Here’s a quick video of our land construction progress:

Preparing the rebar columns

The block foundation

Reaching the ground level

Above ground

The septic hole

Chepe digging deep!

The end of March

I’m impressed how deep the foundation needs to be and how quickly our workers dug it.

Even our nephew Jorge Pablo came to help!

We broke ground on the land today! This is a view of our land from the “road” leading to it. We’ve got a lot of work to do, but it’s very exciting that we were able to begin this morning.

The first thing that we need to do is build a cement block wall around the perimeter of the land, and then afterwards we’ll build the house inside. Here’s three of our workers starting to dig the trench. They’re Yuliza’s two brothers and a nephew.

Construction is very interesting because it’s completely manual labor. We don’t have any electricity yet, but we don’t need it, either. As an engineer I’m enjoying learning how everything is built. For instance, they use a clear hose filled with water in order to make two distant points the same height in order to make a wall straight.

The land title has finally been approved! It took a few months longer than we were expecting, but we’re so happy that it’s now complete. It’s going to be exciting to start the construction now!

We’re working hard in the architectural drawings and plans for the land construction. Here’s a drawing of the two houses that we’d like to build, and they’ll be setup like a duplex. One side will be for the guys to live in, and the other side will be for our family as well as any underage kids who might stay with us in the future. It’s pretty exciting to be able to plan every last detail of the contruction!