Gringos de Marimán

As a point of reference, week 29 started on Labor Day, although Chile doesn't celebrate the holiday. Don't worry, a big holiday week will be coming up shortly, so let's get right to work.

We closed last week with the pirca wall by the dormitorio. Despite showers on Monday and Tuesday, Juan continued on a roll with the pirca. Or perhaps I should say on a curve, up the driveway that is.

Did you notice those dirt mounds up the hill, shown over Juan's shoulder? Let's take a closer look. Here you can see the fruits of my labor over the past week. Actually it'll be a few years before before this peral bears any fruit. I think this is a Bartlett, but all the tags blew off during an overnight storm. Check back in a few years.

You might think that we added these wire cages to protect the trees from the vacas in the background. Hopefully the vacas will just provide a good source of abono. We were more concerned with the local liebres (jackrabbits), which are only slightly smaller than the vacas.

Time to check on the action inside the house. I found Valdovino and Leo crafting some fine looking cajas with grooved edges.

I wasn't sure where these cajas would be used until I spotted a couple hanging over the top edge of the window frames. Obviously these will hide the raised curtains, but why the odd angle?

Add a little cielo and now we see how everything fits together. Juan and Leo started the tongue and groove cielo installation around the cajas and moved quickly across the dormitorio.

They stopped just short of the opposite wall with the high windows. Apparently they wanted to make sure that Fernando had all his orange pvc tubos in place.

By the way, I skipped past the topping off of the toaster wall with volcanita. I figured you might be tired of volcanita after last week.

Here's something new in the cocina, a soffit showed up on the western wall.

On the other side of the room another familiar activity took place, fisiterm stuffing, followed by more tongue and groove activity.

Add a little more volcanita to the soffit and now the cocina's gaining some finishing touches too.

At midweek a flete dropped off some large crates providing another glimpse of what's to come. These dirty looking pieces are piedra pizarra, the cafe oxidado variety. Yes, we chose this particular type because we figured we could blame the dirty floor on the piedra. If you're having a tough time imagining how this might look when it's finished, take a look at the these vendor samples. We'll see if we achieve that same polish.

One immediate problem presented itself when the piedra pizarra arrived. Apparently no one realized that the cafe oxidado variety was thicker than what our specifications originally called for and now the madera sections were too low. So the crew added a few more thin wood pieces to the floor to mark the level for a bit more concreto.

Fortunately, Juan's had plenty of practice mixing concreto. So he converted the remains of our crushed rock pile into a mixing bowl.

Soon we had yet another layer of piso and we're really looking forward to the next layer coming next week. Hasta la proxima!!