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| "Casa Azuledos" as purchased (but with graffiti on side wall blotted out) |
¡Bienvenidos! My intentions here are to cover the approximately seven months spent working on renovations and improvements to our home in Fortín, topically detailing each of the steps in the process. To work within the standard date-ordered blog format, I'm tweaking a bit to make this work. The list of numbered labels on the right will take you the various phases of the project, no matter when they might be posted. The other labels/tags will take you a list of all the posts mentioning specifics of note.
Should you wish a more time-line centered and mundane perspective, our Etepezin blog covers our life here, including the renovation stuff, but not with the detail intended here. Some of the images there also appear here, but you'll find more pictures pertinent to the work being discussed in each post here.
Here are sketches of the two floors of the house, as it was purchased. To orient yourself, remember that the front door of the house (at the left of the sketch), faces approximately east-southeast:
The 10m x20m lot is bounded on the west by a 3m high privacy wall, and on the south by the building walls and a 5m high privacy wall. The house's street-side front garden and north side of the front porch are bounded by 2m high steel rod fencing, as is the small garden on the north around the chimney. The entry and automobile gates are of the same steel fencing material.
The two front bedrooms look out over the sloping tiled porch roof, and the sloped roof over the dining room in the back is also tiled in this matter, with the bathroom window looking out over this slope. All three bedrooms have two large windows, looking out over the street in front, and the patio in back. The laundry has a parapet wall around the flat roof, where the propane tank is situated.
Some background: Having selected beautiful Fortín de las Flores, a small town midway between the cities of Orizaba and Córdoba in west central Veracruz State, for our retirement living, we spent several months, in the winter of 2011, living in a convenient motel and house-hunting. As pet owners, we quickly eliminated the option of renting, as this reduced our choices tremendously -- few Mexicans care to allow people with mascotas to lease from them. Using several real estate agents (no multiple listings or shared commissions here), and just knocking on doors or phoning the numbers on the Se Vende signs, we saw over 30 homes, some of them new. Prices for a very basic home (minimal number of rooms, all utility connections, perhaps one off-street parking space, extremely small lot with maybe only several square feet of lawn, some in gated developments) seemed to start at about MX$450,000/US$34,000. We chanced into one home selling for a half-million dollars, but instructed our agents to only show us places worth, at most, a quarter of that.
In our home search, we were looking for: one bedroom and full bath on ground floor, additional guest bedroom space, all utilities available (including high-speed internet), functional/adequate electrical and plumbing, building in good repair, screened windows, plenty of natural light and ventilation, off-street secured parking for one car, outdoor living space protected from the street, small easily maintained garden area, within walking distance to the town center, quiet non-commercial neighborhood, not on but not too far from public bus lines, far from the railroad tracks that pass thru town, good views of surrounding countryside, in a house design/layout that caught our attention and showed some character. And, all this had to be on offer for an affordable price. Casa Azuledos, we knew immediately when we first walked in, was HOME. Those few things that didn't jibe with our list of requirements could be fixed. This blog is about the renovations that ensued.
This blog was actually created on 24 March 2012, and contained only the image of the house at the top. Eighteen months later, renovations well completed, I picked up the ball again to write the text here. Chances are I will continue to edit each post after it appears, to fill in additional explanations or perhaps add some images, as the thought occurs or commenters ask questions that so prompt me.
Here are sketches of the two floors of the house, as it was purchased. To orient yourself, remember that the front door of the house (at the left of the sketch), faces approximately east-southeast:
Some background: Having selected beautiful Fortín de las Flores, a small town midway between the cities of Orizaba and Córdoba in west central Veracruz State, for our retirement living, we spent several months, in the winter of 2011, living in a convenient motel and house-hunting. As pet owners, we quickly eliminated the option of renting, as this reduced our choices tremendously -- few Mexicans care to allow people with mascotas to lease from them. Using several real estate agents (no multiple listings or shared commissions here), and just knocking on doors or phoning the numbers on the Se Vende signs, we saw over 30 homes, some of them new. Prices for a very basic home (minimal number of rooms, all utility connections, perhaps one off-street parking space, extremely small lot with maybe only several square feet of lawn, some in gated developments) seemed to start at about MX$450,000/US$34,000. We chanced into one home selling for a half-million dollars, but instructed our agents to only show us places worth, at most, a quarter of that.
In our home search, we were looking for: one bedroom and full bath on ground floor, additional guest bedroom space, all utilities available (including high-speed internet), functional/adequate electrical and plumbing, building in good repair, screened windows, plenty of natural light and ventilation, off-street secured parking for one car, outdoor living space protected from the street, small easily maintained garden area, within walking distance to the town center, quiet non-commercial neighborhood, not on but not too far from public bus lines, far from the railroad tracks that pass thru town, good views of surrounding countryside, in a house design/layout that caught our attention and showed some character. And, all this had to be on offer for an affordable price. Casa Azuledos, we knew immediately when we first walked in, was HOME. Those few things that didn't jibe with our list of requirements could be fixed. This blog is about the renovations that ensued.
This blog was actually created on 24 March 2012, and contained only the image of the house at the top. Eighteen months later, renovations well completed, I picked up the ball again to write the text here. Chances are I will continue to edit each post after it appears, to fill in additional explanations or perhaps add some images, as the thought occurs or commenters ask questions that so prompt me.
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