On top of the rock

On top of the rock
Our Cliff

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Wasted days and.....

Today we lost half a days work from half of our crew.

As has become our routine, when Don Jose arrives, we give him a ride up to the parking lot. He drives a car that would never make it up the road so he parks at our bodega when he gets here. The workers all arrive about 2 hours before he does. He appears to be old, although he is probably 15 years younger than we think. The thought of him walking up that steep, long road, though, is too much for us so we give him a ride. Than we look at the work that had been done, and talk about what will be done in the afternoon.

This morning all was good. We made some decisions about lights and a few minor things and we looked over what the guys had already done. No discussion about what they were going to be doing the rest of the day. Down we go. We were waiting for our engineer, Valente, to arrive and he finally got here about 1 o’clock. He drove up the road right away and did not stop at the bodega. We kept asking each other, “Should we go up?” We vacillated, more to see if Valente would stop here when he was leaving. We have been having some issues with him. Issues involving our unfinished road, and him cashing all the checks to complete the work. Anyway, soon we get a phone call from him. He has three questions for us. Are we having TV’s in the casitas? NO. Are we having air conditioners? NO. Where do we want the hot water heaters placed? Hmmm...good question. We decide we better head up.

When we got up there, a mere 4 hours after we had just been up there, we found that they were putting up the walls and the supports for the roofs on the casitas. On each casita these roofs would apparently slope. The slope meant on one side of the casita they built up above the top of the windows by using an additional 3 blocks. That is a lot of height. The other side there was an additional 8 blocks. These walls were mucho alto! They dwarfed the windows. They would remove the views from the main house, and the other areas. We were so unhappy. We asked why??? They answer was because I had not wanted flats roof since they would be visible from the house. I mentioned weeks ago that the rounded terracotta roof tiles would look nice. Well I’ll be damned! They listened! They were making me a visually pretty roof top, which totally destroyed everything else.

Well after much conversation and walking around and looking from every possible angle we had them remove all the blocks. They removed the walls block by block, and scraped the still un-hardened cement, from each piece to take down all the work that 10 men had spent 4 hours doing. We felt really bad, but thank God we went up there!! Tomorrow it would have been really hard to “undo” after the cement had dried. Now they left 2 blocks on top of the windows and we will have flat roofs. I will stick something up there on the roofs to make it look O.K. but it is a far cry better than 5 foot slanted roofs!

Maurice asked Valente what would be happening if we were not here, and still in Canada. Seriously, we change things every day. And major things! He said he would be there everyday with a video camera and each night send us a video of what they did that day.

Ya, like that would work!

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