Month: May 2019

One Month Down, Two Months to Go

Posted on by forsterb

It’s exactly one month today since we left Vancouver.  It seems so long ago that we held my mom’s COL, but we got it done.  Deborah and I were chatting tonight on the Mirador, watching the sun go down on what was another hot and humid day.  We had enough energy after a long, hot day that we stripped off, jumped in the pool and watched a glorious sun dip beyond the horizon.   BTW, it reached 104F today without the humidex.  I heard someone saying that yesterday with the humidex, temperatures seemed like 50C that’s a whopping 122F.

We’ve  been in Merida since the 1st of May and we’ve accomplished quite a lot.  We’ve met with our contractor just about every morning this week at 10:00 and we cover a lot of ground daily, adjustments here, changes there – but Casa Amigos is coming along quite nicely.  The plan is that we’ll be moving from our VRBO rental on June 1st (which is very optimistic) into our Casita suite at the rear of the property.  We realize that we’ll be faced with power outages, water stoppages, workers and jackhammer chatter in the background, but it’s something we think we have to do – we’ll see what happens.  I just so happens that we have a back-up plan B.  One of our friends here has a fantastic casa just around the corner from our construction site and she’s offered it to us for the month of June if Casa Yucatan Construction can’t get things ready for us on June 1st.  Her place is absolutely gorgeous, she has a new one-bedroom Casita with it’s own dipping pool and it will certainly fit the bill and allow us to cut down on our daily walk to Calle 66.  From our current rental we’re about 4 big blocks down to the construction site, so while it’s close – it’s still getting there with the high temperatures even at 9:45 a.m.

Our main focus has been to work with Adam but our secondary focus has been to buy stuff.  That’s the part that Deborah likes the most.  So far we’ve purchased our stove/range, dishwasher, washer, dryer, king-size mattress, cover, sheets, kitchen island lights, BBQ, lounge chairs for the pool and tomorrow we’re planning to add to the appliance purchases with a new refrigerator, TV and microwave oven.  With these important things out of the way, we now only have about 1,000 more things to buy to get us ready for our December stay.

It’s been great to be back in Merida.  To be able to see friends that we haven’t seen for months, to be able to sit on the Mirador and hear the bells of the church at night, the cooing of the doves in the trees overhead, the food, the smells, it’s all things that we’ve come to enjoy here in Merida.

GOD is it HOT in Merida

Posted on by forsterb

We arrived into Merida via Toronto, Nashville and Cancun on April 30th after spending five days in Toronto with my son and his family and two weeks in Murfreesboro, Tennessee with my wife’s family.  It was great to get caught up with everyone – we feel so isolated on the west coast that it was nice to get a hug and updates on their family life.

We’ve grabbed the first Platino ADO out of Cancun to Merida that we could (ADO only allows only a certain number of seats on each bus for “INAPAM seniors” tickets so we headed out on the 2:15 p.m. bus and took the 4 hour and 30 minute relaxing trip to Merida.  By the way the have a new terminal, it’s no longer at the Fiesta Americana Hotel, they’ve moved it to a new facility just a few blocks away and they call it Calle 60.

We’ve been here for three (3) days now, with Thursday and Friday was pretty much occupied with our builder Adam dealing with updates and clarifications on building components because we’ve been  unavailable for the past three weeks or so.  Today being Saturday, we had a day off from the building process and we were able to go shopping.  Luckily enough, there’s kind of a “black Friday” sale going on here in the spring as well as the fall, so we decided to pull the trigger on some appliance purchases.   It was kind of insane spending some huge pesos on four appliances and one mattress we did manage to trim the expense by close to 55% overall on savings.  Timing is everything.

A look east from the Main Terrace.

 

The Concreto Bed Base

 

The Huge Septic Tank for the main House

 

The Upstairs Guest Bedrooms

 

The rear stairwell skylights

 

Coming along nicely

 

Nice Yard

 

Frolicking in the rental pool – keeping cool from 103F

The Casa is coming along fantastic.  Both exterior and interior stucco is being applied to the walls, tiles are being laid, and meetings with the “iron guy”, the “aluminium guy” and “the kitchen counter guy” with the first one set for Monday at 10:00 a.m.   It was “Worker Appreciation Day” on Friday so we got invited to the big luncheon shindig that Casa Yucatan Construction throws for all it’s workers.  It was held at another Casa Yucatan project  site that was not far from our Casa, but I counted at the peak of attendance some fifty-eight (58) workers, some twenty-five (25) alone are from our project – so he’s got a sizeable crew and payroll as well.