys.

This is taken from where our front door will be. It looks a lot farther in this picture, but the front is sort of small. Perfect for a neatly kept area free from dogs (yeah right) and toys!

This photo is taken with me standing at our front door and Jimmy standing at our back door. This is our great room (kitchen, dining, living area) in the center of our house, open on either end. Hopefully it will have a nice cool breeze flowing through it all the time (another yeah right)!

This photo is taken from our back door. I love our back yard. I keep picturing 2 sweaty little boys running around out there!

Here are some smooth stones that come mixed into our gravel that Lico uses to mix concrete. He is saving them in a pile for me! Maybe they will be a future interior wall in our house, or maybe a shower.

Julio is good at what he does. He said that we needed to raise our house in case of flooding, so it will be 3 blocks high. He said that each time they re-gravel the road it gets higher, so we needed to take that into account. He was right. A couple days later they came and laid down gravel on the road in front of our house. Before it was only mud! It is higher now.

{This photo was taken while my parents were here}

The day after Thanksgiving is when they started roping off our house, so they have already finished digging the foundation for all of the walls. They do it by hand. It is so perfectly straight, I have no idea how they do it, but they do it well!

We ordered our 2 metal doors for our wall over 3 months ago. The guys we hired are winners. We had been using another metal guy who did good work, but was a little slow. Never as slow as these though!

This was there 2nd attempt at this door. The curly Q's were not what I asked for, but it is not worth the hassle to change it again.

We bought paint for several coats, but you can still see the metal through it. They didn't even use half of our paint, so who knows where the rest is.

{Same door from the inside}

Here's the kicker. We hired them because their advertisement said that they specialize in installing garage door openers. We were very excited to find an opener on sale in Guatemala City. It will open this door far enough for one car to fit through. We were thrilled! Well these guys are now saying that they do not have anyone who knows how to install it... which we were charged extra for. So 3 months into this, they have our garage door opener still in their shop. At least we still have the other half of their payment. Thankfully we did not order all the metalwork for our windows from them yet! Surprise... we will be going back to the other guy. He was slow, but always got it right in the end.

Here is what it looks like opened all the way from the other side. It slides behind the wall. Yellow is my favorite color!

So that is where we are at now. Lico gave us a timeframe that puts us moving in around July. It won't be finished then, but livable. I doubt it, but it was still exciting to here!