Building this room from scratch allowed us to put in the kind of windows we like — big, many-paned ones, and a French entry door, facing out respectively onto the view and a small grove of trees in the outer patio.  On the wall opposite the view, another set of windows looks into the small interior patio.  Now there was light.  We covered the floor with local river rock (it was free, a major consideration by that point).

Living room windows

The effect of this room turned out to be quite magical and defines the spirit of the house.  It not only provides a view of the surrounding environment, it creates a sensation of actually being one with it.  Standing in the tree-filtered light, on stones gathered from a nearby riverbed, the boundary between indoors and outdoors is rendered indistinct, almost irrelevant.  The room is made of the stuff of the mountain; the mountain is an ever-changing presence in the room.

Passerby

I

low ceiling

The process involved removing the metal roofing, and then the low ceiling material, which was some kind of thin, nasty-looking board.  This, to our surprise, revealed another ceiling higher up (an almost acceptable distance higher up) of carrizo, a local material which resembles bamboo.  It was beautiful — in some of the rooms it was painted a beautifully weathered turquoise — but in bad condition and possibly full of termites, and anyway we were putting on a cement roof which could hold a second story.  The carrizo ceiling was covered with sheets of cardboard, and had 4-6 inches of dirt over it as insulation.  This traditional method of roofing is extremely efficient, by the way — the part of the house we didn’t redo still has the original roofs, and the rooms are cozy in winter and cool in the summer.  And we haven’t had any problems with leaks.

Once all the layers of roofing were gone, we (I use the royal “we” — the construction crew consisted of the Mexigringo, one mason, and one helper) added two to three rows of adobe bricks to the top of the walls to increase the height, and installed a cement roof with styrofoam insulation.

Et voila! — well, five months of back-breaking labor later — 12-foot ceilings!

high ceiling

First, there was the choice of this particular house, the blank canvas on which we worked.  Being imaginative types, we’ve always been good at projecting our illusions onto any available hook, making choice a somewhat risky business for us.  But here it turns out we did really good.  Let me count the ways:

Condition/price ratio. This was really hard to find in this area, we spent many months searching.  Most properties we saw were both out of our price range and completely uninhabitable.  This place was semi-habitable as it stood, and the price was low enough so we could still afford to fix it up.  We had to clean up the papers, which took several months and a lot of  legwork, but given the lack of other options it was worth it.

Size. It’s big enough — five bedrooms.  Although we occupy very little space in the course of our daily activities, we need a distressing amount of room to accommodate all our crap, which refuses to get any smaller despite repeated weedings-out and ever-increasing attrition.  This seems an intractable fact of our life in that most of said crap consists of paintings and art supplies (two rooms full), until recently the source of our livelihood, and the Mexigringo’s tools (one room full), the source of all other good things.  A fourth bedroom holds real crap, i.e. ice chests, suitcases, camping gear, cat carriers, hoarded empty bottles, leftover construction materials, etc.  The fifth bedroom we sleep in. One of the painting rooms has enough space in the middle to accommodate an air mattress for guests willing to bring their own bed.  The other painting room has enough space in the middle for my tiny sewing machine and an ironing board.

View. We both fell in love with the gorgeous view of the mountains.  This has only grown with time.

View

Site. The place is uniquely situated on a kind of promontory of rock at the end of the street, such that the windows are a good 15 feet above street level.  This allows unobstructed contemplation of the view while preventing passersby from viewing us through the uncurtained windows.

Location. Less important to us, but still of note, the house is a three-minute walk from the town square, and also the last house in town in this direction, overlooking a milpa and the Alameda, a shady country lane leading to the river.

Climate. We enjoy the most pleasant summer weather in the entire region, being at almost 3000 feet elevation.

Trees. Although the outer patio isn’t terribly large, it contains a number of trees which shade the front room windows and provide a kind of natural air conditioning, occasional fruit, and home to singing birds.

Old adobe. We both love old houses, and I have a real thing for adobe construction.  This house has both.  The walls in the older parts of the house are two feet thick, featuring nichos for objets d’art, wide windowsills for the cats to sleep on, and steady interior temperatures (cool in the summer and warm, once heated, in the winter).

