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.

Revealing the Wood Beneath

About two weeks ago, our carpenters came by our house and removed all our door panels for restoration. After stacking them carefully on a truck, they whisked (okay, more like sputtered) them away to the wood shop.

Since that time, two guys have been appointed the task of restoring our doors. Not only have years of caked on paint been painstakingly stripped away by hand, but major cracks and chips have also been treated with new wooden implants.

Tomorrow, our doors will get three coats of primer, with a round of hand sanding in between. They will then be wrapped up and put in storage until we are ready and able to pick their ultimate paint color.

As standard residential-grade paints tend to wear very quickly in this climate, our doors will be painted with industrial automotive paint. In case you’re wondering, they won’t be new-car shiny. Instead, we are selecting a matte finish in keeping with the rest of the house.

A Loo with a View

Okay, so we’re not talking stunning vistas of Florence a la Forster. Instead, think small “view” to an outdoor terrace from our master bathroom.

Since April 2009, we’ve wanted to ensure that our master bathroom open up to the outside (you can see the full history of our drawings here). The idea is to have the flexibility to shower outside without feeling overly exposed to the elements (and to potential staring eyes).

Our solution has subtly evolved to its current state shown below:

1. Looking south through the master bathroom.
Here is what you will see from the bed as you look through the bathroom to the terrace. We have worked hard to hide everything that feels “bathroom-like” from view so nothing distracts from the vista of a few potted plants - represented by the lone tree - and maybe a hammock.

2. Master shower and adjacent outdoor terrace.
This image reveals the shower and its connection to the outdoors. We have carried the wooden shower platform all the way outside to promote the connection with the terrace. At one point we considered having a movable shower head that we could take outside. In the end we nixed it because without cleaning the outside terrace first, it might be a little dirty underfoot.

3. Master bathroom from the outdoor terrace.
The screen door on the right can open up on both ends, connecting either the shower or the area in front of the bathroom vanity to the outdoors. At night, air will flow in through this opening and provide a cool breeze across the bed while we sleep.

With the master bathroom now fully designed we can’t wait for the day when we get to enjoy it.

Have Permits, Will Build

We know it’s hard to believe (hell, we were getting a bit skeptical), but we just found out our drawings officially have both stamps of approval - one from the city and the other from INAH.

After we crack open some bubbly and drink ourselves silly, it’ll be time to sign off on the budget, draft a construction schedule and finally break ground.

We’ll keep you posted.

Like Designers in a Candy Store

We are giddy today. We stopped by this morning to check out our first delivery of tzalam wood.

Stacked together, the wood looks almost deceptively like mahogany or even cedar. But put it through a planer, and this is what you get:

Note the beautiful dark grain and the nice chocolate tones. It is definitely in a class of its own. Now all we have to do is wait two months for the wood to be properly dried - a process that is frequently skipped among other carpenters with ensuing problems. Once dried, the production of our cabinetry, wood flooring and furniture can begin.

Working the World of Wood

While negotiating our way through the permitting process for our house, we’ve been spending a lot of time investigating wood.

Since our house will be painted white throughout, the primary source of color and texture will come from our garden as well as key pieces of wood furniture that we’re having custom made.

To that end, we are choosing our wood based on a few key criteria:

1. The wood must be able to withstand the heat and humidity;
2. It must be able to resist wood-destroying pests, like termites;
3. It must play well with our other key materials including steel, terracotta and limestone; and
4. It must be beautiful to look at and complement other second-hand pieces we’ve acquired.

Finding a pest-resistant wood that works well in the climate typically means choosing a hardwood, preferably one available in the region. Choices here include cedar (often used to make colonial doors), pucte (a hardwood from South America that is yellowish in color), American poplar, tzalam, and a few others.

The above image shows a box made from Ziricote and a plank of American poplar sitting on a mahogany table.

Ziricote is an incredibly hard local wood. Popular for making small items, such as the box above, it’s too rare and expensive to use in our house. Poplar on the other hand is cheaper but ruled out because it’s too pale.

Amazingly, our wood guy says that mahogany is technically a soft wood, but due to its natural resistance to termites and other pests, it also works exceedingly well in this climate. It’s a popular choice for cabinetry here in the Yucatan. We are ruling it out, however, as it’s a bit too red for our tastes. 

This image shows pucte (the lighter wood) and a reddish hardwood whose name we can’t recall that is similar in color to mahogany. We really like pucte and would love to use it in our house. Used primarily in boat building, it’s not a common choice for cabinetry. We love it because of how well it goes with our terracotta and crema maya tiles (shown above).

Unfortunately, our wood guy had a tough time sourcing pucte, and suggested another wood instead called tzalam. Similar to pucte, we love the grain and feel its varied yellow-to-brown tones will keep our house feeling warm without feeling overly hot (something we find happens when there’s too much mahogany around). The dark chocolate grains will also complement the dark steel that will be used for accents and structural support.

Tzalam, our choice for wood.

