Up the Narrow Stairs

Architects often obsess over the need to create beautiful stairs. Stan is no exception.

When we started the project, he was awash with visions of a gorgeous exposed staircase ascending from the living room. A little thing called a budget intervened and we eventually went for a cheaper L-shaped staircase tucked behind a wall.

With good design possible on any budget, Stan still managed to engage his architecture training to create the most elegant staircase our money could make.

Kept intentionally narrow, the resulting stairs are meant to feel a tad constricted. This works to accentuate the drama of the open spaces at the top and bottom landings. So as not to feel stuffy, we gave it a double height space with lots of light flooding in from above.

This week, the stairs have been formed and we ascended them for the first time. The first photo is taken from the bottom landing.

As you reach the first landing and turn to the right, the walls extend up nearly 20 feet and frame the light flooding down from above. It feels narrow without being tight, just as intended.

Once the walls are plastered, the stairs will be finished with tzalam wood that has been burnt and coated in polyurethane. The result will end up like the 3D rendering below.

From Renders to Reality

A key part of our house is the new central courtyard, which connects the indoor living room up front with the kitchen in the rear. As this is where most of our days will be spent, achieving a well-proportioned space is critical.

During the design phase, we relied heavily on 3-D renderings of these spaces to give us a sense of proportion. Since construction began, we’ve had our fingers crossed that these renders would translate into the desired reality. With the bulk of the new walls and roofs now up, we can finally see if we were right.

Here are some images - both how things look now and how we envisaged them with the renders. First up, looking north toward the indoor media room.

Now from the other direction, looking south toward the kitchen. The builder has yet to punch an opening in the end wall to form the doorway into the kitchen.

Obviously we still have a ways to go. Now that we are able to stand in the new outdoor living space, however, we are thrilled that it’s working out so well.

Our Bedrooms Take Flight

It’s amazing how quickly things happen when we’re not building walls from large boulders of limestone.

Our rear garden wall took a single stone mason and his assistant six weeks to complete, one stone at a time. In contrast our second story, built from concrete block, went up in a flash. One day they were just starting and then two weeks later they were done. Just like that!

Employing techniques that involved a lot of precision and care, each block was carefully set into place, then tapped gently here and there to ensure it lined up perfectly with the other blocks. A plumb line was used to double check the block’s vertical alignment.

What results are nearly-perfect vertical walls that soar meters above the ground forming the bedrooms within. Topped off with a roof of reinforced concrete beams and polystyrene block, we now have two newly minted bedrooms.

Mind the Gap. It Sucks.

Concrete and stone are standard construction materials in Mérida. In our house, we employ both for our many walls and roofs.

With their high mass, these materials absorb a great deal of heat as they bask each day in the brutal Mérida sun. 

Once absorbed, heat seeps into the building and heats up the rooms. This of course is apparent when visiting homes in hot summer months - you are greeted at the door and whisked immediately outside to escape the stifling heat building up inside.

In order to prevent this heat gain, we have designed a few tricks into our building, one of which - a double wall on our western boundary - began construction this week.

The west side of any property is a major spot for afternoon sun and therefore heat gain. Our trick is to erect two identical concrete block walls along this flank with an air gap in between. Open at the top, this arrangement forms a very long and thin “chimney”.

In the image below you can see the outer wall is up, and the footing for the second inner wall is in.

How does all this help? We are glad you asked. Heat from the afternoon sun will warm the outer wall and slowly seep into the air gap. As hot air rises, it will naturally vent out the chimney. Bye bye hot air, hello cool inner wall (and therefore cool room beyond).

To maximize our investment in this gap, it is also open to the room below (see the image below), allowing hot air in this room to also vent upwards through the same gap. As the air in the chimney rises, our hope is that this motion will actually suck hot air from the room below with no mechanical ventilation required. In fact, the hotter the outer wall, the more our gap will suck.

This upward movement of hot air is also great when we turn on the AC in the room below. As cold air naturally sinks, hot air will be displaced upwards through the chimney instead of being cooled by our AC unit. Lower electric bills will ensue.

Finally, as air will be flowing up this chimney all year round, we have a natural strategy for lowering the humidity in the room below when the house is shut up and we are out of town.

All this from an extra concrete wall! Money well spent we think.

Movin’ On Up!

Last week, construction leapt forward with the erection of our second story floor. Workers began hoisting steel columns, laying concrete beams and raising concrete roof block. 

Suddenly, walls and roofs were rising from the ground and new rooms, like the outdoor living room, were taking shape.  

The main mass in this new floor is a type of concrete block (pictured below) designed to drop in between concrete beams to form a roof - an efficient method that was laid in a snap.

Where the floor is exposed to the sun, we opted to replace the concrete block with one made from polystyrene (gleaming in white below).

Polystyrene gives us an effective insulating barrier that will prevent heat penetrating the room below. This lighter structure is also good as it significantly reduces the weight of the roof and allows for thinner support columns beneath, but we digress…

A week of work and all this new construction was ready to be encased in a thin layer of concrete that would form the second story floor.

On the appointed day, a concrete mixer was rented for the grand pouring event (actually the next day because the first concrete mixer rented was broken). A steady stream of workers spent the day feeding the mixer with cement, gravel and water.

Another stream of workers then carried buckets of wet concrete into the site so they could be hoisted, by hand, onto the slab for pouring. It was lucky the day was cool, as we may have broken a sweat watching all that heavy lifting.

