Shopping Adventures in Town

Sunday was a mixed bag as far as the weather was concerned. It started off in the morning with high clouds, and the sun peaking through every once in a while. But it was perfect for a game of Bocce Ball. It was Sunday morning Bocce Ball over at Bob and Martha's place (which is where I'm staying). So by 8AM, two Bocce Ball courts were in use, the games were a close matches and so began the roar of the crowd (and the neighborhood dogs). I evidently wasn't sleeping in today.

I didn't feel like playing Bocce Ball today and it seemed they already had enough players. It was a good time to head into town and pick up some supplies so I wouldn't be eating out so often. As nice as it was at the Don Quixote, they didn't have a stove to cook on, only a microwave. At Bob and Martha's, at least I have a stove and lots of utensils.

So once into town, I stopped by our P.O. Box in town to see what had accumulated over the couple of months we had been away. No junk mail here. The only thing I had in my mail box were bills from Belize Electric, LTD (BEL), and they were addressed to the former tenant of my mail box. That will be a job for me to do during the week, to go to BEL and get my bill sent to the P.O Box and have him removed. It's amazing to see the P.O. Boxes still use the old skeleton key.






After that, it was to the local market to pick up some essentials. Bread, eggs, milk, juice, etc. Not much that different than home, just not the selections you have at the big supermarkets. More like a 7/11 or Circle K. And once in a while you may find that special spice or seasoning you need for that special occasion. Unfortunately, you will probably find it when you don't really need it or just after you really needed it.

From there it was over to Chico's tortilla factory for fresh, hot tortillas. Mmmm. $1.25BZ for a pound of them. $2 worth, please. Hot off the tortilla press, weighed on an old time scale, wrapped in soft butcher paper and given to you still steaming.





After that it was over to Frank's, the butcher, for fresh bacon from the slab. How thick, Mr. Perry? Only one pound? Oh, I also need a couple of pounds of ground beef and a pound of chicken. Is that all Mr. Perry? It's nice when the locals know you.

From there it was over to the fresh fruit and vegetable market to pick up a few things and then to head home. As you can see, shopping in Corozal is a adventure, moving from shop to shop, place to place. But that is part of the enjoyment of living here. And it's not like I don't have the time. I get to meet people and go places that are sometimes overlooked. From there, it was time to head back to Bob and Martha's.

After I made some lunch, I want over to the house to clean up the future lawn area and get it ready so I can install the sprinkler system on Wednesday. Of course, about half way through cleaning up, it begins to rain. Not too hard and it wasn't cold, so it was back to work.





Because I had been working outside, I had battery powered music and an ice chest with beer, I didn't realize that the power to all of Corozal and Consejo had been knocked out, and for more than a couple of hours. Maybe it was time to stop working and go home to see if I had any candles in case this blackout lasted into the evening. By the time I got back to Bob and Martha's, the power was back on....only to go back out a few hours later. Oh well. No internet tonight. And it began to rain again. Time to kick back, light some candles and enjoy some smooth jazz. Nice way to finish the day, Belizian style.

The Slow Dash to the Finish

Mischelle and I have been here in Belize for ten days and time seems to have flown by. Mischelle had to leave yesterday for home, to take care of our four legged kids and to pay the bills that are due. It looks like it's time for me to start paying all our bills online so I get used to the process and make sure I don't miss any payments. We accomplished most everything we needed to do that, required input from Mischelle. Now it's up to me to finish all the details and make sure the work gets done. We enjoyed our last day at the Don Quixote and lounged around the pool all day. It was a nice way for Mischelle to finish her work trip.









That evening, it was over to the New Millenium for a few farewell drinks and dinner. Jorge is the bartender and waiter and his sister, Sara, runs the kitchen. Dependably good food for very reasonable prices. And it's the local meeting place during the week and weekends, except for Fridays, which are spent over at Smugglers Den.







Now that Mischelle has left, I have moved over to Bob and Martha's studio apartment in the village of Consejo. It's a nice, comfortable, safe place to stay, close to the work site. I've stayed here so many times, it's going to be strange once the house is finished. It's been my second home, in Belize.





