No room for concrete in this column

This photo shows the top of a 15cm column trying to accommodate eight 16mm rebar from the roof beams and four 12mm rebar from the column. There is practically no room for concrete.  I ended up welding this tangle of rebar in the hope of gaining some strength from the rebar even if the concrete was minimal.  The post should have been sized by the engineers to be large enough to properly accommodate the rebar.  I told the engineer I wanted to demolish this column.  The engineer talked me out of it, however it should have been demolished and replaced with a larger column.

Demolishing just completed work

The engineers left out a support column needed to support a beam which they also left out.  One of the workers looked at the plans and saw the problem early on.  The engineers left out support for one end of a main roof truss.  We could not build in that defect, so we had to demolish a just constructed wall and wall footer (shown above) to allow us to pour a footer for the added column.  The concrete in the demolished footer was satisfyingly strong and resistant to demolition.

A column error corrected.

Workers laid block right up to rebar cage for columns, leaving inadequate room for the concrete portion of the column.  The block (which was filled with concrete) had to be cut back throughout the structure — a big waste of time.

Splicing error in roof beam rebar

This shows a rebar cage for the roof beam.  The splicing was done incorrectly.  No splicing plan was included with our drawings so the workers followed their own ideas which proved to be wrong.  See http://goiloilo.com/our-philippine-house-project-rebar-splicing/ for all the gory details.  This particular rebar cage was redone three times before it was done correctly.  I don’t blame the workers.  In our opinion, a splicing plan should have been provided by the engineers.

This column was demolished and replaced.   The concrete was too stony and dry because I went too far in insisting that  not too much water be added to the concrete.  As I learned, concrete can be a little wetter in hot conditions.

The effects of over vibration at the bottom of a column pour.

This defect was caused by my crew over-using the concrete vibrator.  The water and concrete slurry ran out of the bottom of the form, leaving behind the aggregate.  The crew tried to hide this from me by covering it with mortar.  I raked it out immediately.

A friends of ours in Iloilo had their casement windows made by:

Denis Jaleco, denisjaleco@gmail.com, 0929-772-8699

Here’s a photo of the Jaleco casement windows in our friend’s bedroom.  These large windows give a light, airy feeling to this fairly small room.

Bedroom window 2m high and 2.5m wide (on a 3m ceiling and 3.5m wall). Also note sliding screens. These windows were custom fabricated.

The Jalecos (Denis is an architect and his father makes the windows) gave us a quote for all of our windows (12 in all) of about P90,000 installed but not glazed.  We thought this was a very fair price but since we already had a welding shop set up, our welders said they knew how to make windows, and they were running short of welding projects, we decided to try to make our own windows.

In the U.S. we’re used to windows being pre-made with fancy insulated glass, plastic cladding, smooth opening and locking hardware and big prices.  In the Philippines it’s quite common to weld up windows at the job site, especially for less expensive homes.  Here’s a steel casement window in a big house in one of Iloilo’s swanky subdivisions. You can see the security grilles behind the glass panes.  Our windows will be just about the same, with three pairs of sash per window, each having three panes of glass.  Our windows are bigger so the glass panes will be quite large — about 50cm high and 35cm wide.

Our welders beginning the fabrication of casement windows

Because steel window-making is common in the Philippines, the larger construction supply outlets stock the necessary materials; Z-bar, T-bar, I-bar, hinges and latches.  The problem is that such windows usually go into cheaper houses, so the materials are aimed toward affordability rather than quality.  This is so often the case in the Philippines.  The z-bar is the main problem.  Standard z-bar is very flimsy.  It was hard to find better z-bar.  We found somewhat better z-bar at Far Eastern Hardware on Quezon Street.  The cheap z-bar is P189, the better is P520.  We bought the better stuff, but it’s easy to see why the cheap stuff is the best seller.

"Premium" 7/8" z-bar from Far Eastern.

The z-bar constitutes the main item in window construction.  It is used to make the exterior of each sash.

This is the quite heavy I-bar stock.  It is used as part of the frame, separating the sashes.

T-bar

This is the the T-bar which separates the panes in each sash.

Another key part of the window is the security bars.  Practically all windows in the Philippines are protected with security grilles. With casement windows, the bars forming the grilles are welded to the interior of the steel window frame.  They are spaced to create a grid which the smallest child cannot climb through. You can see the grilles in the photos above.   This is because children are sometime used as part of a break-in.  If the children can squeeze through, they can then make their way to an entrance door and unlock it to allow the rest of the team to get in.

The windows themselves are welded to reinforcement bars embedded in the concrete walls.  The windows are then mortared into the wall openings making a very secure window.

Handles and security bars

We were able to find good quality window handles at Far Eastern Hardware in Iloilo City.  They have at least three grades of handles for those making their own casement windows.  These are the deluxe models at P45.  This photo also shows the 13mm security bars.

Another great thing about making your own windows is the complete flexibility to choose whatever thickness, color, energy efficiency of glazing (glass) you want to use.

