Laying The Foundation...On An Island

future ocean view...

I finally get to blog about building. Originally, this whole page was about owning a vacation home and building in the Caribbean. For the last three and a half years, we have been "owning" and "repairing" in the Caribbean.  We have five lots now. One with a house and four that are so small that we are treating them as technically two.  One has a 'peek'-at-the-ocean view similar to our existing home and the other affords us a much more impressive wide open ocean view, provided we build our home on top of an eight to ten foot tall foundation/basement to overcome the neighbor's wall and other neighbor's guest house placement....sigh...

little peek of ocean

When we bought the house, we were the only structure on top of our little development. We knew that the two properties that penned-in our property and thus view had been sold and would have buildings there soon. I've blogged about that headache at length as well.  In a nutshell, we knew that one should never attempt building from afar.  Certainly, there is anecdotal evidence that with large developers this could be done. We are cheap however and want the best bargain you can get which is rife with potential disasters. BUT, we went ahead and tested an unknown young Haitian builder who we had seen working on a beautiful rock wall anyway.  And the story goes:

    Once upon a time, there was a little white house on a hill.  It seemed never to have enough power or water for its inhabitants which was a never-ending worry for all people concerned. Even with solar panels and beefed-up batteries, a myriad of other little systems could and did fail, leaving the people literally in the dark. Free energy from the sun is anything but cheap! Then there was the issue of water. Originally, the house sat alone on the hill connected to the community water line. Fast forward some years and there are now six additional houses in the immediate vicinity. Enter Enapa, the water barons of the town. Even though the little white house was connected and had always had water. Enapa installed new water lines and required all the houses to pay at first a little and then a lot! Typical gangsters. So, what could be done? Basically, nothing. Unless...

...You build a 30,000 gallon water cistern (3 12x12 cement brick rooms) on a house that is barely 1,200 square feet! We have a decent size pool and it's only 15,000 gallons.

We are big fans of the show Home Improvement. Not only does it take place in our own Metro Detroit but also depicts Tim the Tool-man Taylor forever creating the "Man's" version of something; over-powered and often destructive. Well, I like to joke that we have built a Dominican version of the Man's Cistern. Of course, the process of quoting, managing and ultimately living with the results was validation of our belief that you have to be there for every step of a construction project.

Still, we had to do something about the water situation and start the process of putting gutters on the house to collect the water at sometime. We hope even to be free of the water company eventually.  For the first couple of years we'll keep the contract, but if we can capture and hold enough, we could kiss them goodbye!

I had seen a Haitian worker building a beautiful rock wall by hand down in the neighborhood at the bottom of the hill heading towards the waterfall. I watched the process and then very creepily stopped and got the guy's contact info. Daniel was his name and in typical island fashion, when I asked if he built larger projects the answer was a resounding "sí, claro!"  We haggled a price for a 36' x 12' cistern to be built behind the house and in essence, it would serve the dual purpose of being a patio on that side of the house. There were lots of hiccups. Our friends checked in regularly and sent pictures and Thomas flew down three times during the build. There was never a picture that didn't send up red flags.

This is not what you want to see on the outside of the cistern

WhatsApp has a cool function that when you send a picture you can very easily mark it all up for the recipient to see and then ignore. (See picture to the left) We knew this wasn't going to be to our (Thomas's) standard and we were not proved wrong. The slab top which should function as a patio area is set back on one side so that it doesn't quite reach the width of the house and there is a definite downhill feel when walking across the top. Thomas's brain is still exploding a bit over the almost 14" offset in height over the 35' 8" length (notice...not quite 36')...still, I was willing to accept the lesser standard so long as it served the function of holding water. Alas, even that was too much to expect. Upon my arrival about a week after Thomas who was there hoping to correct the many mistakes, I documented the resulting leakage that was occurring now that the cistern was full. I measured the water level in the section furthest from the front door each day. We were losing 1/2 inch daily. I think in retrospect, no one builds cisterns above ground, so if they were building them to leak, how would anyone know?

hydraulic cement??

Summary of the build; We got an almost 36' long 15' wide slanting slab under which there are three chambers that can't hold water. The slant which included the foundation, in case you were wondering, slants AWAY from where the water pump sits. That paired with the top foot of the cistern being coated with what seems to be just normal cement...let's be honest, the whole thing was coated with normal cement, not hydraulic water-proofing cement... means (calculating for the slant and missing top of cistern capacity) we are short (no pun intended) two feet! Which subsequently amounts to ~760 cubic feet of water missing which equals -5,685 gallons! That's almost 3 times the capacity of our original cistern that came with the house. Woof! Lesson learned...or fears validated! Yikes!

I will post an update when we get this all fixed and document how long and how expesive that is!