Posts Tagged ‘Finca’

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

Tuesday 10th May was the first day of some frantic activity.

The site for the house

The 3 point linkage did not fit our tractor.

The new farm entrance looking from the road

Overflowing irrigation ditch added to the 'interest'

Site levelling in progress

Stuck in the flooded new entrance

Everyone busy working before dusk falls

Measuring up for the initial stakes to go in.