More to come…..glazing, glazing compound, installation

Ours is a one-story house, so a single standard six meter long rebar (about 20 feet) can extend from the footer (1.2 M deep) to the topmost roof beam without splicing.  That’s a good thing.  Our columns used 12mm diameter rebar. All columns and beams also include rings of reinforcing steel called “stirrups”.  The stirrups are held in position using “tie wire”.  Together the rebar and stirrups make up the rebar cage which will go into a plywood form, the form will be filled with wet concrete to make a column or beam.

Column footer. The vertical rebar at bent at the bottom and secured to the footer rebar. When the footer concrete is poured the base of the column is well secured 1.2M (about 4 feet) underground.

The beams are a different matter.  Since the room beam length for our house is 13.5M and 15M,  the 6M beam rebar must be spliced.  How and where is splicing is done affects the strength of the beams and of the house.  Disappointingly, our engineers did not provide a rebar splicing plan with the plan package.  They should have.  Our good, experienced workers could neatly make the rebar splices but really had no idea of how much overlap there should be at the splices or where the splices should be.  Splicing was done incorrectly and had to be redone, in one case three times.  This wasted time and money and caused considerable frustration.

Since our workers had worked on dozens of houses this leaves one wondering about the errors embedded in them.  On commercial buildings there will likely be a supervising engineer, but on residences — who knows?  In the case of our house, if Bob had not been there, the critical roof beams would have been already poured and the mistakes, hidden.

Splicing error in roof beam rebar

The above photo shows the completed rebar cage for our east roof beam.  The rebar is 16mm diameter.  At the top and bottom are two rebars spliced together at the center of the beam.  This is wrong in two ways.  The top splice is OK as it is over the center of the span.  The bottom splice is wrong because it should be over a column.  Both splices have far too little overlap at 30 or 40cm.  The minimum is 64cm for 16mm diameter rebar.

Although this splicing was done by a excellent, experienced worker he was just guessing about how to assemble the rebar because the engineers had given no instruction in the plans.  Their lame excuse is that the workers should have known how to do the splicing. Further, the engineers could have, should have suggested using longer rebar (9M) which would need less splicing.

Here are the engineering rules-of-thumb we garnered regarding splicing:

• Splice beam top bars at locations between support columns.
• Splice bottom beam bars at or near support columns.
• The splice overlap should be a minimum of 40X the diameter of the rebar.  So, for 16mm rebar the splice should be a minimum of 64CM, for 12mm rebar, 48cm.

So, the above splicing violates every one of these rules.  The splice overlap was 30CM, less than one-half of what it should have been.  All bars were spliced in one location.  This rebar cage had to be taken down and completely redone.  Without supervision this beam would have been poured and the mistakes hidden forever, or until the first earthquake.

Why were our experienced workers ignorant of these rules?  The answer is a little scary!

Here’s a pretty good article on rebar, and rebar cage fabrications: http://www.wikihow.com/Tie-Rebar

Rebar cage at intersection of roof beams and column. Little room for concrete.

While our attention to  these construction details may seem over-obsessive (they certainly do seem so to our construction crew!), the Haiti disaster and now the Chile earthquakes show that proper engineering and construction can make the difference between life and death or at least between being able to live in your home after an earthquake as opposed to being homeless and starting all over again.

Here’s what the house looks like after thirty days of work:

After thirty work days...

Septic tank excavation

One of our workers has been assigned the job of digging the pit in which the septic tank will be built.  The three chamber septic tank will measure 3.1 meters (10 feet)  by 1.9 meters (6 feet)  and will be 2.1 meters deep (almost 7 feet). The tank will have a concrete slab on the bottom, filled, steel reinforced hollow block walls and a concrete  top with clean-out ports.

During typhoons, the considerable water from the roof downspouts, will be collected in a series of concrete catch basins and directed outside the lot.

The soil, as is true with most rice fields (that’s why they retain water as “rice paddies”) is extremely heavy clay.  The water table really varies with the season from being more or less at the surface of the land during the wet season to about fifteen feet down during the dry season.  If one had to do a percolation test to check the absorptive capacity of this clay  – well there must be none during the wet season.  During the dry season the clay becomes cracked and very absorptive.

There are complications with wastewater disposal in our “neighborhood”.  Being flat, mostly undeveloped farmland there is no municipal or subdivision drainage system into which to discharge.  As is typical, only “black water” (toilet waste) will go into the septic system.  Rain water from the roof gutters, and water from washing, sinks and showers will not be treated but will just be discharged as is.  As our neighborhood develops, probably a drainage system or ditch will be installed to carry wastewater to the nearest stream bed.  Many local families live along the streams and have their dug wells in or near the streams. Outside of treatment in a septic tank, there is virtually no sewerage treatment in the Philippines.  Boracay is one exception we know of.

When you buy property in a formal subdivision, you’re supposed to have access to a formal drainage system provided by the developer, an advantage.  The waste will just be eventually discharged into a ditch, stream, river or the ocean, but at least it will be carried away from your lot.  I have not heard of on-site leaching systems as are typical in the U.S.

Reinforcing bar framework for septic tank

In the Philippines, septic tanks are built on-site, not delivered by a truck.

Setting the rebar cage into the septic tank excavation

Concrete floor of tank and beginning of walls and partitions

Lots of smiles, even in a septic tank!