Now it's time to make any last real changes, make sure everything is the way we want it and let the workers do their job. Our site foreman, Amir, and I are now on the same page and I feel he will get the job done right. I've added some small changes to the patio and pool area and where there are changes in colored stucco. It's all those little changes that only can take place during the last stages of construction. It's all fine on paper, the drawings, the computer simulation. But it's until you see the actual home, that you make those final, subtle changes, that can change the whole character of the home.







They have started applying white stucco to the outside pillars of the patio. The main house and retaining wall will begin next week when we receive the complete batch of colored stucco from Mexico. We have decided to go with a light, mint green stucco with white as the accent color. It should blend nicely with the surrounding colors of the vegetation and trees. It is also a different color scheme than the surrounding neighbors, so that even though it is a subtle color, it will stand out in the neighborhood, just as much as our neighbors that have the bright colors of Central America.










The cistern access openings were in the wrong location (in front of the pool steps), as I had seen in the pictures e-mailed me before we arrived, but have since been corrected and are going to be perfect in the new location. The pipes for the cistern intake have also changed from the patio area to the far outside corners of the house and when encased in block will look like pillars at the ends of the building. It's amazing look inside the cistern and to realize that basically you have a flooded basemant. Our "basement" cistern is a large room, that is eighteen feet by twenty feet large, and 10 feet deep. Over twenty thousand gallons.







With all this hard work, it was time to head back to the office. There was a "board" meeting that I had to attend. An exchange of ideas, things to come and to plan for the future.








It's Sunday tomorrow, so I will be able to rest from all this hard work and planning. But wouldn't you like to be here as a planning assistant?

We're finally here!

After months of waiting, we are finally back in Belize, and enjoying every minute of it. We are staying at the old Don Quixote Hotel in Consejo Shores that can be discribed as a diamond in the rough. The main caretakers, Tanya and Kayo, have done a wonderful job bringing the hotel back from the brink to a very comfortable place to stay with large rooms, air conditioning and a wonderful pool overlooking the blue bay of Chetumal.





The progress on our house is slow at the moment but around the first of April it will really pick up. We went over to Chetumal and picked out all of our tile for the main living space. It was really easy dealing with Interceramics, in Chet. We had picked out most of our tiles and alternates from the catalog and showroom in LA, so we only spent an hour or so at their showroom. My contractor said the prices, even with duties and taxes will probably be less than getting them from Belize, and a MUCH bigger selection.







After that we went over to the Free Zone to have a few beers, discuss some business....and have a few more beers, and then over to the Las Vegas Casino to have...a few more beers. You get the idea. At least I didn't have to drive.

After that lengthy "business meeting", we decided on a color for the exterior stucco. We are going with a soft mint green with a white trim. They will begin applying the stucco sometime next week. The windows should be here in about two weeks along with the quartz countertops. The cabinets for the bathrooms are just about complete and they are currently working on the kitchen cabinets and all the interior doors.

It's getting exciting to see the finished product. It won't be too long now. Mischelle leaves for home tomorrow, so it will be just me for the next 3 weeks. I hope to see a lot done in that time, but unfortunately, the tiles won't be in until just after I leave. But it has been a productive trip, so far.


I am relocating to Bob and Martha's place for the next 2 weeks, so updates to the blog should be more often. Then it's back to the Don Quixote for the last week of my stay. It's hard work, but somebody's gotta do it.

A Post Before We Go

It's now less than a week before our trip to Belize. We are assembling our items to put in the shipping container along with our windows. We hope that everything will arrive in Belize by the end of March. We ended up buying quartz counter tops from here in the States because the price was so good and I didn't think we could find anything comparable for the price, even including shipping, duty and taxes. With the quartz being a man made material, it is less porous than granite, does not need to be sealed, and is stronger yet lighter in the thickness and width available.