With work complete, our crew celebrated with well earned chamorro and beer. Our reward was to stand atop our castle and contemplate the new formed space. It was an exciting day.

The Structure of Things to Come

The steel columns are finally up. Purchased a few weeks back, they have been languishing on site awaiting the holes to be dug for each of their footings.

Demarcating the line between indoor and outdoor space, as well as defining the spacing for the screen doors, their precise placement was crucial. As such, we have been on site measuring and remeasuring to ensure they are erected in just the right spot.

On the day they went up, we got a short and slightly frantic email from our contractor - “Did you find any problem with the columns?? Should we stop the process??” The double question marks are perhaps an indication that our obsessive measuring made him a little nervous.

Relatively Boring… or Perhaps Not?

As architect on our project, Stan sails home from site each day on an ethereal cloud of constructive bliss. Each night he is bursting with thoughts about the joys of a house built by hand and the impressive craftsmanship witnessed that day.

One week, I (Brent) am regaled with tales of how steel structural cages were hand formed from long lengths of rebar. Hoisted into place, these columns are encased in concrete and provide the structural reinforcement for the second story.

The following week, I am lashed with talk of the footings - how they are dug, shaped, lined, poured, unmolded, and finally painted with black waterproof sealant.

I have only one response. BORING! The first day I heard about the bending of rebar it was interesting. However, by day five I was done and ready for something else to happen on site. Our contractor, for example, promises that if we encounter large rocks while digging the pool, he will use dynamite. Now this would be interesting! Tell me about that!

Perhaps, having watched TV where whole houses are constructed before my eyes in under an hour (minus ad breaks), I have unrealistic expectations about the pace of things. Perhaps, my desire for a quality build AND a fast-moving story is unreasonable. Perhaps I should be more like Stan.

Building Blocks

For the last few weeks, a huge pile of concrete blocks stacked up in the front room has slowly shrunk. One by one, they have been carried deeper on site to be mortared into place.

The old western wall of our property was built of mamposteria. Not structurally sound and encroaching the boundary of the neighbor’s property, we decided to build a new block wall in front to support the second level. Goodbye old wall.

Block walls for the stairs are starting to take shape. For the first time, parts of the new addition are beginning to emerge and we can start to see how various spaces are framed.

Below you can see the view as you come down the stairs. In front is the new east boundary wall that is not quite high enough to block the view of the ruin next door.

As our ruin is slowly being devoured by our renovation, we become less forgiving of the dilapidated buildings that surround us. A tree or two to block the (formally romanticized) unsightliness will provide the perfect remedy.

Meanwhile in the rear garden, the new mamposteria wall has finally attained its full height of three and a half meters.

For the last few weeks, we have watched this wall climb to new heights, worrying all the while about how much higher it could possibly get. Now leveling out at its final altitude, we have stopped fretting. This is particularly true once we remembered that the rear garden of the property is going to be raised up 60cm (approx. two feet), and thus shrink the towering construction.

Picking through the Trash

Refuse seems to be the theme of the week for us. After posting a few days back about the way garbage is collected in Mexico City, we ended up learning a lot more than we expected about what happens to it after it’s collected.

Our favorite furniture dealer hooked us up with a guy called Antonio to drive around the city for a day in search of stuff that we could use in our renovation - old door handles, drain covers, hooks, and the like. Antonio, a specialist in furniture restoration, was hard pressed to find these items so instead took us furniture shopping.

First up, we taxied north for an hour to a part of the city called San Felipe (cost: 80 pesos!). Antonio took us to a warehouse filled with old furniture, lamps and bits of broken down taco stands. There we found our first items, a mid-century vinyl sofa for 300 pesos and a copper lamp used in police interrogations (40 pesos).

Next, we drove south for another hour to a Colonia called Iztapalapa that accepts and processes the city’s waste. We drove down narrow streets with huge bags of collected refuse, waiting to be sorted by the occupants of each house.

Every house specialized in specific items. Some had old computer parts where men sat outside under umbrellas stripping discarded motherboards of their precious metals. Others processed old medical equipment, empty perfume bottles and metal shelves.

We were hunting for some Eames-style bucket chairs that were originally manufactured en masse in Guadalajara in the middle of last century. Antonio led us to a “chair” place were we picked through a mountain of office chairs in search of our loot.

After 20 minutes of digging, we had what we wanted, 7 excellent specimens in blue and green for 100 pesos each.

We ended the day browsing an open air trash market. This place was amazing, stretching off into the distance for about half a mile. There were literally thousands of vendors, each displaying various wares on a tarp. Some were selling old toys such as dolls with no arms and racing cars with chipped paint. Others had old cordless telephone base stations, cameras with no lens glass, hammers with broken handles, and so on and so forth into the distance.

An hour at this market got us seriously thinking about our waste stream, and where the items we throw out end up. As we snapped a few photos, we wondered how long it would be before our camera, less than one week old, would find its way to one of these tarps.

An el DF Moment

Coffee in hand, we gazed out the window of our Mexico City rental apartment this morning and were transfixed by the work of the garbage crew.

Once collected from the sidewalk, trash bags are opened and emptied onto the back of the garbage truck. From there, they are sorted with all recyclables removed and placed in separate bins.  

Strangely, although we live in Mérida, we are unsure if the process is the same there, as garbage is collected in the middle of the night and we have never seen the process in action. Does anyone have any insight?