Albañiles trabajando

Domingo 26 Ene - Sábado 01 Feb   Sunday Colyn came for dinner and we had a delightful chat. Yes, we had the pork roast recently purchased. It was without a doubt the best pork roast we have had in years!  Since we now have our new Koblenz wet/dry vacuum cleaner, Carmen has been super cleaning one room at a time. Took three days to finish ridding the house of the soot we get from cane burning. Of course we could keep our doors and windows closed. But, who wants to do this when the sun is out and the air is warm?  On tuesday and friday Dan had the next couple of tooth-whitening sessions at the dentist.  Each session involved being fitted with a device designed to hold his mouth open, putting a protective coating on the encias (gums), painting a light-reactive bleach-like substance on the teeth, and then having a clip with strong blue light set in front of the teeth to activate the whitener for a period of about 45 minutes. 

Thursday morning, bright and early, our renovation equipo (team, crew) showed up.  Dan talked to Luís, the foreman, about raises for the crew, as the federal and Veracruz area minimum daily wage went up 3.9% this year (to MX$67.29, or US$5.18, per day). As skilled workers, our guys get about 3½ to 5½ times this minimum, for a ten hour day. There are also IVA tax increases on some critical things (gasoline, bus fares) that will affect our albañiles, who travel from Coscomatepec each day. Luis said it did not matter, but we felt it was our responsibility to recognize that they had higher costs this year, so we added a peso to all their hourly rates, plus an additional peso increase for Luís.

They are putting in a pasarela (walkway) on the north side of our entry in the front jardín similar to the ones on the south. We were going to keep grass there, but we have real dislike of using the weedeater to cut the small bit of grass there. After all, doesn't being retired mean you don't have to cut the grass any more? The worst part is the cleaning up of all the thrown-about grass. Already we have many plants just waiting to fill in the new planting areas that will border the new walkway.

Among other projects saved for the crew are: 1) Building a storage cabinet topped with a concrete shelf on the south end of the front porch for holding the new small hot water heater and garden stuff, which will be eventually enclosed with metal cabinet doors made by Mauricio.  Dan will be drilling holes thru the wall to make pipe runs to take cold water from the supply point inside under the kitchen sink to the new heater and a hot line back from the heater to the sink. In the process the sink will be reseated (fixing the constant leaks we've had there).  2)  Ceramic tiles (we'll use up our leftovers from the bathroom project) will be set on top of  the concrte shelf on the porch, and to seal and finish the floor of the base cabinet under the kitchen sink. 3) Redoing a couple of terraza tile joints above the new bathroom at both the east and west ends, where small leaks are staining the walls. 4) Addressing moisture problems on the outside of the party wall south of our house, to keep moisture from damaging interior walls on the porch and in the bath & upstairs medium bedroom. Seems the sealant on the south-facing wall has bubbled so it must be scraped off and re-done. The neighboring house is just finished on the first floor, with its second floor unfinshed brick walls in place with no roof.  The unfinished state of things is allowing rain to soak thru into our house walls. Our crew will reseal the joints and create chaflanes (bevels, sloped concrete joints) where exterior vertical surfaces meet horizontals.

Well – we had almost a year with our beautiful wall to the north. Someone has taken it upon his- or herself to decorate the wall with, what? Probably a name written in a fancy script to make it basically unreadable. We also saw the same tagging in the same color paint on a wall near downtown. Sort of like an animal marking it's territory? Our crew will re-paint the wall  -- we have LOTS of leftover blue paint we can use.. If it gets to be a problem and we get tired of overpainting with blue, we have considered just leaving it be and imprinting flowers overtop the graffiti to obscure and disguise it's message.

Our dearest kitties are closed into their small room upstairs so that the crew does not have to be careful when going in and out the doors and gates This also being the sewing room, Carmen spent time with them while she made heavy cloth sacks for a couple games we have, figuring it is better/quicker to mix the tiles in a bag, than on the table. As soon as the crew leaves at 5:30pm, we let the kitties out of their room and the first thing they do is to run down the stairs, after a quick check upstairs, and out the door downstairs to check out all the new changes. It is amazing to watch. One would not think they would care about such things. When the crew is not here, Gardi will go out front and sit on the porch bench about 4pm, and meow until Carmen comes out and waters plants, if they were not watered earlier that day. Whenever it happens, Gardi supervises -- seems like it might be his favorite time of day. Smij is getting braver every day, but will have no part of the watering. Dan waters the back area and we sort of take turns watering the upstairs terraza off our bedroom.

Our crew changes clothes in our laundry/shop at the beginning and end of their workday. There is a window/pass-thru between the laundry and our new bathroom. To give the guys more privacy, Carmen gave Dan a curtain and he installed the rod to hold it.  It looks good, and also finishes off the bathroom nicely.

The exposed other side of our south wall was worked on this week. The guys scraped off the bubbled impermeabilizante (underneath the paint there is an additional tarry coating) and discovered the wall has a few tiny cracks and one major horizontal one across it.  This was perhaps the major causes of the moisture in the upper wall, causing the interior paint to peel off. They are chipping out loose stucco, re-sealing the tar layer with the propane torch, and will be installing expanded mesh (metal desplegado) and stuccoing over the horizontal crack. 

The nights have been in the low 50ºFs and the days sunny (except for one rainy day) and below 80ºF. Our tall indoor dracaena has decided to lose leaves. Why? It is insect free, so is it due to too little or too much water, temperatures briefly below 60º, too little light or possibly a draft when the back door stands open? Can't think of anything else!  Our cut flowers which were purchased this week at the front gate are long stemmed as usual. Gorgeous white double daisies for our tall vase and delicate pink carnations for the table. The two-week old orange and green carnations still have some fresh looking blossoms so they were put in the vase with the new pinks, which have many buds so should last three weeks. All indoor vased flowers get fresh water, a rinsing and ends cut off every few days to prevent the putrid smell they would otherwise get.  Outside, we lost two plants to the cold nights.  We have been leaving our vanilla orchid wrapped with plastic sheeting when we get a period with nights below 50ºF --  with this extra care we hope to not lose the growing tips like a year ago. 

After three days of  trabajando (working), the guys have nearly finished the walkway. Hopefully all the grass roots were dug out. Perhaps we'll wait a few weeks before planting with the hope of getting any remaining grass roots killed.  We bought a couple bags of potting soil for the area on both sides of our new walkway. That side area was low and the new walkway was built the height of the center walkway, which of course means more soil is needed at the sides. Bought hopefully the final plumbing fittings for the kitchen sink and small hot water heater. Dan has been drilling holes thru the walls to connect water and propane lines. Also been doing much soldering of many little pieces in preparation. The base cabinet to the right of the sink needs to be empty (as the pipes will go thru the walls there and run along the back into the space under the sink).. Carmen did this plus a yearly cleaning there.

The newest food that we like is jicama (a brown-skinned, white-fleshed tuber) and Dan has been enjoying fresh guayabas (guavas).  Peeled and cubed, jicama is much like apple when put into a Waldorf-like salad, or with tomato. Also very inexpensive and full of vitamin C. Actually we have eaten it before, just never learned to like it.  When we think of it as a "fruit" it is much more appealing.