Septic tank just about done and ready for 4" reinforced concrete top. 3-3-10

Septic tank lid ready to be poured.

More details to follow.

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Splicing error in roof beam rebar

Our Philippine house building project: concrete roof beams.  This photo shows the 16mm rebar framework for the concrete roof beam which is supported by the columns and in turn will carry the considerable weight of the roof structure. For that see http://goiloilo.com/our-house-project-welding/.

A visit by our engineer confirmed a problem with the arrangement of the rebar in the beam.  Rebar comes in six meter lengths.  As shown in the photo, the workers spiced all the rebar in the center of the span.  The engineer directed that splices be staggered with no splices at mid-span in the bottom rebar and no splices at the support columns in the top of the beam. Everything you see above will have to be taken down and redone.  Our plans lacked a rebar splicing plan.  This has caused endless required corrections and wasted time and money. Our foreman and workers just don’t know the engineering principles. We’ve asked the engineer to prepare a splicing plan so that the workers (and owners) will be sure that things are done properly.  We suggest that you insist that your architect or engineer include a splicing plan.

Here’s a few rebar splicing guidelines we learned.  They are only rules of thumb.

• The splices for reinforcing bars in the top of the beam should be between columns.
• The splices for reinforcing bars in the bottom of the beam should be approximately over the support columns.
• The reinforcing bar splice overlap should be 40X the diameter of the rebar.  For example the splice on a 12mm rebar should be a minimum of 48cm.  For a 16mm bar, the splice should be at least 64cm.  Longer splices are better.

This photo (above) shows 16mm rebar spliced with a 40cm splice. The minimum overlap should be 64cm. This rebar cage had to be disassembled and redone.

Lintel Beam 2-19-10

The forms shown above are for the lintel beam.  This beam is at the top of the window and door openings to carry the load above those openings.  In the case of our house, the lintel beam will go around the entire perimeter of the house.  Above it will be two more courses of block and on top of that will be the main roof beam.

Rebar cage at intersection of roof beams and column.

It’s hard too see exactly where there is room for concrete in this dense tangle of rebar.  We’ll have to use small aggregate (the rule of thumb is that aggregate should be one-fifth the size of the smallest rebar opening) and gently vibrate the concrete.

A forest of bamboo scaffolding

Bamboo scaffolding in Kowloon, Hong Kong, 2005

The roof beam is complete

The crew worked feverishly to finish pouring the roof beam.  This is the last structural concrete work.  It will take two weeks for the beam to cure, then the steel roof trusses can go on.

More to come…..

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Our welders are paid P280 per day. Our equipment will be paid for in savings on the trusses. We are also considering constructing our own steel casement windows, steel door jambs, water tank tower, car port and lots of miscellaneous projects.  Welders and welding equipment are essential for just about any Philippine construction project.

Making roof rafters (trusses) in our new on-site welding shop

There will be five pairs of the roof truss (rafter) shown above.  Each half is 8.5 meters long, has a 2.5 meter rise and spans 6.5 meters. The total span is 13.15 meters.  The crew wanted to make each piece over-long, lift them up onto the roof structure and then cut them to fit the angle at the roof beam and at the cornice end.  This cutting and fitting of these heavy rafters high overhead did not make sense to me.  Coming from the U.S. and being a little familiar with pre-cutting wood rafters, it seemed to me that we had the necessary information to pre-cut these trusses on the ground. We did a layout on the ground to be sure our calculations were correct, welded up a rafter to use as a template and are making five identical pairs.  The crew will be watching to see if the Amerikano’s theory is correct!

More to come…

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A forest of bamboo scaffolding 3-10-2010

An index to posts about our Philippine house building project. A few of the links are not yet “live” but will become so as the project progresses.

Shopping for steel.  It does seem very difficult to save money on basic materials such as cement and steel.  While there are hundreds of construction supply firms, post-negotiation prices vary only by a few pesos.  There are some pitfalls.  Our specifications called for our roof trusses to be made of 2″ X 2″ X 1/4″ angle bar. Give this spec to construction material sellers and you’ll be excited by the price variations, hoping for a bargain.  Look deeper and you’ll see that there is no 1/4″ thick angle bar available.  After looking at angle bar from various sellers, I decided to buy a vernier caliper so that I could measure the thickness of various items.  It turns out that the prices varied because their response for a price on 2×2x1/4 included material not even remotely meeting the specification; 4mm, 5mm, 5.5mm and 6mm angle bar.  One-fourth inch equals 6.35mm.   The caliper is also useful for detecting undersized rebar.  Not surprisingly, it turns out that, once again, price differences are minor once you’ve finally managed compare products with similar specs.

There’s another complication.  It turns out that steel is sold by kilograms per meter.  This may be a fair way to price steel products but a difficult translation when your engineering specs call for 2″x2″x1/4″!

Welding. The angle iron in this load will be used to make roof trusses.  They will be constructed on-site by our crew, two of whom are experienced welders.  Setting up our own welding shop makes economic sense.  The 300 amp welder and AEG cut-off saw cost about P25,000 or about $500.  Our welders are paid P280 per day.  Our equipment will be paid for in savings on the trusses. We are also considering constructing our own steel casement windows.

