Priorities - or - short term vs long term thinking

With a daily wage of 20$ for 8 hours of hard work in the sun, the three top priorities of locals when building a house are how much it costs, how much they have to pay for it, and how much money is needed. The rest is pretty much irrelevant!

I am not swimming in money myself, but, I am able to consider other factors and arrange priorities a little differently with our house.

My thought is, construction of the house is taking a few months. But you’ll live in it many, many years. So, if you make the construction easier and cheaper, you get the benefit during these few months while building. If, however, you make maintainability and adjustability a higher priority, you reap the benefits for all the years you live there.

Of course, a company who builds homes to sell, doesn’t care about anything after the sale. But I do!

Here are some of the topics that I considered, and the ideas and solutions I came up with:

Electrical and water pipes:

They are usually inside the walls. When the walls are sticks with drywall on top it already is a lot of trouble to fix any problems with these pipes or to extend them in some way. Here in Panama, the walls are concrete. If you need to open one to get at pipes, you need a jackhammer! And whatever was not yet broken about the pipe is surely going to be completely destroyed once the wall is open!

I chose to put my pipes outside the wall, and cover them up with wooden cladding, which is fastened by screws, not nails. If you need to get at them, simply unscrew three, four screws and there you go!

electrical pipes covered behind wood

Waterpipes visible, thus in copper instead of pvc

Drain clean-outs:

There’s no maintenance issue more troublesome to me than clogged drain pipes. Except, clogged drainpipes that are not accessible! 

For that reason, i put clean-out plugs everywhere! Every toilet and shower drain has such a access point right outside, on the other side of the bathroom wall. On every corner and every endpoint of the main drain pipe there’s an access point as well.

zoom in to see the access points for the snake

I put a lot of effort into ensuring the drains are all following the 2-3% declination rule, so I’m thinking (hoping) I won’t have many issues of clogged pipes. But if there’s one, at least it’s easy to get the snake to where the clog is!

Wall coloring:

painting your house is a very costly and/or work intense job. Having concrete walls, it’s possible to avoid having to paint your house for as long as you live! The trick is, using “tinta” with white concrete. That way, the wall “is” colored by itself, and does not need coats of paint. No paint, no need to renew paint!

I used yellow tinta - it goes well with the green of the land and the red of the roof and tile floor

Sun, rain, and high humidity:

There are three big issues in the tropics with which your building has to cope: Sun, rain, and humidity.

The sun heats up roof and walls, making the inside be like a baking oven - if your architecture doesn’t have a way to get rid of the heat easily and without lots of equipment and energy effort.

I raised the roof a bit above the concrete, and leave the space between them free, so hot air can easily escape to be replaced by fresh, cooler air. 

Secondly, I put a wooden ceiling on top of the rooms. That insulates the concrete walls and the air inside the room from the heat radiation of the hot roof.

sufficient space between roof and concrete

No need for expensive - to buy, to install, and to operate - air conditioning systems!

The frequent, sometimes very heavy rain, turns any terrain into either a river (if it’s sloped) or a lake (if it’s level), or both!

I put the slab on top of a thick layer of gravel, which lets water run through easily. In addition, I put drainage pipes around the perimeter of the house, so that most of water is running of right away and not even getting to the gravel cushion.

notice the canal for the drainage pipes 

Slab is floating on thick cushion of gravel

No need for sump-pumps or similar equipment to deal with the abundance of water!

The humidity facilitates the growth of mold and mildew. In my experience, once the air is not moving, mold is developing very quickly. And once you have it, it’s virtually impossible to get rid of! 

I put large windows, and designed them to be able to be opened completely. That way, it is easy to keep the air moving in the rooms - simply leave the windows open…

Side windows can by tilted up - 100% open, sash needs no space as it hangs close to the ceiling

front window is 1,8 by 3m (6 by 10 ft)

No need for expensive dehydration equipment!

No systems installed, means the least amount of maintenance effort required!

Summarizing 

I tried to build a sustainable, easy to maintain, comfortable, and healthy home. I’m sure there are many more topics and ideas that could be considered and dealt with. But so far, it feels really good living in the space!

tranquil, sustainable, comfortable, affordable tropical living

The trouble with local real estate

 There are two types of houses that are available in Panama, based on what I found when searching:

Homes built for locals, and homes built for foreigners.

The homes built for locals are quite affordable - but there's a reason for that: the quality standards and designs are not really up to what a typical foreigner would find acceptable.

Today I encountered one of the very typical problems also in Iris' house: the toilet drains tend to get clogged. I can't count how many local toilets I visited where signs of "Don't throw toilet paper into the toilet" are tell-tales of this issue!

I had installed a toilet a while ago - a provisorium. We didn't have running water yet, but we simply refilled the toilet-tank from a bucket after flushing. No problem...

