In the Thick of It
Construction continues
Constructing anything is always a challenge-just ask anyone who has built or remodeled a home! Mark and I really love a challenge, I guess, because we now decided to turn the difficulty level WAY UP by undertaking this overly ambitious project – in less than 6 months…on a steeply sloped site…on a remote mountain-top location…in the rainy season!
The Fortnight
Because the construction workers lived on site during construction, the plan was for them to work in fortnights. No, not Taylor Swift’s new song or the video game. I mean fortnights as in 14 day periods. This is a common practice in Costa Rica.
The whole team would work for 10 days straight and then go home for 4 days. So, during the 4 days they were gone, nothing would get done except the small projects that were being handled by our staff. And for 1 of those 4 days, our staff also had a day off so nothing, nothing would get done! Those were painful days to wait around as time was quickly ticking by!
The entire construction project was planned around these fortnights. Each fortnight had a schedule and specific objectives to be completed. Towards the end of each fortnight, we would review with Cordero and the construction superintendent how things had gone for that fortnight and what was planned for the upcoming fortnight. In this way, it became very easy to see if we were on schedule or not.
For the first half of the project, things looked promising, and we stuck pretty close to the master schedule. As the project progressed, however, it started to become obvious that we were NOT on schedule.
Shocked? Nah…
The Road
I’ve mentioned the road to our hotel before. Let me paint the picture again. Our hotel is located at 2000 feet elevation and 2 ½ miles up a steep, windy, gravel road. We were essentially the last property up our road, and it is a dead end. You go down the same way you go up.
You need a 4-wheel drive to make it up the road because of its steepness. We really aren’t kidding about this! Many people tried without a 4x4 vehicle, and they always got stuck in the same spot. Just ask our neighbor Loren!
Loren lived closer to the bottom of the mountain. Guests who showed up without a 4x4 usually started spinning their wheels just as they were passing Loren’s driveway. We lost track of how many guests he rescued. About once a month he would call us and say, “I’ve got another one!”
Our ‘road’ is also very narrow, so for a big truck of any kind, if it’s going up, the cars that are behind usually have to wait…wait…wait…for the slow moving vehicle to get up the road. If another car is coming down when the truck is going up, they have to move over onto the shoulder of the steep, jungle mountain road to let the truck pass. If a truck can get up the road, it’s a slooooowwww process.
Although many guests asked us if we got all the materials to the hotel by helicopter, everything that we used came sloooowwwly up the mountain road. Sorry to the other hotels and neighbors living on the same road for those months of traffic jams!
We always tried to schedule truck deliveries for mid-morning because the trucks could only make it up to the hotel when the road was somewhat dry. Too early in the day – the road was still wet from yesterday’safternoon rains. Too late in the day – the road might already be wet from today’s afternoon rains!
And speaking of the wet road…
The Rainy Season
We were attempting to do all this work IN THE RAINY SEASON! Do you know how rainy it can get in the rainy season in a tropical rainforest??????????????????
VERY RAINY! (see: A Perfect Storm)
And the soil in our area is a red clay that turns into a thick red mud when it is saturated by rain. I’ve never seen so much mud in my life.
Everyone on-site (including Mark and me) wore knee-high rubber boots to get through the mud. Each time I passed one of the construction workers as I was wandering around the site, they would just smile, shake their heads and mutter mucho barro (a lot of mud). We were all in the thick of it!
Do you remember the scene in Forrest Gump where he talks about all the different kinds of rain in Vietnam? “Little bit of stingin’ rain, big ol’ fat rain, rain that flew in sideways, and sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath.”
We never knew how true that was until we lived in the rainforest especially in the rainy season! The workers would try to keep working in drizzle, sprinkles, droplets, spit, mist, and in the type of rain that the Costa Ricans call pelo del gato (cat hair). I have no idea why they call it that! But most afternoons, the light rain would give way to heavy rain.
— And you guessed it. When it rains a lot, and it’s very muddy, there are things that cannot be done.
You can’t drive trucks up the slippery, wet mountain road in the rain. You can’t move materials in the rain. You can’t ask someone to climb up a scaffold or a ladder in the rain. You can’t weld in the rain. You can’t pour concrete in the rain. You can’t tile or paint in the rain. People cannot work in the rain. Ugh. Rain.
There were some days instead of beginning work at 6am, we’d ask the workers to start at sunrise-about 5:15am so they could get some work done before the rains came. We were pressing the timeline and we had to get it done.
Once the main building was under roof, we staged that space to work as much under cover as possible to do what we could there. We did the best we could.
We had to construct a huge tent over the dugout pool area so that we could continue working on laying rebar, constructing forms and make some progress each day.
When we first bought the hotel, we met an ex-pat neighbor who told us, “In Costa Rica, you have to be content to accomplish one thing each day. If you expect to do more, you will be disappointed.”
So that’s how we started to think about the rest of this construction project - we hoped to make a little progress each day and get out of the thick of it!
And for fun…click here to take a ride with me up our steep, windy, gravel mountain road! Weeee!!!
“In Costa Rica, you have to be content to accomplish one thing each day. If you expect to do more, you will be disappointed.”...maybe these are just words to live by, Marlo! ❤️❤️ You really chose the perfect name for your publication! 🌈
Oh the rain! And that rain description from Forrest Gump is so accurate! 😅