My ambition to have top quality concrete quality concrete in our house project has sometimes led to frustration.  My crew are hard workers, but accustomed to their ways of concrete work.  The local gravel contains so much sand that the mix probably ends up being 1-3-2 (one cement, three sand and two gravel).   The workers like this sandy gravel because it’s easy to work with, flows easily into forms.  I pushed to use the washed 3/4′ gravel as the only aggregate, but I learned that the 3/4″ gravel in fact has larger stone which can lodge in the rebar cages.  Our most recent solution is to screen the supposed 3/4″ gravel with  a 1″ screen.  About half of the material passes through the screen.  The smaller material should work better in the columns and beams.

Trying to keep workers from adding too much water to concrete is a legendary Philippine construction problem.  They like to make soupy concrete because it flows easily and does not set-up quickly, it remains “workable”  for a much longer time than proper concrete.  It flows easily into forms.  Once the soupy concrete sets, it looks fine but really is weakened.  When I mange to get proper concrete made, the crew is horrified at at how quickly it sets.  It disrupts the way they are used to working.  I had read that some on-site supervising engineers have been so frustrated with this problem that they just disappeared from the project site.  I now understand their problem. Another problem is keeping workers from “tempering” (adding water and remixing) the already mixed concrete or mortar.  This is a definite NO on our project.  My insisting that concrete be mixed my way is resented by some crew members who have been working with concrete all their working lives.

The above photo is from the end of week three.  About $12,500 has been spent, but a good part of this is in materials stored on site but not yet used, including cement, block, and the load of steel shown above.

With some help from El Nino we have had perfect construction weather.  We have not had any rain since October.  This has been terrible for farmers but good for us. One continuing worry about the dry weather is that our well will run dry.  We use so much water for making concrete, cleaning tools and equipment, watering plants, and for our crew’s personal needs — washing, laundry and so forth.  So far the well has held up.  We had it redug deeper last year.  See http://goiloilo.com/digging-water-well-tigbauan-philippines/ From this point it should be about a month until we have our walls up and roof on.  After that, rain is not such a problem.

Walls, Feb. 13, 2010 (24 work days)

Wetting hollow block

Once you receive delivery of your hollow block, you must constantly keep them wet.  If they dry out they lose strength and eventually crumble back into the sand they were made from. 2-16-10. Day 26 of project.

Lintel Beam 2-19-10

Overview 2-19-10

Excellent new construction on plaza in Lucban, Quezon Province, Philippines

When we added some elements we wanted like a second floor verandah, this is what we got:

Perspective Drawing for our Tigbauan House

But we reluctantly abandoned these plans for a rather basic one story design similar to to a plan we had seen at SOS Children’s Village in Zarraga, Iloilo:

Cottage - SOS Children's Village, Iloilo

Here’s what we have ended up with:

A perspective drawing of the house we'll build

Here are some of the reasons  for our change of of heart as we gave them to a goiloilo.com reader:

Thanks for you appreciative comments about the house design. We had been working on it for three years, ever since we saw a similar design in historic Lucban, Quezon but we have to break the news that at the last minute we have abandoned this design and have decided to build a one-story house. I suppose our decision is really a triumph of practicality over aesthetics.

We had lots of good reasons for wanting a two story house. We wanted a perch where we could have an unimpeded view of the mountains and surrounding rice fields. We wanted to reach up to the cool night time breezes. We wanted to have a second floor refuge from any flooding, especially after experiencing Typhoon Frank in Iloilo City. I wanted an upstairs refuge from the family hubbub downstairs. An upstairs bedroom seemed more secure from robbers. Those were the advantages we saw, on top of the instinctive aesthetic appeal of the two story house. Psychologically, it was perching above rather than crouching below. My mother-in-law says there are two types of homes and home owners, “perchers” and “nesters”.

The building of our bahay kubo helped change our mind. As is traditional, the floor of the bahay kubo is about one meter above grade. This makes a standing adult above the level of the top of our eight foot fence. We are surrounded by land which either has already been subdivided or in in the process of subdivision. The pace of development in the Philippines is such that land around us will be developed, sooner or later. Our lot is only twenty-three meters wide. Our second floor would give us a ring side seat to whatever was going on a few feet away, karaoke, TV, crowing roosters and all the other aspects of exuberant Filipino life. If we built a single story house, our eight foot high concrete wall will provide a considerable buffer from whatever noisy chaos eventually surrounds us. I’m a little embarrassed to show how shallow or thinking was, but there you have it!

There are other advantages to the single story design. This is earthquake country. Panay had an 8.5 earthquake in 1948 which destroyed many buildings. Proper engineering for a two story concrete house (most are NOT properly engineered) calls for lots of very expensive 25mm rebar and steel decking to support the second story floor. A one story house is simpler, more or less like our fence with a roof. Our property is unusually exposed to typhoons. We are one kilometer from the sea on a flat, exposed, treeless plain. That gives us good breezes when it’s hot, but the typhoons will really blast us.

