Building Your Home
Many people have asked me what it is like to live in a country you did not grow up in. The process of moving and getting acquainted with a place always takes time and effort. This is true anywhere. I feel it always takes several months to really feel moved in. You have to find the necessary places—grocery store, hardware, doctors, and so on. Of course, unless you already have a social group in this new location, you need to find a way to meet people and make friends. Any place without a social group is not going to be a great place to live for long.
Once you get moved in and discover those necessary places and start to meet people, you enter the “honeymoon” phase. This is especially true when you move to another country. The new sights, sounds, views, food, all seem wonderful. You revel in the new vistas when walking down the road. Everything is just perfect.
Then, of course, that first problem hits. Maybe there is a huge leak at your new home, requiring some type of contractor. Maybe you have a medical issue. Possibly you turn on the water taps and nothing comes out or you just need to replace some light fixtures. What do you do? How do you get the help you need?
Let’s say you first need to do a project around the house. I can only tell you how this works in Latin America, because we have done very few construction projects in the U.S. and those were decades ago. So, let’s say your new tropical retirement place needs a new bathroom, a kitchen upgrade, or just a repair. After ineffectively trying to do the work yourself, you remember why you did not go into contracting as a career.
So now, the first thing is you have to find a good contractor. If you do not have anyone who you trust to give you a good recommendation, you can try going onto community Facebook pages and ask the random strangers who show up online for their thoughts. These pages abound in every expat location we have seen.
At least half the comments will be rude, insulting or trollish. Your intelligence will be questioned. People will tell you to go back to where you came from if you cannot figure things out on your own. Some will be so rude that they cause you to start blocking people you have never met. Hopefully, one or two nice commentors will give you a positive comment.
Then, you get a few construction guys or companies who are recommended and a whole lot of others who message you directly. How do you know which one to choose? Which one is a con artist, a crook, a guy looking to learn a trade or a legitimate contractor? It’s a bit of a crapshoot.
When you are first in a location, the inclination is to pick someone who speaks English or comes off as most professional. Of course, in many cases that means at a minimum, the person will be charging you double what the work costs anyone else (gringo bingo). The second thing to be aware of is that the person may not be skilled, be available, or be honest. Tearing out a poorly done project, waiting at home for days for no one to show up or getting ripped off of a lot of money is not fun.
Assuming you finally find a contractor who you believe is qualified and reasonably priced, you will likely find that you will be given a verbal cost estimate—maybe—and a projected time of completion. Be advised that neither of these is more than the wildest guess, at least in our experience. You will pay a lot more and spend a lot more time in the process than you can imagine.
What will happen, based on our experience, is that the contractor will show up on an unexpected day, likely with assistants in tow. The contractor will give a few directions and take off. You may or may not see him (and it’s always a him) for quite some time. I have had employees ask me to pay them directly after a week’s work, because the foreman has not paid them and is not answering calls or messages. Even if the builder who originally spoke to you speaks English and understands your project, the employees will not. Be quick with your phone translator app, because you are going to need it. Also, be aware that a lot of these guys spell Spanish about as well as you do, so there will be some difficulty figuring out words.
It is important to remember that little to nothing happens if you are not around, all day, bored to tears, making sure that work progresses. This means that the rest of your life is on standstill. You will be sitting for hours in the morning waiting for someone to show up, sending ever more frantic WhatsApp messages in a language you only understand through Google translate. If you leave for anything, that is when the crew comes. Then, they will leave disgusted and may not return. When someone maybe shows up in the late afternoon, or the next day, or the next week, then your real waiting around begins.
At some point, the work will stop. Maybe the weather is bad. Maybe some parts need to be ordered. Maybe the contractor wants more money, yet again, and you are beginning to question where your previous payments went. Maybe no one says anything to you and just does not show up. Maybe in the case of our first contractor, the guy runs off with everyone’s money and his new girlfriend to a new location. Eventually, you will figure out that a new contractor is necessary.
In your distress that you will never live in anything but concrete dust, if you are very lucky, a neighbor may wander over some day. In Spanish and broken English, you may get a reference for someone this neighbor uses. You are warned that he only takes payment in cash, speaks only Spanish and does work on those days and in those hours when he is free. At this point, you shrug and want to hug your neighbor. You may have just found a real local guy who will show up and do the work at probably half the price of your originally recommended English speaker.
These contractors are generally hardworking men who learned how to build and fix things on their own. I have found that they are also a lot more honest with you than those answering Facebook posts in English. Most work on a per day basis. You buy supplies and pay them as the time passes. They will still usually show up on an irregular basis, but you will get the job done eventually.
They will follow their own ideas. Most of them are working under the table and have never met a permit or building requirement in their lives. If they do not agree with you on something, they will do it their way. This is not to put down any of the workmanship we have found in our travels through Latin America. It takes time, but if you are so lucky to find a local guy who is handy with construction, the rest of your projects will be much easier.
We were fortunate to find several men like this in Panamá. One guy, Verisimo, built a septic tank area and bathroom in our lower lot, put in concrete walkways and drainage systems and even helped us concrete over some of the ruts in the dirt lane leading up the hill to our house. All of this with just hard physical labor and some shovels. Another man was an absolute artist with tiles. A lot of our furniture, including bathroom cupboards, our walk-in closet, exterior doors, tables—everything you can imagine, was hand constructed by people. It was so much better quality than the cheap quality things you buy at the stores these days.
So many talented people in the world! After moving to Mexico, we have found the same thing here. There are people who can build just about anything for you. They might even build you a bathtub from concrete blocks when you cannot find anything you like.
And every great once in a while, after you have been somewhere for some time, you run into a retired contractor from home who just wants to create. All my previous advice goes out the window. This guy can perform miracles and turn your kitchen from an old, water damaged place into the room of your dreams. That is when you know you have finally arrived home.
We have noticed that in the U.S. we also have a hard time finding reliable plumbers, electricians, and so on. We needed some plumbing work done, and the company that got the highest reviews continued to put off the job even after two canceled appointments. He said they were busy elsewhere. We finally got a plumber who is reliable and charges decent prices. We consider him a real “find.” We have had similar issues with electricians. The trades have become in such demand that they really don’t need the job that much anymore. One contractor gave me a bid on some work and then told me he didn’t know when he could get to it because he was so busy and didn’t really need the extra work. I joke with my PhD educated son that if his school closes (it’s a small private college so it’s always in the back of our minds), and he can’t get another job at a college (he’s not an MIT physicist and academic jobs are hard to find these days), he should become a plumber or truck driver so he can make some real money (his salary as a tenured associate professor is less than 65K per year)!