We bought true granite counters for both the bathrooms, that included the sinks and pre-drilled faucet holes, at HD Supply (www.HDSRR.com) for under $300 for both bathrooms. Such a deal. We will also ship those down in the container along with the pool tiles, Decora light switches and outlets.

The work on the house continues as the walkway on the side of the house is built and the patio cover is completed. Work was to begin plastering the outside of the house but we have put that on hold until we can decide on the color.








After looking over the pictures of the patio, I have discovered that the access to the two cisterns are right in the walkway to the pool. I don't know what they were thinking when they put them there, but we had specifically told our contractor to put them on the side of the cistern so they would be out of the way and out of view. The lids, with the lifting handles, are now positioned in the middle of our main walkway from the patio to the pool. We even redesigned the patio supports so that there would be no obstacles from the patio to the pool and the view would be unobstructed. I guess that they will have to fill those holes and cut in new ones. Hopefully that won't be too much of a problem.

The Excitement Begins as the Trip Nears

We are leaving for Belize in just over two weeks and we are still deciding on what needs to be accomplished while we are there. Apply for the QRP, renew the vehicle registration and insurance, look for a local doctor and pick out our tiling are just a few things on our list...and it only seems to get longer. I will be down a few weeks longer than Mischelle, so I should be able to get most everything accomplished.

New pictures have finally arrived and work has indeed begun again on our home. The openings for the patio doors are being enlarged, the cistern cover has been poured and the patio columns are finished. It also looks as though the ceiling has a coat of white plaster applied.








Hopefully, the windows will arrive by late March so I will be able see them once they are installed. After that it will really start to come together in a hurry. Once the front door goes in and the windows are installed, the house can be sealed up so that the interior door and cabinets can be installed and the house can be secured. It will soon be time to plan the next trip down for the final walk through.

Belize Time Abroad

Belize time seems to have affected our window company up here in the States, so our windows won't make the Feb. 21st container shipment, as we had hoped. Other factors factored in the decision to put the shipment off until March, but it won't set us back too much. Our plans won't have us moving in until June or July, so a month delay is not that big a deal. It will give us a chance to complete the paperwork and qualify for the QRP program so our household goods are shipped in tax and duty free.




We still plan to go to Belize in March, to get the tiles and pick out other finishing items but it may be more of a vacation than a construction visit. If that's the case, I will take Mischelle over to San Pedro and Caulker Caye to see the tourist side of Belize and maybe do some diving or snorkeling.



Several of the friends that I have met through my blog are now in Belize full time or they are there now checking out the progress that has been made on their homes. I get to learn from their experiences and gain from their knowledge. Donna, of "Our Belize Planning" has been updating her blog, from Belize. She and her husband, Jacques, have been down there for a couple of weeks now and are lamenting the return to the cold north next week. Our other friends, Rick and Dawn, are also in Belize, to check on the progress of their home in the Mayan Seaside. Pip and Jason have moved into their new home, next to ours. And since they have been down there for a couple of months now, they have already set their body clocks to Belize time. Also, my friend, Hipolito, whom I drove down with to Belize last year around this time, is flying down to visit his relatives and to pour the roof for his place near Corozal. It's quite a busy time down there and I wish we were there to meet everyone.



A new roadblock has creeped up on the construction site, that won't affect us at the moment, but has affected others in the community that are close to having their homes complete. It seems that the Belize building authorities (CBA) has now decided that if there is a stairway to the roof, inside or outside, then the entire roof must be counted as habitable space and will be counted towards the square footage of the entire house. Anything over 3000 sq. ft., and that includes patio and veranda areas, needs to have an approval by a certified Belizian structural engineer. And that, of course, adds a whole new layer of paperwork and rules. It just seems to get better and better. I just want to get the construction completed before anymore "new" rules come up. So for now, we are eliminating the staircase and just making it into a room with a 21 foot ceiling. Others unfortunately, have already built the staircase, and now must tear it down or face more paperwork and expenses.



Here in Camarillo, the remodeling of the master bathroom is complete. We will wait for our return from Belize before we put our house on the market. Time seems to be moving faster and June is not that far away.