We came to realize that our experience with flooding in Iloilo City was not very relevant to our Tigbauan property which is about
fifty feet above sea level and did not flood during Frank. Certainly the two story house would survive, but maybe we’d be a bit more comfortable hunkered down in a one story house.

More importantly, we are enjoying having Carol’s niece in Tigbauan, sending her to school here and generally trying to give her a better future. Carol’s sister has also been staying with us. The only story house is less elegant, but gives us another bedroom for another niece or two. Eliminating the stairway and second floor complexity allows us to have a four bedroom house for less money than the three bedroom two story house.  In the end practicality ruled.  We knew the room sizes we needed and basically our home is a box containing these rooms.

We did have a few other design preferences.  We don’t use much air conditioning so we want our house to be comfortable without it. We wanted big windows to let in lots of light and breeze and also to reduce the thermal mass of the cement and block.  Our ceilings will be three meters (almost 10′) high and will have ceiling fans.  We have unusually big windows (2.4M wide and 1.6M high) and hence bedrooms may be hot during the day, but should cool off quickly in the late afternoon.  Three of our four bedrooms have cross ventilation, that is they are corner rooms with windows in two directions.  We wanted a big roof overhang to provide as much shade as possible.  Our overhang is 1.5 meters.  Our porch face north and so will be in the shade most of the day.  The location of our lot in open farm country means it’s very breezy, sometime excessively so during the dry NE monsoon.  We have already planted shade trees to the south of the house – Mango and Acacia.  We will put split air conditioning in two bedrooms.  Sometimes aircon is nice when you’re taking an afternoon nap on hot day.  We are pretty acclimatized to the heat but an air conditioned bedroom is an essential courtesy to for visiting friends and family.

Back to the one story design.  It also can’t be overlooked that the old foreigner who will occupy the house will turn 66 this year and intends to spend the remainer of his years in the house we build.  While one hopes to stay healthy and die peacefully in one’s sleep at a ripe old age, the reality is often grimmer.  The climb to our second floor bedroom might become impossible.  I recommend The Denial of Aging by Dr.Muriel Gillick.  It’s subtitled “Perpetual Youth, Eternal Life and Other Dangerous Fantasies”.  This book gives a good dose of reality about aging, but does it in a way which leads to clear thinking rather than depression.  By the way, my father died more or less instantly at 80 of a heart attack on a Florida golf course surrounded by his golfing buddies — so there are happy endings.

We looked at mixers at several locations.  The best we saw was at “New OK Marketing” on Ledesma Street in Iloilo City.  New OK impresses as one of those frantically busy businesses which move a large volume of product out of a small storefront. They seem to know their product, have a good stock of spare parts and can service what they sell.  So far, we are impressed with “New OK”.  They sell and repair all sorts of gas and diesel equipment including generators, brush cutters, chain saws, agricultural and construction equipment.

We also bought a more exotic bit of equipment, a gas powered internal concrete vibrator. One of the challenges of building with reinforced concrete columns, is getting the concrete to flow around all the rebar in the relatively small column forms and thoroughly fill all the voids without making the concrete so soupy that it is weak.

We decided to buy a Chinese-made gas powered internal concrete vibrator to ensure the quality of the columns.  This consists of a Robin 5 HP gas engine with a coupling for a six meter long flexible shaft.  At the end of the shaft is the vibrator mechanism. It bears a frightening resemblance to the equipment used in a colonoscopy! The vibrator is inserted into the wet concrete filled column to ensure that the concrete fills every void.

After considerable use of the vibrator, our conclusion is that it’s more suitable to commercial situations with trained operators and bigger pours.  Some of our workers over vibrated concrete in columns.  The result was that a slurry of water and cement ran out of the form leaving voids in the bottom of columns.  For us the vibrator probably did more harm than good.  See the photo below as an example:

The price of the mixer was P48,000 with a 6.5 HP Briggs and Stratton engine.  A Robin or Honda engine would have added P7,000.  Once proud Briggs and Stratton is now the economy option. We had a choice of a light duty mixer with a Robin or Honda engine or a heavy duty mixer with a Briggs and Stratton engine.   The heavy duty mixer looked 100% better than the cheaper model so we opted for it.  The price of the vibrator was P17,000.   As it turns out, both the mixer and the vibrator required repair.  The Robin engine had a defective ignition and had to be returned for repair.  Both times a problem getting repairs would have been caused vexing delays in the project, but were delighted to report that New OK has really stood behind the equipment they sold us.  The Robin engine on the concrete vibrator was fixed while we waited under warranty, at no charge.  We ran the cement mixer for one day and our foreman sensed that all was not well.  He removed the mixer bucket and found that  the main bearing roller bearing was frozen.  He hopped on a jeepney to Iloilo City and later the same day a technician from New OK appeared at our job site in a New OK truck with all the tools and replacement parts needed to replace the faulty roller bearing — and the new bearing was a USA-made Timken.  The entire repair was done so promptly and at no charge, so we happily recommend New OK if you need power equipment including generators, brush cutters, pumps, compressors, welders and similar equipment.  New OK, 29 Ledesma Street, Iloilo City.  033-337-1023, 335-0509, 337-6931.

