Sylvain’s Panama Adventure

Construction is still going well. There were a lot of heated discussions last week on some Yahoo groups regarding the difficulty of building in Panama. If you’ve built a house anywhere, you know how frustrating it can be to deal with all the errors and problems, so just imagine building in a third world country!

There are two main problems when building in Panama even if you have an honest and well meaning contractor. The first one is time: everything takes longer in Latin America, and they just don’t seem to care if they’re late. So projects that drag on for several months past schedule are common.

The second one is the quality of finishing work. This problem has two root causes:

1. there is a shortage of trained workers in Panama, and very few actual tradesmen with experience with finishing work like painting, tile laying, and wood working.

2. most of the labourers live in simple houses with unpainted cement block walls, tin roofs, and dirt floors. Our expectations of quality finishes are totally foreign to them and make no sense whatsoever.

This means that the last few months of building, the finishing work, can drag on forever and requires constant attention to catch problems early. My house is still at the block laying stage, something they do quite well. I’m bracing myself for more problems and delays as we approach the finishing stage. We’re asking for the guest house to be finished early, this will spread the finishing work a bit and give us an early experience as to what we can expect later on.

Here are a few more pictures I took just before we left Panama last week:

This is the preparation work before pouring the upper bedroom floor. Notice all the rebar work as well as the water pipes and electrical conduits that have to be placed before the pour.

Here you can see the bedroom module, ready to pour the second floor.

Here you can see the foundation work for the pool. You can begin to see what the pool will look like, nestled between the livingroom/kitchen unit on the left, and coming right up against the back of the guest house on the right.

Here’s a closeup view of the very heavy pool foundation.

Here you can see the rebar for the infinity edge pool wall that goes from the bohio on the left to the guesthouse at the top. The next picture shows the same wall from the driveway side, where the wall will create a 3 meter tall waterfall.

Tags: Buidling, Panama, Pool, Tropical House

Trackback URI | Comments RSS