Usable existing tile floors. Not what we’d have chosen probably, but not bad either, and they saved us a fortune.

The basic material was solid.  Next time, what we did with it!

Mixer-type faucets may also be problematic when combined with on-demand water heaters which work off sensing water pressure.  This winter, our shower water kept getting colder and colder for no apparent reason, until finally the MexiGringo discovered that somehow the point that triggers the heater had moved in the faucet, so now we have to move the faucet toward the off position until it kicks in.  It was a miserable, shivery few weeks before he figured this out; at first we were thinking we had bought too small of a heater for the winter temperatures.  By the way, the on-demand water heater is a wondrous thing which has reduced our LP gas expenditures enormously, a truly worthwhile investment.

Please note I’m not advocating buying the cheapest thing (necessarily) — quality and durability are always worth paying for.  I’m saying get the simplest thing, the most functional item with the fewest moving/breakable parts, something which will be easy — or at least possible — to replace down the line.

And while we’re in the bathroom here,  if you’re shopping for sinks and toilets, consider the mineral content of the local water when contemplating the beautiful jewel-toned specimens available.  If there’s a lot of  lime in the water, you’ll become an eternal slave to that colorful toilet, on your knees scrubbing away with a pumice stone.  I actually learned this unhappy lesson back in Arizona, but it’s equally applicable here:  we never give those colored toilets a second glance.

There are plenty of trouble-free ways to beautify kitchens and bathrooms in Mexico — like tile for example.  But when it comes to the faucets and fixtures, keeping it simple is the way to go.

You’ll find this same attitude when hiring people to perform services for you, from building a house to catering a party.  What typically happens is something like this:  You describe the project in detail, then ask what the person would charge for it.  Instead of naming a price, they’ll tell you something like, “Oh, don’t worry about it, it won’t be much.”

If you allow yourself to be put off by this evasion out of a misguided sense of politeness, lack of assertiveness, fear of making a cultural misstep, or any other reason, I guarantee you will regret it.   If it’s a one-shot deal, like a car repair, you can write it off to experience, but failing to establish a price on larger projects can prove extremely costly both financially and emotionally.  ALWAYS AGREE ON A PRICE FIRST!

In hiring people for construction work, there are two approaches to payment: contract or wage.  Some workers prefer one or the other, others are flexible.  Under the contract plan, the maestro bids a price for the completed job.  Some amount of the total will be required up front to get the job going, and the rest at determined intervals.  An advantage to this is the work may be completed quickly, so the contractor can move on to the next job.  On the other hand, if the contractor is a flake, you may never see him again, or the job could take forever.   Another disadvantage is that the work might be hurried or slipshod, or materials may be skimped on if the bid was unrealistically low.  Also, you can’t make any significant changes without renegotiating the price.  Consider too that your helpful/supervising presence is less likely to be welcomed by a maestro racing to finish the project than one being paid a fixed wage.  If you want to be closely involved with the job and be able to make creative decisions as you go along, the wage basis is probably preferable.  A wage arrangement is likely to take longer than a contract, but you’re more likely to get exactly what you want.

Overall, contract arrangements are probably riskier, especially for larger jobs.  Always try to find people with excellent personal recommendations from someone you trust.  In addition, do not hesitate to fire anyone whose work is not satisfactory; you can always find someone will do the job properly.

Obviously there are situations where quoting an exact price will not be possible (as in car repairs where the extent of the problem is not known), in which case you should ask for an estimate including the worst-case price.

If a person absolutely will not name a price for you, walk away.  Even if they’re the greatest cook/mechanic/architect/friend of yours in all of Mexico, even if it took you weeks of searching to find them.  There’s always somebody else, and you’ll avoid a world of heartache, misunderstandings, and financial losses by taking the time to find them.

This project was pretty simple.  We knew we wanted a New Mexico style kiva design (I once lived in Santa Fe and never got over it).  Our big concern was to build something that worked; most fireplaces don’t heat very well.  So it was back to the internet, where I found a dandy website called The Buckley Rumford Company, which is a veritable treasure trove of information on building something called Rumford fireplaces and kiva fireplaces incorporating Rumford principles.

