Rural Housing Area

After months of looking at houses online that turned out to all have major items on my 'verboten' list we got a little frustrated. i.e. We found a beautiful house in a tranquil setting close to the city but the public transport took 2-3 hours to get you to town, even though the car would get you there in 10 minutes. Another place looked great until we arrived and found the communa backs on to major highway whose edges are crumbling because it is carrying way too much traffic. Not mentioned was also the fact that it's on a curve that has busses threatening to come through your living room if the driver isn't careful. But the pictures naturally showed only the pretty garden and spacious rooms.

I know that one wants to show off the major advantages of their property but some of the advertisements seemed very misleading to put it mildly.

We doggedly continued our quest of course, as we would have in any country. One of our obstacles is the sad issue that in most of Latin America there is no such thing as a proper multiple listing service. Now just back and think about that for a moment. If you want to find a house to buy or rent you must go to every realtor you can find, and I will mention that it is surprisingly difficult to find them unless you go to every small shopping mall and walk into their office. Often the offices are closed so you must look for a phone number, talk to someone who finally calls you back, and then if you meet some magic criteria they might give you a secert web address to get more information on their seemingly special listings. Whew!

I can't imagine too many more cumbersome ways to try and locate real estate in this day and age. It is slowly changing and there is a growing website that lists properties in a single line format. Then if it has been paid for they may have a larger listing with some photos. The entire house hunting process added to our frustration rather like dropping a fresh load of laundry in the mud and having to do it all over again. We expected some challenges but here we were with money in our pockets and we couldn't find anything to spend it on!

After beating our heads against many a stuccoed wall for while we got quite tired at our own lack of progress. Most houses here are built with cement, rebar, bricks and the thinnest glass you can use and still call it a window. Forget any further insulation. These houses are expensive to heat and cool and don't think of putting up a picture without your diamond drill bits. We needed a huge insulated soft space for our grand piano and another for my special 12 foot quilitng machine. Plus, well you know, living spaces for eating and sleeping. So what do we do next?

The gentle tendrils of 'what if we....' had started growing in our thoughts. We began to wonder about the possibility of buying a lot and building our dream house. Something we'd never done before. The result of this idea was that everyone in every country where we had friends or relatives was telling us that building a house was definitely the harder alternative. (Actually I think the word 'idiots' was bandied about in conversation.) As I said in another post our grasp of local laws and Spanish was only mediocre. We did feel secure after a good deal of research showed that our investment would be safe and passed onto our heirs without any trouble. Building a house is usually a challenge and so it would be even more difficult in a foreign country. And we were certainly aware that our less than grand budget wouldn't have people jumping to do our bidding. (Yes, I did mean the double entendre)

So what if we were starting from scratch and doing it ourselves? Obviously others had done this process-- they bought land, designed a house they wanted and then someone else built the house for them. Sounds simple, sort of like the statements; Grow up. Get married. And, have a family. The millions of steps and decisions encompassed those plain statements are mind boggling.

But the building of houses was going on all around us. We had talked to the people doing it and they had warned us against a number of pitfalls. We were going to have to be careful and try and gather as much information as humanly possible and then rely on the connections of our friends who would hopefully help us navigate the treacherous reefs. We had a firm decision now but no place to excercise it.

So what did I do?

Well while out on an errand I was going past one of those dusty little hardware shops. You know the sort the northern hemisphere used to have a lot of? There are guys sitting around in there who can tell you what kind of parts you need to repair your 1984 door lock, or with a little discussion they can decide how many 2x4’s, nails, brackets and everything else you’ll need to build that shed in back of your house. Then they’ll round it all up for you and tell you how much including delivery for tomorrow. All with a cigarette hanging off the lower lip I might add.

Anyway, I was going past and I noticed a ratty crate containing a soft blue bathroom sink in the window. (That piece of glass hadn’t been washed since the place was built in 1948 I was sure.) When I checked the price it was only the equivalent of $12usd. On a whim I went in assuming it was second hand. I used to haunt the big box stores like Home Depot and so I know my sink prices.

This sink was a lovely slightly odd oval shape, heavy, Italian, with a thick coating of enamel and new. Well, if you didn’t count the time it had been sitting accumulating dust and dirt. I loved the shape—and yes, I checked to make sure that there was good adequate room to actually get my hands in there to wash them and that it would take a standard stopper. Decorative but unusable is not for me. Then too the price was certainly right for the quality. The shop had 5 of them tucked away. I picked 3 that had no blemishes whatsoever and paid my $36. He loaded them in the car and I proudly took them home to my husband.

Gentle and knowing man that he is, he was not surprised that although we had nothing more than an idea that we would be building a house in Chile sometime fairly soon his wife came home with 3 bathroom sinks.

And so started our project to build a house in Chile.

All Text & Photos Copyright Suzie Hammond

All Text & Photos Copyright Suzie Hammond;

Author: "I Don't Know Where I Want to Be-But it's Not Here" (Easily Find Your Ideal Relocation Destination) http://www.goodwriter.info

Blog: 'Uprooting' The Unwinding of Unusual Tales of Relocation-- small adventures all over the world

FaceBook: Resources for relocation issues