We’ve been here for over a year now!!
It’s hard to believe it’s already been over one year since we’ve been here. Last year around this time we were finally getting our container delivered to our house. Which meant finally getting a fridge and other things we took for granted after living without them for more than a month. But then of course we gave up having….space. But that’s the trade off. Space to move and cook, to work and enjoy our morning coffee. Exchanged for tons of boxes and bins, appliances, and basically having things we need to get this project off the ground. Though having more than three t-shirts is nice too.
A year ago at this time we’d just received our container, the property was virtually empty, and Roger put our BBQ together and much charring and burning of things occurred.
Second Carnaval
Still fun and Roger loves it. Uplifting family event enjoyed by all. This year was less chaotic and just as enjoyable. We were both incredibly tired but still had enough energy to head out to Peguche on Monday to get sprayed with foam and have buckets of water thrown on us, and spray people with foam right back. We stopped for a beer and relaxed as revellers hosed each other down in foam, water, eggs, flour…. If you’re outdoors you’re fair game and it’s always a blast. It was a smaller crowd than last year or likely over the weekend. Just right. Honestly don’t know if we could have handled the same level of festivities as before but fun all the same.
Peace, Patience, Planning
Something that we’re doing now we didn’t manage in the hectic speed of the past few years is finally taking the time to plan things out more and relaxing while doing so. There’s still mountains of stress and decisions need to be made, but at a pace that’s a bit easier to manage and it’s allowing us to draft out plans a fair bit more thoroughly than in the early days.
Drafting and redrafting ideas on paper, more planning in advance for contingencies, it feels nice to not whip something up on the spot and just go with it then afterward go “….uh….oops…..yah didn’t think of that”. Which is still bound to happen but maybe in the idea stage rather than when the bricks are already laid.
Growth is important, sustained and maintainable, at a manageable pace. Even now and again we oops. We’ve piled on too much too fast as has been our habit, and need to balance crews, jobs, material, time, plans, money, meetings. The challenge is great, and we still manage and we learn to pace things out.
Almost a year since Tali came into our family
We adopted Tali on March 17th last year, spending our St. Patty’s going to Ibarra and bringing her home has been a wonderful decision to grow our family of furballs. She’s grown out of her shell and with Gandalf’s nonchalant attitude, has learned how to handle aggressive dogs a bit better. Looking back at the first pictures, it’s amazing how big both her and Gandalf have gotten. St. Patty’s is now also Tali Day. If we find the time to brew again soon we’ll make her a spent grain doggy cake or treats of some kind.
Watching Olympics. Thank you VPN + CBC
We may be living here in Ecuador, but we do follow Canadian teams! We also still listen to the CBC in the mornings! Been fun to catch the games, and looking forward to sledge hockey in the Paralympics. “Not available in your country” has been an all-too-familiar sight on many websites and having a VPN has been awesome.
Brewery Incoming!!
Yep, tearing down more walls, more construction mess, and piles of dirt for dogs to play in. They love the giant piles of debris, then they get sad when a giant dump truck takes it away, only to be happy again when that same truck brings a load of stone and sand for concrete. Queens of the hill. Max and Jupiter have been exploring the neighbours empty property through the holes in the wall. The crew had to dig it out to make space for the support columns and so of course, Max and Jup have decided to go for feline-mini-walkabouts. Also of course they come back covered in burrs. Then lie on our sweaters. Thanks guys.
This is also prompting Roger to get back to the plans for the brewery rig. Brewing outside in the sun is glorious. Until it rains. Or until it gets ridiculously windy. Or the cats and dogs get too close to the burner. Or Max decides now is the purrfect time to climb all over the table with all the clean and sanitized equipment. Plans keep getting pushed back from other priorities, and we have a 97.9856% sure idea of where we want all the new water piping to be located. But the rig plan itself to hold the pots, burners, and mash tun keeps changing. It will be wonderful to finally have a closed space staying cat and dog free and not have to manually move a pot with 6-7 gallons of boiling liquid in it. Yay.
Things like to overcomplicate themselves. Trying to keep things simple is not always simple. So our basic plan of action for pretty much everything is these few actually simple steps:
- Come up with a crazy idea
- Reel it back, remove and/or change things and make it less crazy but still functional
- Cheers and beers
So when we find ourselves wildly overthinking things (which is often and neither of us are architects or engineers) we take the time to go back to the drawing board and maybe just maybe make it work but in a non-crazy way.
It’s exhausting to be hitting 10 months of near-constant construction. The noise, the dust, the expense, the perpetual cooking/cleaning cycle. The space of peace between the main building finishing and beginning the brewery was a pleasant respite still full of carpentry and other work, and looking forward to seeing this done too. Eventually these cycles will be more our own, and running the show more than waiting for the curtain to rise.
We’ll also be drinking far less pop.
Hostel Building is Nearly Done!
We have grass, most doors are installed, we have stairs. All that’s left is the railings, small windows, and we can begin working on the interior! Still a lot of closets and cabinets, shelving, mirrors, etc, but steps in the right direction. The cozy feel in the study and main bedroom were already evident after we had the windows and glass installed. Warm and snug, not like the rooms in the old house that drop to bone-chilling cold at night. In the near future we’re hoping to get the furniture in, and a solar calefon (water system) installed to finally have hot water!
It’s been almost three years now of planning and work, and as much as it seems never-ending we actually are nearing more and more milestones. The brewery is underway, we have a lawn again which has been absent for almost a year, more of the community at large knows we exist and what we’re planning, we have a business number, some walls are painted, glass is installed. All successes, big or small, we’re celebrating. All steps towards our goal.
Archeology of Plumbing
It’s amazing what you find when you dig. So in that we’re now finally building the brewery space (feels odd in a happy way to say that, it’s so tiny but brewery it shall be!) the crew has been digging and digging and digging and found an extra water pipe we didn’t even know was there. It runs from the main line off the house. So Roger dug up concrete, rocky ground, and block for hours to trace it and still never found the end of it before saying to hell with it. Water pipes here are thankfully stamped with their production date, this pipe was only from 2012 but seemed to trail off into the sunset over nowhere back into an area where the previous owners had no taps, sinks, or anything. There was literally nothing but grass. A complete dead end as far as we could tell and running under our new water connection to the hostal rather than connected to it.
So cortar y eliminar…. re-routing water pipes, new shut off valves and new pipes in new places.
The crew also discovered an old inaccessible drainage box buried under what was the washing area. We have to fix that too before moving on and pouring the new floor.
One thing has become increasingly funny to Roger over the last 12 months and all the ridiculous amounts of digging that has happened. Grew up farming and shovelling manure. Left the farm and raced dragon boats for over 10 years essentially shovelling water. Now in Ecuador shovelling to install drainage and dig foundations, clear rubble and mix cement. Haven’t mixed cement since he was a kid during construction of the barn.
You never truly leave the farm. And you truly never stop shovelling to get to a finish line.