Work Begins Again, 2010

The work on the house has begun again. It looks like we will have an architect to approve our plans, so we can now move ahead with the construction. Our contractor was in LA to order the windows for our house and we are very happy with our window selections. We ended up ordering 16 sliding windows, 2 fiberglass single hung exterior doors, 2 glass enclosed exterior doors with side light and 2 six foot sliders with 18" windows above. Our window company, WinDor, has provided us excellent customer service and had a product for all of our needs. Working with my contractor, they have also been able to save me the sales tax on my purchases because they are being shipped out of the country, to Belize. Here in California, depending on the county, sales tax can be as high 10%.

From there we went to Interceramics, which is a tile company with distributors throughout the US, Canada and Mexico. Interceramics has a wonderful 115 page catalog to browse through with tile for just about everyone. This allows us to shop for tiles up here in the States and pick them up from the distributorship in Chetumal. If the tile is made in Mexico, they can ship it to any distributor in Mexico. Of course, some of the tiles we like came from Italy, so there's no bargain there, so we just chose something similar that was made in Mexico. It allows us to do the lookie, touchie, feelie thing plus look at the displays in their showrooms. They can find out on the spot if the tile is available in the Mexico stores. It opens up more possibilities than the limited selections available in Belize. It's not so much the lack of selection vs. the many stores you need to visit to find what you need. So you may be getting tiles from several different tile stores. Also, the amount of the tile available can also become an issue.

It can allow us to see the different accented tiles that can go with our selections along with the different tile sizes. The catalog also shows the many different patterns that can be achieved with various tiles, patterns and accents. I don't want to have just a standard square or diamond pattern in our floors and bathroom walls. Borders, accents. mosaics, etc. can add to the overall appeal of an area and to the cohesiveness of the designs.



With the ordering of the windows today, the expected ship date is Feb. 21st. I hope to add a few items to the shipping container along with the windows just so we can get them down there. I've ordered the trim tile for the pool and would like to include that in the shipment. It's only 4 boxes but I can't take them on the plane when we go down in March. Too much weight. And if I ship it with the furniture container, it won't get there until June or July at the earliest.

We have also decided on the fans we want for the main living room and kitchen. They are quite large at 68", but they move a lot of air on slower speeds and are quite energy efficient. On low speed it uses under 20W and on high speed uses around 80W.

We haven't decided on the fans for the bathrooms, bedrooms and laundry room but that will be a decision for a little later.

Our kitchen cabinets and center island will be made of a red tamarind as well as all the interior doors. We have found some granite that looks great for our kitchen counter tops and center island, that also fits our budget. We hope to ship them down along with our bathroom counters and sinks. The granite will add a classic look with a solid surface counter. Mischelle doesn't care for tile counters and I don't really like them either. And I did tell her this would be her dream home, so I need to get her what she wants.

Happy New Year

It's been a couple of months since my last post so I'm providing an update now that we are starting a new year and a new decade. We made a trip down to Belize, in early December, to check on the construction and to pick out tiling, doors and cabinets. We also wanted to check on the window sizes to make sure they are correct before we order them. The house has a coat of plaster both inside and out and everything is really coming together, ready for the next stage.

We've made a few changes to the the inside layout, removing an extra door into a bedroom and adding an door to the pantry under the stairs. The construction work should begin again sometime late January or the beginning of February. It was a daunting task trying to pick out everything that goes into the house with only a little over a week to make the decisions. Fortunately, not all the decisions needed to be made right away.

We have decided to use a red tamarind for the interior doors and cabinets. That was an easy choice. Now we just need to pick the style for the doors and designs for the cabinets. The tiles for the living room, bedrooms and baths will be decided at a later date after we have more of a chance to look around. We visited tile stores in Belize City, Orange Walk and Corozal but did not find everything we were looking for, so we have decided to look over in Chetumal to see if we have other options.

I hope that the construction will be done by April but there will be lots of landscaping that will need to be done along with building a fence to keep the dogs in. That should keep us busy until the end of the year.

