Day 75 & 76

On Monday we continued painting the mini-beam which connects all the posts. It only took half the day to complete it, with a few touch ups the rest of the day. This is how our house looks like now. Because the roof is so bright we have a hard time focusing the camera on the main house. So all you can see is the bright yellow-green hat roof and the adobe red posts. We also had our worker wax and polish our patio floor which restored the it to its original color.

This is the south facing (main) door. 

Next project will be to clear up the surrounding area, make some pathways near the house and organize/renovate the tool shed. For now, we will focus on preparing the land for the coming rainy season.

Day 74

First day of painting the posts Adobe Red color. It will probably be finished by this afternoon. We might also paint the mini-bond beam the same color after we chip off the shotcreted cement - it just did not stick and is peeling off in some areas.

This deep red color is quite nice. 

Day 73

We have given our workers a break to take care of their own personal stuff. It just was great timing that the paintng of the roof was completed. One worker finished shotcreting the portions of the wall which came off when they were taking out the bamboo paneling and removing the tacked tarp which covered our windows.

Anyway, as I previously mentioned, we bought our paint from 3 different stores. It turned out there the ones we bought in the city were more yellow and the one close to our place is more green. You could actually see the difference up close where the top half of the roof is more yellow and the bottom half is more green.

We also had some fog on Friday morning, much to our surprise :-) 

Day 67 & 68

Day 1 of painting covered the top level with about 2 layers of paint and the 2nd level with 1 layer, which used up 1 bucket of the Davies Sun & Rain Pale Nile paint. The swatch color of the Pale Nile showed a more greener hue but in reality it has more yellow-ish hue in it. 

The painting of the entire roof only took about a day and a half. Today was the full day of painting. They also had to remove the scaffolding to be able to completely paint the roof. Shown here are two of our workers working on the areas once covered by the scaffolding. Quite acrobatic, aren't they?

Painting on more layers all around the roof. 

Painting on the 2nd layer of paint on the patio roof portion. 

Here's the breakdown of how much we used to build the roof:

CEMENT = 120 bags

POWDERED WATERPROOFER mixed in with the cement = 120 packets

SAND = 18 cubic meters or 6 truck loads (about 1/3 were not used after sieving)

BOSTIK cementitious waterproofer= 20 buckets

PAINT = 21 buckets

We still have to paint the 12 posts which will probably use 2 buckets of paint. We had to buy our paint from 3 stores because they do not carry enough of one color in each place. The problem we found was the colors did not match although it was supposedly the same Pale Nile color. One was greener, the other was yellower. Thankfully once the paint was applied the difference was not too obvious.

Day 61

The spraying of the shotcrete under the eaves of the patio roof is almost done. We had about 6 layers of the shotcrete, the final one using pure mix of water and cement. Then when we almost finished with the final section of the eaves, we had the idea of applying a pure cement and water mix, thick enough to be like paste and simply paste the mixture in the areas where the wire mesh is exposed. It would have saved us a lot of time if we did this in the first place. We were a bit distracted because we had a house guest and could not really keep an eye on the work being done. However, the shotcrete work took 7 days to complete the entire patio roof, but not to completely cover it. Now with that pasted on pure mix on the areas that have exposed wires. we will now just have one layer of sprayed on pure cement and water mix.

We will use this method when doing the inside portion of the roof.

We also have applied  layers of the cementitious powermix Bostik on the roof (pictured above). It was tested the same day when rains poured that night. There were no leaks inside the house nor in the inner portion of the patio roof. We plan to have at least 3 layers of Bostik on the main roof and 4 layers on the patio roof.

We anticipate painting the roof this week. We plan to use the Davies Sun and Rain Pale Nile color for the roof. Thankully we found a distributor close to our place with even a cheaper price tag than the other places in the area.

It is supposed to be (officially) summer time now. But we are blessed to have some rains at night to cool of the warm temperatures of the day. It also refills our rain water tanks which is so precious around this time of extreme drought.

Day 58

Work continues on the eaves and the roof edge. It is only the 6th day of the shotcrete work on the eaves, which is going pretty quickly compared to the manual throwing of concrete, the style used to cement the edging of the roof. If our mason did the throwing of concrete to finish/smoothen the eaves it would have taken even longer. The only negative side to the shotcrete work is the dust that forms after the sand dries off the cement because the mix is very wet so as to allow the mixture to be sprayed. But, the work sure goes pretty fast and we use a lot less cement and sand.

By next week we hope to continue with the waterproofing of the roof.