With our choice made, its time to put some money down and get some in our hands. Although we won’t start building our furniture for months, it’s important to get it now so that it has sufficient time to dry and shrink before our furniture guy starts cutting.

Permitting Headaches

As some of you may know, Mérida recently held local elections. After over 21 years, the ruling party PAN was thrown out of office.

With this change in government came a massive shuffling of administrators and some changes in permitting procedures. As a result, our application for a building permit, previously little more than a rubber stamp, has been rejected based on building code violations in our proposal.  

The major sticking point is the placement of our pool at one meter from the boundary wall. City code mandates that all pools must be situated at least two meters from a property’s boundary line. 

Prior to the recent elections, the city allowed exceptions to this rule if a structural engineer was able to sign off on your drawings and guarantee no damage to your neighbor’s property during construction. Not any more! Thank goodness our property is wide enough to retain the pool (albiet moved) with the now strictly enforced rule.  

With some adjustments, we’ve come up with a reasonable solution. With this revision made (as well as a few others), we are ready to resubmit. Fingers crossed we get the green light this time.

Inching Ever Closer

Well, one huge hurdle is over. We heard yesterday INAH, the government agency responsible for overseeing the preservation of historic buildings, has given us its stamp of approval. Now it’s up to the city to review our documents and give us the green light.

Until recently, this was a mere formality that happened within a few days. We heard, however, that change is afoot and the process is becoming more heavily scrutinized. We’ll see how things go.

Once this two-step permitting process is over, we can legally break ground. Wish us luck!

Finalizing Floor Finishes

We are getting mighty close to breaking ground, but until we get the green light from INAH, we’re in a holding pattern. This means that while our nails are getting awfully short from all the biting, we’re working with our contractor to finalize the build budget.

In order to do this, one task is to finalize our floor finishes. We’ve spent the past couple of days revisiting all our preliminary finishes and have made some solid decisions. Although we won’t get in to the nitty gritty details, we thought we would post these images to give you an idea of how our floor choices are coming together. And here is a link to our current plan just in case you want to reference it.

This black and white pasta tile currently exists in our front entrance courtyard. It will remain there. Additional black and white tile will be purchased and used in the adjacent media room.

We’ve posted about these reclaimed terracotta tiles before. All 1200 tiles will be cleaned up and used in our kitchen and back service room.

These limestone blocks will be used as transitional materials between rooms and doorways to help facilitate changes in material from, for example, pasta tile to crema maya.

Crema maya, one of three native limestones to the Yucatan, will cover our outdoor living room and dining room floors.

This fantastic pasta tile will be removed from what is to become our media room downstairs and transferred to one of our bedrooms upstairs (sorry about the terrible photo).

Our stairs and upstairs terrace landing will be made of unfinished hardwood similar in tone and texture to the ones pictured here. We have yet to pick the specific species, but understand there are several available for purchase.

This amazing monastery in Valladolid (which we will post about soon) has an incredible pathway made of limestone pavers. Similar pavers will be used throughout our garden and on our pool patio.

Cooking by Induction

As the summer advances, we find ourselves cooking less. Just the thought of boiling pasta water or baking a loaf of bread causes us to break a sweat. We love to cook, yet don’t want to add heat to our already sweltering rental house. A terrible conundrum!

As a result of this experience, we’ve revisited the cooktops planned for our kitchen renovation. Instead of going with the standard gas stove, we’re leaning heavily toward induction cooktops.

The principle behind these units is straight forward. A piece of magnetic material (for example, a steel sauce pan or cast-iron skillet) is placed within a magnetic field generated from the cooktop itself. Energy is then transferred (or induced) from the cooktop to the pan or skillet causing it heat up.

Unlike a standard electric stove that uses radiant heat to transfer energy (and thus takes a bit of time to warm up), a pot placed on an induction cooktop starts heating instantly and delivers a speedy performance similar to gas.

So why dump gas in favor of an induction cooktop? The answer is energy efficiency. A typical gas stove is only 30% efficient, meaning a whopping 70% of the heat generated is wasted on heating you and your kitchen rather than your dinner. Induction cooktops are around 90% efficient. With almost no wasted heat, cooking this way will produce less sweat, a happier cook and more yummy dinners.

The induction cooktop is made even more attractive by the fact that we can now install a fan over the countertop to keep us even cooler when cooking up a storm. This would be impossible with a gas cooktop, as the breeze generated by the fan would blow the heat away from the cooktop before it got a chance to heat up our frying pan. We have experienced this problem in other houses we’ve rented and can say that it makes for some pretty underwhelming stir-frys and a whole lot of misery.

There is, however, no free lunch. Induction cooktops are more expensive and require cookware made of magnetic materials (like steel or cast iron). No aluminum, no copper and no earthenware. For us, this means our favorite Oaxacan clay pots and the delicious slow braises they contain will have to move outside onto a gas ring. Given the heat, this is perhaps not a bad thing.