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Part 1: A Journey to Mexico: House Construction
Episodes 1 — 

Chip Carter has been a life-long resident of Vallejo, California and has owned North Bay Cabinents for many years, specializing in kitchen and bathroom remodeling. He was employed at Mare Island working on nuclear submarines prior to launching his own business. He is one of the founders of Boyz Under the Hood, a club devoted to the restorion of classic American automobiles.

Chip undertook a trip to Mexico to view part of the construction project on a house in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico in 2009. This is his pictorial narrative of that experience. Click on the movie camera icon to open each episode's slideshow. There is a back story to some images that requires a long caption; you may want to run these manually.

 

Episode 1 The Journey

This is a story about driving on the highways in Baja. Most of the highway is 1 lane in each direction with no shoulders and where the desert is flat, the road beds are raised. It seems when it rains it pours in the desert. Let me tell you the rain story now because it affects how they build in Baja. It rains mostly in Sep and Oct I think and the rains are mostly caused by hurricanes. Since the desert is mostly flat, when it rains heavily the water doesn't have a place to go and it builds up and puddles or goes roaring down the arroyos. I will show you the arroyo pictures later. They have to raise the roads because the rains form a huge lake before they can soak in or drain off. Now back to the subject of this email. We drove a distance of about 1080 miles from the house to the border and along the way we went thru 8 Army and 1 Navy check points. They stop everyone on the highway and search for guns and drugs. Naturally we had neither. Trucks may have to unload their cargo to be searched but we just had to get out of the car. We knew a check point was coming up because we learned to read the signs. The soldiers don't speak much English but we could understand what they wanted. At each check point, they tapped on the car to make sure the parts were hollow, probed around the upholstery with an old radio antenna, and searched thru our stuff and asked where we were coming from and going to. At one place, they took out the oil dipstick and smelled the oil. Where we stood while they searched, there were pictures of some of the stuff they found and the people in handcuffs.

There was usually about 15 soldiers milling around with big rifles. It went like this. We drove between 80 and 90 miles an hour and had to come to a real fast stop when we saw the road sign. One guard had you pull up between two big ropes and wait our turn to be searched. I guess the big ropes were speed bumps. We pulled forward as directed to be searched and questioned. At each stop, there was a snack booth to get cokes and water. Have to make money some how. Coke is very big in MX, but not diet Coke. That's another story though. At one of the last stops, they asked for Bob's bottle of Tequila so they could party that night. Bob gave it up so as to not be delayed. Now in case we should decide to run the check point, that have an ingenious system to stop you. It is pictured somewhere below. After they would find out how far we had come, they didn't search so much because they knew we had been through a few before them. Sometimes we would be speeding down the highway and come over a hill and find a bunch of Federalies parked on the side of the road and they would stop us to ask what we were doing on the road. These guys are scarier than the soldiers. The soldiers are 18 and 19 year old kids and they are required to serve in the military for a year.

Episode 2 — Early Construction

Bob had to show the Mexican contractor how to do some things and he taught them how to do some things also. An example of this is when they crossed a hot and cold water line inside the concrete blocks and after the house was finished they had all hot water to some of the bathrooms including to the toilet. They couldn't figure out how to find the crossed pipes inside the walls so the plumber ran a new hot water line around the outside of the house and was going to run it thru the wall at each bathroom. Bob happened to come down that week to check on progress and he saw that and threw a fit. I guess he wasn't going to like seeing a pipe running on the outside of his house. He ran water all thru the house to see what faucets didn't have cold water and was able to determine in what wall the crossed pipes should be in. He told Juan to break a hole there and they would find the problem. They did and they found the crossed lines.

Construction methods are a lot different there but they build a very nice house but there is a lot of rework correcting things done incorrectly. I am including some pictures taken during construction because they are interesting and sorta funny.

The architect, Jesus, was a young guy who spoke pretty good English but had to be corrected now and then. He designed the house. The contractor, Juan, was a 10% partner with Jesus. Juan lived in Texas a long time so he spoke and understood English very well. Juan may be a couple years older than me. I asked him a lot of questions about the workers and construction methods.

There was always about 30 workers a day on the job. They make $10 per day when they show up to work. I asked Juan why they made so little money when things in that area were pretty near normal American pricing. He said the workers knew where to shop for normal local costs and that he tried paying them $15 a day before but that gave them too much money and they spent the extra money on beer and would get too drunk to come to work the next day. He cut their back to $10 a day. He also tried giving them things like a mattress to sleep on because they slept on dirt in their houses but they just sold these things to buy beer and you know what that lead to. Their houses were normally cinder block small shacks with a thatch roof and no floor. These houses are every where and those that are abandoned are roofless and empty. They are about the size of your master bedroom.

None of the workers have a car. Juan drove a school bus and he made a couple of stops in town and picked up those that wanted to work that day. The workers ate lunch on the job and were bused home at the end of the day. At least 1 worker lived on the site watching the tools and materials. He slept under a tarp or had a shack made of pallets and plywood. He moved inside the house as it got closer to completion. You will see a picture of the "wheelbarrow tree" below. They hoisted the wheel barrows up into a tree to keep people from stealing them. There is also a picture of a "Mexican cement mixer".

Episode 3 — Mid Construction

Diane and Bob have a couple of condo's in Cabo San Lucas and stay there a few times a year. When a new development was started in San Jose del Cabo, they bought a lot across from the Sea of Cortez. San Jose is about 20 miles north of Cabo. Cabo is on the very south tip of Baja while San Jose is up the coast on the Sea of Cortez. Cabo is basically on the Pacific Ocean side which is not the desirable side. The Sea of Cortez is that pretty blue water like the Carribean area and it is fine to swim in.

Bob didn't want to be directly next to the Sea because hurricanes might wear away the hillside made of sand and damage the house. He was right. Some of the hillside is gone already. They bought across the street from those houses. They were one of the first ones to purchase and build on their lot. Theirs is the smallest house in the development. His contractor said he needed to build a bigger house but Bob told him they weren't rich, just doing good. Two of the houses down the street were built by the now deceased guy that owned Corona beer, built for his daughters. On their street, most of the lots are now built on but not yet completed. Bob and Diane have stayed in the house a few times and I got to stay there 2 nights before we had to leave. They made a good investment because some of the lots are selling for around 7 million without a house. It has become a popular area for Americans. In future emails, I will send pictures of how they do construction work in MX. Bob and I walked thru 3 of the houses and they were a lot bigger and very beautiful. As they did at Bob's house, the contractor lived on the property to protect it from the locals.