We plan on returning sometime in March to oversee the tile installation. The windows and front door should be in by then and with the house enclosed at that point, the cabinets should also be installed while we are there. Exciting to think that we are almost finished. Now we just need to plan for the move.

Our Blog One Year Anniversary

One year ago today, we started our blog on the adventures of building and living in Belize. While we haven't started living in Belize as of yet, the building of our home does continue...well sort of. The Gov't of Belize has put a "stop work" order on our house and several others in the Consejo area. It seems that they have decided to start enforcing a law requiring that all plans be approved by a Belizian architect and now need a stamp on the plans to prove it. Only problem is trying to find a certified Belizian architect. It seems that there are none in northern Belize and the problem with their new plan is there is only a hand full of building inspectors for the whole country, once you do get the plans certified. In the mean time, at least half the construction workers in the Corozal area have been laid off due to the work stoppage, so until they figure this out, a lot of people are unemployed. For us it is just another inconvenience, for them, they will have to find other work to feed their families at a time when work is just not available.

So we wait and let our contractor work things out. Our house is essentially finished but for the windows and the fixtures. We return to Belize in December to pick out the tiling and cabinets, so hopefully we will have a better idea of what's going on by then.

So I have decided to suspend work on the blog, until at least late December, because it seems I am blogging more about our lives in Southern California than I am about Belize. It doesn't seem fair to the people who read my blog, expecting news in and about Belize, to write about things that they would have no interest in. I have no new pictures, work has stopped, so there is nothing new to write except what we do here in the States. But we will return.....someday.

Thanks to all of you following our blog and I have enjoyed corresponding with many of you. I will still check my comments from time to time, and for those of you who still want to contact us, you can leave a comment on the blog and it will be forwarded to my e-mail. Good luck to all of those wanting to live in their own "slice of paradise" and I hope your dreams come true.

Perry and Mischelle

Light Up The Halo, The Angels Win!

Every time the LA Angels win at home, they light up the halo that surrounds the Big A sign in front of Angel stadium. Well tonight the halo is lit up and the Angels survive a wild game 5 to advance to the sixth game of the American League Championship Series, behind 3 games to 2. We're headed to the friendly confines of the new Yankee Stadium. With the hostle crowd, the rain and low 40 degree temperatures, it should be a good game. I just hope the Angels can muster a win. We have to win.

GO ANGELS! GO ANGELS!

Beat New York, Beat New York!

GO ANGELS! GO ANGELS!!!!

The Angels' Need to Win.

On Tuesday I went to the fourth game of the American League Championship series with my LA Angels facing the New York Yankees. We got there early and went to the local sports bar to get primed for the game. The place was full of Angel fans, all dressed in red.

Angel stadium was sold out and the place was a rockin'. Both Angel and Yankee fans gathered at the memorial to Nick Adenhart, our first year pitcher killed by a drunk driver just after his first game. This years' march to the World Series was for Nick. But we had to get there first.

At the Team Store, they had the World Series Trophy they had won back in 2002, and it was time to add the one for 2009.

We had good seats, just down the third base line, about 30 rows up. It allowed us to get close to the players before the game and watch the pre-game workout and batting practice. After that we settled into our seats and waited for the game to begin. The singing of the National Anthem, the Armed Forces fly-over and we were ready to begin.

The first few innings we played to a scoreless tie. Then, the scoring began. Unfortunately, it was not for the Angels'. We fell 6 runs behind and we really needed our Rally Monkey.

But tonight, not even the Rally Monkey could save the Angels'. By the end of the game it was 10 to 1, Yankees. We'll have to wait until Thursday to play game 5 and to see if the Angels' postseason continues. Down 3 games to 1, we had to win Thursday.

We also have tickets to the World Series, if we get that far. The Dodgers have lost their Championship series, so there's no chance of a freeway series this year. I printed the tickets to the World Series, just in case the tickets were the closest I get to going to the actual World Series. Angels' have to win.