Concrete vibrator in action

The business end of the concrete vibrator

Based on the first two weeks on the project, we can’t imagine not having the mixer.  It makes better concrete much, much faster.  We are less convinced about necessity of the vibrator.

Rebar cutter in action

This is a reinforcing bar “rebar” cutter.  Cutting and forming rebar is a big part of building in the Philippines.  On our fence project all rebar was cut with hacksaws.  For the house we invested in this rebar cutter.  It speeds up the work at little incremental cost.  I can’t say the number of “Lenox” hacksaw blades we bought on the fence project but it was dozens.  This cutter cost P4,300 and will be sold at the end of the project.  We bought our at Far Eastern hardware in Iloilo City.  Far Eastern is nirvana for the builder with every type of tool you can imagine on display.

A ponke in action

Building our house in the Philippines.  Ensuring concrete quality.  This photos shows the workers adding material to the cement mixer using a “ponke”.  The ponke is a wooden box with handles.  The inside dimensions of the ponke are 40cm x 40cm x 40cm.  The ponke is sized to hold one sack of cement.  I asked that the ponkes be built and used as a means of controlling the concrete mixture. After research,  we decided on a mixture of one part cement, two parts sand and three parts gravel – a 1-2-3 mix. The use of the ponkes makes it easy to get the mixture right.  Ponkes are rarely used in the Philippines now, but formerly were the norm .  Now materials are more commonly measured using empty cement sacks refilled with sand or gravel.  I wanted the ponkes and my ever patient crew accommodated another whim of the kano.

Our quest for construction quality led us to buy a cement mixer, an internal concrete vibrator and to used washed screened gravel for the columns and beams rather than ordinary unscreened gravel.  We paid P700 per cubic meter for the screened gravel versus P420 for regular gravel.  More on the mixer and vibrator at http://goiloilo.com/building-our-house-getting-started/

One of the crucial advantages of being you own contractor is that YOU have some control the quality and quantity of concrete and reinforcing bar.  If you don’t think this is important, study the photos of the Haiti earthquake.  While there was widespread destruction, many building survived with little or no damage.

Our 1-2-3 mix is almost considered to be an extravagance.  The house you buy already built probably won’t have such strong concrete.  1-3-5 is in common use.  I have seen deliveries of substandard reinforcing bar.  A poorly built house may be built with a “class B” or “class C” concrete mix and not enough rebar.  You’ll never know what’s in your house unless you build it yourself.  It might never matter, but here’s a photo of the church in nearby Oton, Iloilo which was destroyed in the 1948 Panay Island earthquake.

Magnificent Oton Church, destroyed by 1948 earthquake. About 8KM from our building site.

The plan of our house was designed by a structural engineer.  We’re trying to be quite strict in following the plans.  We see quite a bit of good engineering in the plans as we build.  Lots of reinforcing steel is used in critical areas, but much less in columns not carrying much load.  Sometimes good Filipino builders use traditional rules of thumb not based on engineering basics.  This can mean too much steel in places which really don’t need it and not enough in places that do.

At least in the provinces, the ambition to have quality concrete for your project can lead to frustration.  My crew are hard workers, but accustomed to their ways of concrete construction.  The local gravel contains so much sand that the mix probably ends up being 1-3-2 (one cement, three sand and two gravel).   The workers like this sandy gravel because it’s easy to work with, flows easily into forms.  Using 3/4′ gravel makes stronger concrete, but my workers hate it.  Even more importantly, trying to keep Philippine workers from adding too much water to concrete is a legendary problem.  They like to make soupy concrete because it flows easily and does not set-up quickly, it remains “workable”  for a much longer time than proper concrete.  I had read that some on-site supervising engineers have been so frustrated with this problem that they just disappeared from the project site.  I now understand their problem.  I have pushed so hard that it has caused real friction with my crew.   In my mind I know that when the forms are removed the columns and beams look great, impressively solid, the strength of good concrete may have been seriously compromised by my workers ingrained habits.

On a less technical note, I have to observe that this quest for perfection in construction is an obsession shared by many old foreigners building in the Philippines.  There is something a bit irrational about it. They spend too much money on the dream home of their autumn years — their last big enterprise.  Often they don’t end up living in the house for very long.  You’ll see lots of them for sale on the Internet.

Some build and find they don’t like living in the Philippines.  Most foreigners are retired and old.  Many become ill and return to their home countries. The houses they are building really don’t belong to them, as foreigners can’t own property in the Philippines.  The foreigner is dependent on the goodwill of the wife and her family.  This does not always work out.  The foreigner wants a building which will last for generations but it’s likely his residence will not be for long.

The Haiti earthquake comes as we have just finalized plans for our new house in Tigbauan, Iloilo in the Philippines.  Looking at the photos from Haiti, one sees construction that has much in common with that in the Philippines — reinforced concrete beams and columns with a soft block infill.  I have been concerned about some building practices I see in the Philippines; cement blocks that are mostly sand — so soft they can be crushed in ones hand, unwashed sand and gravel from rivers, soupy concrete with far too much water mixed by hand and used for support columns, concrete which starts to set but is revived with even more water so it “won’t go to waste”.   Comments I read about problems in Haiti seem so similar:

“There are also significant problems with the quality of building materials used, says Peter Haas, head of the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, a US-based non-profit group that has been working in Haiti since 2006.