Rumford fireplaces are named for their inventor, a certain Count Rumford  born in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts, whose work with fireplace geometry resulted in such impressive heating efficiency that the principles are still in use today.  Mr. Buckley of the website found many similarities between Rumfords and traditional New Mexican kiva fireplaces, and has combined them into the Rumford-Kiva.  Detailed plans and instructions for all manner of these fireplaces are provided on the website, along with a wealth of related information, pictures, and links.  I enthusiastically recommend anyone planning to build a fireplace to avail themselves of this resource.

Our fireplace, built by the Mexigringo with Alejandro the albañil (mason), ended up an amalgam of Rumford proportions, kiva looks, local building traditions, and the whims of the two builders.  It’s a corner fireplace, constructed of burnt-adobe bricks against regular adobe walls, and lined with firebrick.   And miracle of miracles, it works like a charm!

The Rocket Stove

I found out about this concept looking around on the internet, and being a big fan of all things innovative and sustainable, promoted it enthusiastically to the Mexigringo, who I must say looked on it with a rather jaundiced eye from the first.  But I persisted.  It promised one-third the fuel consumption of a conventional wood-stove, clean and thorough wood consumption, a warm, comfy, and architecturally appealing adobe bench to read and snooze on, plus, cheap and easy assembly!  What more could you ask?

It really did seem like a great solution.  We wanted something efficient because of our large space and high ceilings.  Wood is available but not plentiful here, so the promise of low fuel consumption appealed.  The back of the how-to-do-it book asserted that it could be thrown together in a weekend by anyone with minimal building experience.  And, we already had a huge pile of adobe construction rubble on site which could be recycled into the bench.

So we built it and now it’s winter and we’re using it.  And have somewhat sadly concluded that doing this in Mexico was way more trouble than it was worth.

For starters, the materials, so easily obtainable and often free in the states, ranged from difficult to impossible to find here and involved literally weeks of searching hither and yon.  They were also expensive.  Nothing goes to waste in Mexico:  An old barrel is not a throwaway item but a valuable asset to be parted with only in exchange for cash.  The only freebies were the dirt and sand, which are plentiful locally.  There were no “cheapies.”

The stove took us WAY longer than a weekend to build, more like three weeks all told, and that’s not counting the bench, which we finished months later.  The book’s breezy assertion that any idiot could do this left us feeling like, well, lower than idiots.  In practice, the how-to instructions often proved vague, contradictory or open to various interpretations, leading to much lost time and interpersonal strain among the construction crew.   At some point we realized that no information was given on how to finish the surface of the bench — that was in another book.  One of our cats decided the unfinished bench was a giant kitty box, and we had to cover it over with tarps and weights.  It was not an easy journey, any of it.

Upon using the stove, it appears to be mostly suitable for colder climates than ours.  It’s meant to be fired up on a daily basis, which warms the adobe bench, which then radiates a steady warmth.  So far this year (which does seem unusually mild) we’ve yet to use it two days running, as we’ve been having chilly days alternating with warm days.  So we haven’t been able to benefit from heated bench effect.

Lastly, the stove is temperamental (as the book more than adequately warns).  It has lots of personality, and a bit of a personality disorder — if not given abundant attention, it tends to pout and smoke.   If YOU are temperamental too, then this is perhaps not the best stove for you.  On the other hand, if you’re what they call process-oriented — but really REALLY process-oriented — it may be just the thing.

To the stove’s credit, it does take off the chill in a hurry once we light it up.  This in a 12 x 30 ft. room with 14 ft.  ceilings and tons of windows.  Who knows what wonders it might perform in a smaller space?

To sum up, if we had it to do over again, we wouldn’t, not here anyway.  But if I ever found myself mysteriously transplanted to the back woods of Oregon, I’d totally try it again, hopefully with the help of lots of knowledgeable mountain-man types.  Ironically, these heating stoves are a spinoff of a successful cooking stove developed for use in Third World countries with wood depletion problems.   The heater version, however, appears more doable back in The Land of the Affluent.

If you’re interested in learning more about rocket stoves, see the book Rocket Mass Heaters by Ianto Evans and Leslie Jackson, or their website here.

And stay tuned for part 2 of this tale, which has a happier ending…