‘Achievements’

Our finca is in a very rural and remote area and usually there is very little crime here. We are still living in the town a half hour drive away from the farm whilst a local builder completes our house. When he finishes work in the evening, he leaves his tools laying around outside, and they are still there the next morning. Similarly we have piles of building material out in the open, close to the road and nothing has gone missing.

The other night, at about 10 pm, a neighbour was sitting out on his porch when he saw a car drive down the earth road that leads past our farm. A few hundred meters away from our entrance the car turned off its lights. Shortly afterwards the neighbour saw what he thought was a lantern or torch moving about by our house.

So he went inside, picked up his rifle, and walked down one of his fields to investigate. As he neared our farm he could see an unfamiliar car in our farm entrance as well as someone with a torch by or in the house.

Carefully taking aim with his rifle, he fired three shots at the car.
The torch went out, there was a short pause, then the car reversed out of the entrance and tore up the road like a scalded cat, only putting on its lights as it reached the public road 1 km away.

Crime prevented, job done.

We are now racing against the clock because winter is approaching and we have to get all the cement and brickwork completed before the temperatures start to fall towards freezing.

We designed the layout of the house that we wanted built and a Maestro Mayor de Obras designed the structural steel work that we would need. Looking at what happened in Japan and Chile recently we decided to implement the latest design of columns and footings to resist earthquake damage.

Tons of steelwork went into the house footings

The house will end up as a box made of reinforced concrete columns and beams infilled with bricks.
Our first lorry load of sand and gravel for the footings arrived and I was a bit worried that the temporary bridge would not hold its weight. It did and it was with a sigh of relief when the lorry tipped its load onto the farm.

The sand and gravel lorry crosses the temporary bridge into the farm

Unfortunately the lorry’s reverse gear had failed and he could not get out the way he entered. But we managed to get him across the farm and out of the main entrance in the end. (Later he turned up unexpectedly with a load of sand which we had not ordered. The whole front of the lorry was pushed in and the windscreen and glass windows were broken. He had had a head on collision with a van on the way to delivering to the wrong farm. Poor chap, not one of his best days).

The footings were poured and terminated above ground level so that the house could not flood if the irrigation ditch walls failed.

The raised footings

As the first building work started there were some additions we made to our original plans, such as adding a woodburner and a wood fired boiler.

Discussing the plans with the builder

Neighbours came to see how the construction was going on and also to see the house layout which  is designed to blend in with the local houses here and will be a single storey house with a pitched roof.

Marcelo dropped in on his way past to see how we were doing

At the time of writing this we have not had any rain for over 4 months and no irrigation water for nearly 2 months. The well on our farm has dried up and we are borrowing water from a neighbour’s well in order to keep work on the house progressing. But the wild life is suffering from the drought most of all. I had a number of 6 or 7 litre plastic bottles filled with water and spread out around the farm so we could water trees such as the lemons and pecans. Every one of the bottles has had it’s top bitten off or the bottle itself punctured. I assume it is foxes, wild cats and feral dogs desperate for water which have done the damage.

Wild animals desperate for water have drained all these bottles

We are about to start house building on the farm but have a problem as the irrigation water will be cut off for at least 2 months.  As the builder will need a huge amount of water for the concrete and brickwork he has to do we decided to rejuvenate an old ‘pileta’ or underground storage tank that we have close to the building site.

Digging out the old water storage tank

The tank is about 2m by 2m by 2m and was partially full of earth and rubbish. In the past it had one of its walls knocked in to provide a slope for cattle to use to walk down for a drink.
We have never done any work like this, but we had one week to dig out the rubbish, rebuild 1 underground wall, carry out cement repairs and line the whole with a cement based plaster.

In the trench, behind the spade, is an old cement floor from an earlier house

A trench was dug connecting the pileta with an irrigation ditch and a PVC pipe laid in it with a filter to keep out leaves etc. Whilst digging the trench and (later) the house footings we came across old cement floors and footings and coloured chunks of plaster indicating yet another house once stood here. More of that in a future post.

When the pileta was completed we painted it in swimming pool paint to help keep it leak tight.

Any colour as long as it is blue

The paint should have had 5 days to dry, but all it received was 3 days as we filled it with some irrigation water for a farm further downstream, 1 day before it was cut off for the whole area. Our work was OK as the pileta did not leak at all.

No sooner had the pileta been filled, then  it was emptied by the builder! He had built a bund around where the house was to go and filled it with nearly 6000 litres of water to help compress the earth before digging footings.  And to make matters worse – he wanted anoher 6000 litres to further compress it.

Water is pumped onto the site to compress the earth

We were saved by the local shop owner who has a well and a pump. He very kindly allowed us to fill our empty 220 litre oil drums with water to replenish the pileta. And with 4 drums on the back of the pick up (880 litres) at a go, that was a lot of trips.

The local municipality were great too and their water tanker dropped off a few thousand litres when they could spare it. Thanks to both those people we were now able to start and continue building.

But before we could build anything we needed steel, sand, gravel and bricks to be delivered to the site.

I filled the irrigation supply ditch for our neighbour with earth, stones and logs so that heavy traffic could access our work site on the promise that it would all be cleared away before irrigation started again.

Temporary access bridge for lorries