“People are skimping on cement to try to cut costs, putting a lot of water in, building too thin, and you end up with a structure that’s innately weaker,” said Mr Haas, who was on his way to Haiti to help assess the safety of damaged buildings.

“Concrete blocks are being made in people’s backyards and dried out in the sun,” he said.”

Roger Bilham writing in Nature says, “In my visit to the region in the weeks after the earthquake, the reason for the disaster was clear in the mangled ruins — the buildings had been doomed during their construction. Every possible mistake was evident: brittle steel, coarse non-angular aggregate, weak cement mixed with dirty or salty sand, and the widespread termination of steel reinforcement rods at the joints between columns and floors of buildings where earthquake stresses are highest.”

One writer called these buildings, “rubble in waiting”.

In my own experience with building in the Philippines, non-angular dirty aggregate and dirty sand dredged from rivers is in very common use in Iloilo.

Also this from the Los Angeles Times:

Tectonics And Poor Construction Conspired To Create Devastation In Haiti – Latimes.Com

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-me-quake-science14-2010jan14,0,1587916.story

The catastrophic quake that struck Haiti on Tuesday involved a collision of lethal circumstances: a massive, shallow eruption below a densely populated city with few, if any, building codes.

The magnitude 7.0 quake occurred near the boundary between two major tectonic plates, the Caribbean and North American plates.

Most of the movement along these plates is what is known as left-lateral strike-slip motion, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, with the Caribbean plate moving eastward in relation to the North America plate.

Kate Hutton, a seismologist at Caltech, said the quake was similar to those seen along the San Andreas fault: It was shallow, a fact that enhances the intensity and makes it more localized to the region right along the fault.

“We are not surprised by any of it,” Hutton said.

The Haiti quake had many similarities to the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in Northern California. That quake, said Tom Heaton, director of Caltech’s Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory, “caused a lot of damage, but it wasn’t a disaster like this in terms of the number of people injured and killed.”

For engineers and others well versed in the strict guidelines that California, Japan and other quake-prone zones mandate, the devastation seen in Haiti — and other developing countries that have been hit by similarly sized temblors — is horrifying but understandable. They blame the high numbers of earthquake fatalities in developing countries on poor building construction and rapid urban growth.

Before about 1950, a given-sized earthquake would do about the same amount of damage in the developed and underdeveloped world, said Ross Stein, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif. Now the loss of life is typically 10 times higher in developing countries and the damage can be as much as 100 times higher, he said.

When a magnitude 7.9 earthquake rocked China’s Sichuan province in 2008, schools, hospitals and other public buildings collapsed, contributing to the huge toll — about 87,000 dead and missing. Shoddy school construction was blamed for the deaths of about 5,000 children.

The Chinese government was criticized for failing to impose strict building regulations, which it pledged to remedy.

Farzad Naeim, president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, said that the quake in Haiti demonstrates “the same bad history, the nightmare, being repeated over and over again.”

Naeim said that older construction in the region was built at a time when “people didn’t know better.” And new construction, he said, has not kept pace with advances in earthquake engineering, including reinforcements that are standard for new construction in California.

Turkey had a “very advanced code” in 1999 when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake killed at least 17,000 people, said Stein, who has worked extensively in the country. But the government left it to contractors to do their own inspections, he said.

In a city like Istanbul, “you are not really going to get anywhere by making rules,” he said. “Many, many people are just pouring into the area without anything, and they knock down some trees and put a tent up. And the next year it’s a shack. And the next year it’s kind of a building. And the next year they start adding a floor as their family grows or other relatives come into the area.

“So here I am worrying about construction standards, but in reality so many of the buildings are built without any ownership, without any architect or engineer or anything,” Stein said.

“What you have to do is train people to build stronger buildings with the means at their disposal.”

Brian Tucker heads a Palo Alto-based group, GeoHazards International, that works with communities in developing countries to do just that. But he said that people “tend to treat earthquake disasters as God-given and controlled by God,” especially in countries with many other pressing problems.

“I try to respectfully tell people that the earthquake disaster is in our hands,” he said. “It’s not like a comet coming from out of space that you have no way of anticipating.”

Stein, of the USGS, said that part of the problem is that scientists have spent much of their time trying to understand the earthquake risks in California, Japan and other well-off parts of the world with high seismic hazards, while ignoring poorer and more densely populated parts of the world.

That’s why the United Nations Development Program and other international agencies have been helping vulnerable countries — including Jordan, Bhutan, China, Fiji, India and Iran — to improve planning for earthquakes. The U.N. advises governments to upgrade schools, hospitals and other public buildings to better withstand earthquakes; to impose stricter building codes; and to develop evacuation, rescue and contingency plans.

Jordan Ryan, director of the UNDP crisis bureau, said his agency estimates that 60 million people have been affected by quakes in the last 10 years.

Ryan said there had been progress in getting the issue onto the agenda of some governments. “It’s a very difficult argument to make,” he said.

