At long last, the design is final (enough) to start construction, and so we have. In addition, Adriana had a surprise gift of a trip to Switzerland to see Navide. Let’s go to Switzerland first!

Suisse / Switzerland

It’s a long haul to Switzerland, but Adriana is so glad she had the chance to go. She’d really been missing Natalia. She spent a month there and had a wonderful time reconnecting with Natalia (and Davide and Sanji!).

In addition to the people side, Adriana was awed by the beauty of Switzerland: Towering mountains surrounding lakes, beautiful, elegant cities, farms dotted all over. Here are some photos of Lucerne, where Navide live. This is a very old bridge:

A funky building:

Another:

Davide walking Sanji around Lucerne:

Moon over Lucerne, viewed from Navide’s apartment:

They went on several day trips, so here they are! Lugano:

Adriana looking beautiful at Meggenhorn Castle:

And a video of the same castle:

They did a boat tour on a tiny ‘lake’ in Blausee:

They also went on this incredible, world-famous hike.

The view from the top is spectacular:

Here are Navide with Adriana.

In addition to being stunningly beautiful, Switzerland is very safe. There is a self-serve store near Navide where you pick what you want and then deposit the cost into a box – there are no staff. People are honest in that way.

It’s also safe for children to walk to school. I used to walk to elementary school when I was a child in Toronto. Times have changed in Canada and the US, but it seems like times didn’t have to change. Adriana was out walking Sanji when she saw this:

Before moving on to the house, let’s close out the Swiss trip with the noble Sanji.

Casa 4

Honest-to-goodness construction has finally started. Ground has been levelled, holes have been dug, and the temporary toilet is in place:

There are still many things to decide, like all the interior finishes (tile, lights, etc). The architects and engineer expect the house to be done in 8-10 months, which is very fast for here. Nobody else believes it will go that fast; they tell us to expect more like 18 months. However, this is a new style of construction that our engineer is bringing from Australia. It has the advantages/features of:

• a lighter, more flexible structure, which better withstands earthquakes;
• poles driven into the ground anchor the house;
• laminated panels (a sandwich of steel with an insulating polyurethane in the middle) provide sound and heat insulation;
• less expensive
• quicker to build

We have an engineer who designed the structure and is leading the build. He’s also doing a Master’s degree and our house is it. This style of building would be better in many ways for Colombia.

No construction (or any) project proceeds problem-free, and right now we’re dealing with a lack of electricity. We cannot get EmCali, the monopoly electricity provider for our community, to turn on the temporary power for construction. I won’t bore you with details, but suffice it to say we’re paying 600,000 COP (~CAD$265) per week for a generator. A fine of example of unaccountable bureaucracy….

The screenshot below shows the top two-thirds of the lot with the house and driveway shown. The main road that services all the houses in Lomas del Viento (except #4,5, and 6) is the thick black line at the bottom. The double/triple black line is the ‘servidumbre’, basically an easement through our lot for a road that allows access to lots 4, 5, and 6. We’re #4, the first one. Note the rear of the house faces south, meaning the kitchen and dining room face that way, with views of reserve and farmland. This is the design from the architects; you can see the various plans listed on the left.

This is the walkout basement. There will be a guest bedroom, indoor/outdoor kitchen, and someday a sauna. Right now, you can see the yellow drain pipes for future bathrooms and kitchen. The trench at the back is a footing for a retaining wall that is also the back wall of the basement. The metal rebar goes into the trenches to be part of the retaining wall when the cement is poured.

This is a snake the workers killed (accidentally) during construction. It’s a Double-banded False Coral snake, not poisonous. It mainly eats other snakes. It resembles the Coral snake, which is poisonous but apparently not terribly.

And this is poop on our lot. Adriana asked Google and apparently whatever left that is a herbivore, as the poop is full of seeds and plant matter. That’s good, because it appears to be something fairly large…

One of the reasons we chose this lot, or it chose us, I think, as we’ve tried over the years to get rid of it and it won’t go, was the views. For the first time, I was at the lot when storms were around.

This is a 360-degree view of that storm (those storms?) from our lot:

I hope you enjoyed the update. Things will move faster now, so expect more updates – maybe once a month instead of once every six months!

I’ll leave you with Sanji. Adriana is with him and asks him about me. (I did not go to Switzerland, I stayed in Colombia with the house construction.)