Our Walls Become Our House

After a couple of weeks of no news on the construction front, we have finally received new pictures from our contractor. The roof pour was done last week, so the house is finally looking like a house and not just a bunch of tall walls.

They started with the bedrooms first and moved to the living room later in the week, after the first pour had set. The living room is a couple of feet higher than the bedrooms, so new forms needed to be made before that pour could begin. As with the previous pour of the support beams and foundation, all of the work mixing and pouring is done by hand, a wheelbarrow or 5 gal. bucket at a time. It is a long, hard day for these guys, but they wouldn't have it any other way. After finishing a roof pour at a neighbor's home, one of the workers commented that it was a good workout. I have suggested using a pulley system to get the cenent up to the roof, but they will have nothing to do with it, even though it would make their jobs easier. I wonder if they are afraid it will affect their jobs, maybe not needing as much labor to do the same pour. There are concrete mixing trucks available here in Belize along with a pumper or two, but with the cost factor added in, good old fashioned hard labor wins every time. Plus, it employs many more people.

As I have stated before, these guys work like ants, going up and down those ladders all day in the hot, humid sun. The 100 LB buckets of cement on their heads, padded only by a hat made from the cement bags, it is an amazing sight to watch. Each guy, of a 15-20 person crew, probably transports two tons of cement up those ladders during the course of a day.

At the end of the day, many of the guys like to take a dip in the ocean to cool off and to wash all the cement dust off their bodies. Once again, these guys have done a great job on our house. I am looking forward to the new pictures showing a completed shell of the entire house. The cistern cover/patio and patio roof/2nd floor patio are the last things that need to be poured and the house will be ready for plastering. We have decided to add coloring to the plaster mix so we won't have to paint every few years. Now we just need to start looking at colors.