The toiled drain in the other bathroom was plugged with some crumpled up cement bag - originally, so no debris falls into the pipe and causes problems later on. Lately, also to avoid gases from the septic system to come up through open hole.

Well, after tiling the whole bathroom, and grouting most of it, as well, I got ready to install the toilet here, too. Trying to remove the paper was very hard. It seemed to be soaked, and had lost any cohesion! Once I finally got the paper removed, to my great surprise, I found a "soup" sitting in the toilet-drain.  (Explains the moist paper plug! Yuck! 😝)

Soup sitting in drain is an unpleasant surprise in many ways

Apparently, the self-proclaimed "specialist" had glued the pipes together with a inclination instead of a declination! So, part of what was flushed down on the one bathroom, ended up flowing down the pipe to the other bathroom!

I have encountered many problems already in this house, and fixed them, or found a work around. But, how the heck, am I supposed to fix this one?!?!

I decided to break the finished tile-floor again, and using the jackhammer, open the concrete floor, and see if maybe the pipe can be lifted a little bit. 

Well, obviously, that didn't work out! A 1cm (1/2") pipe is a little flexible. But a 10cm (4") pipe doesn't move a mm on such a short length!

3 hours of work to dig out that pipe again

It looks, as if the pipe is forking off the pipe of the other bathroom, using a Y piece. And, 30cm after the Y and 60 cm before the end where the toilet is going to be sitting, the foundation of the wall between the bathrooms is fixating that pipe. It is in the wrong position for good! Cast in concrete, literally!

So far I have not been able to come up with any idea as to how to fix this problem! The only thing that might make life easier with a constantly clogging toilet, is a cleanout access close to the toilet. So, when the pipe is clogged, it is possible to insert a pressure hose without having to uninstall the toilet each time... So, if no better idea comes to me, I'll be cutting the pipe and inserting a 5cm (2") fork and letting that 5cm pipe lead all the way to the bathroom floor and put a plug on that. Not pretty. But kind of hidden a little by the toilet bowl, so you don't immediately see it, when entering the room. 

How the heck to fix that!?!

Well, we're about to go on another vacation to Austria. The hole will stay there until we get back, and whatever the best idea is going to be by that time, I'll implement...

Now, just to be clear: The issue of incorrect declination of the sewer pipes is a problem as well of many homes that were built for foreigners! One more reason for me to be present all the time and to double check everything while I am having my house built!

My Teak Plantation

Now that I have the proceeds of the sale of my condo in my account, I can make the transfer to Panama to pay for the teak plantation. But, wait, not so fast!

10 year old teak trees!

It takes 70 years for spruce and fir, but only 25 years +/- for teak!

I am buying the teak plantation to be eligible for a reforestation visa. Jeff, the CEO of Panama Teak Forestry, and their lawyer Lill of Kery Cruz are very helpful in telling me exactly how to go about it, and what to be careful about.

The rule says, the plantation has to be in my name (that is, not in the name of a foundation or company I might have in Panama), and the funds have to be transferred from a Non-Panamanian account in my name straight to the PTF account. Plus, they want a notarized and apostilled confirmation of the transfer from the bank where my account is from which I make the transfer.

Well, E*Trade is a 21st century bank, where everything is done online. There is no branch, where I could go to get a document with a signature of a live person that can be notarized and apostilled! 

Panama is a developing country, which is under strong pressure from the US to be diligent about money transfers, due to a history of money laundering. So, the Panamanian banks, as well as the Panamanian government want to make sure everything is in right order, but they use 20th century processes. 

I talk to Customer Service at E*Trade, but they, too, are at their wit's end about how to get this accomplished. They can send me a transfer confirmation, no problem. And it is on their letter head, no problem either. But, it is an email attachment, thus doesn't have a live-ink signature.

I end up printing the email document, and writing on it that I swear by perjury of law that this is an authentic document. I sign it in front of the notary and get his seal. Then I submit that form to the GSCCA who apostilles Georgia notarizations. I hope, this will satisfy the Panamanian Immigration department. We'll see...

Two days after I initiated the transfer, I get an email from PTF notifying me that their bank is threatening to reject the wire if we all don't submit within 2 days a bunch of documents! 

They request: The singed contract (of course), six months worth of statements of the account where the money originated (well, ok, too) that also shows this transfer. Heck! How am I getting a bank statement in the middle of April, that shows a transaction that happened in the middle of April? Impossible! Statements are created at the beginning of the month for the previous month! 

I decide to take a screenshot of my online-banking recent transactions page and submit that, together with the 6 months statements. Plus, for good measures, I add the HUD statement of my condo sale, too, to prove where the big deposit came from, that showed up on the account 5 days before the wire to Panama went out.

Two days later PTF emails me, that the transfer was accepted and the funds were credited to their account. Yeay! First hurdle taken successfully!

Now I can go back to Panama, buy my land, and start building my home...