“It’s like the old insurance argument: ‘Who cares about prevention? We don’t have enough money. We’re a poor country.’ ”

More reading:

Flawed Building Likely a Big Element – New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/world/americas/14construction.html?scp=4&sq=construction&st=cse

Haiti’s Buildings Weren’t Fit To Withstand Quakes NPR

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122547242

This is the design we’ve settled on.  More detail on how we chose this design at http://goiloilo.com/our-house-project-design-devolution/

A perspective drawing of the house we'll build

Beginning the layout

The first glitch occurred when the foreman doing the layout assumed that the front of the house faced the road to the south. The house actually faces north toward the mountains. As a result, much of the layout was reversed and had to be redone. Fortunately, no concrete had been poured and the corners were correct.

Rebar cutter in action

Our first load of rebar was delivered — 450 six meter long pieces.  All of these need to be cut and formed.  We bought a rebar cutter to speed the process, being shown here snipping 16mm rebar.  On our wall construction project we cut all the rebar with hacksaws. The rebar cutter really speeds the work.

This photo shows foreman Tatoy performing part of the big job of fabricating rebar cages.  This one is for a house corner column.  It six meters long.  The long vertical bars are 12mm and the stirrups are 10mm.  The rebar seems to have been made at Qian’an Jiujiang Wire Rod Co., Ltd. in China.  They claim to make 16 millions tons of steel products per year.  We paid (Jan 2010) P288 for 16mm rebar, P163 for 12mm and P113 for 10mm.  We are paying P209 for a bag of cement, P300 per cubic meter of sand and P420 for stone.  Sorted, washed 3/4″ stone is much more, P700 per cubic meter.

Excavating for column footers 1.2M deep

Column footer

This is a good overview shot showing how most construction is done in the Philippines.  This shows a column footer excavation which is 1.2 meters (about 4′) below natural grade.  The footer is one meter square.  A 8X8 mesh of 16mm rebar is at the bottom.  The column rebar core rises almost six meters (about 20′) above the bottom of the footer.  This rebar core will be encased in a plywood form into which concrete will be poured and then vibrated in an effort to ensure that there are no voids.   Easier said than done!   This is what greeted us when we removed the form from our first column.

The complicated rebar framework devised by our engineer is much more demanding than the usual square column with a vertical rebar in each corner.  Getting the wet concrete to flow through the multiple rebars is a challenge, especially when trying to avoid over wet concrete.  It’s a perpetual struggle to keep the workers from making the concrete too wet.   Another factor,  we were using 3/4″ gravel rather than the sandier gravel which is typical here.  The gravel “hung” in the rebar framework leaving big voids.  We demolished this column.  You can be sure that this kind of a problem wold be quickly hidden away if you are not on-site supervising.

Editorial comment. If we had it to do over again,  we’d use plain square columns rather than the complex design devised by our engineers. While there may be advantages to the design our engineers provided, the practical problems of building them correctly in the provincial Philippines are several.  Our good, experienced workers had no experience with such columns, or generally such complex rebar configurations.  The aggregate generally available in our rural area contains larger stone which tend to hang up in the small openings.  We had the advantage of a good crew who wanted to good work. a concrete vibrator and screened gravel.  Still we had continuing problems and wasted lots of time trying make good columns using the design we were supplied with. In a situation where supervision was lax the situation would be worse.  Trying to fill the complex framework, the workers would use soupy concrete.  Any voids and defects would be plastered over.  The real world end result could easily be a significantly weaker column than employing the usual simple  square column with four vertical rebar.

Practice makes perfect - an almost perfect corner column.

The rebar at the top of the columns will be tied into the reinforced concrete beams which top the walls of the house.  These elements make a strong, well-anchored frame which is filled in with weak hollow cement blocks which are also filled with rebar and concrete and then parged with a thick coat of stucco-like concrete.  Metal roof trusses are also anchored into the concrete room beams.  The trusses will support long span steel roofing.  We decided to use 6″ hollow block for the exterior walls and four inch block for the interior partitions.  We are purchasing our block from Damasco in Pavia, Iloilo.  We used Damasco block for our perimeter wall.  In our view Damasco is the gold standard for block in Iloilo.  One does pay a premium. Local four inch hollow block costs P9, delivered.  Damasco 6″ block costs P13 delivered, 4″ Damasco block costs P12.   Using better block is a minor extravagance as the cost of block is a surprisingly small part of total construction cost.  More on hollow block shopping at http://goiloilo.com/our-house-project-cement-blocks/

At the end of our first week of construction the first concrete is poured

2″ X 2″ lumber is a staple of construction in the Philippines, used for layout as seen above and with 1/2″ marine plywood for building forms.  Typically the 2X2 is “coco” lumber – lumber from the coconut tree.  My foreman insisted that we buy mahogany instead, saying the coco is dangerously weak.  I reluctantly agreed – coco is P55 for a 2×2x8′, mahogany is about P75 and we needed a few hundred pieces.  Now I’m a convert.  The mahogany is stronger and more durable.  Coco lumber in forms under under pressure from wet concrete does give way more easily.  I do feel guilt.  Much of the mahogany is beautiful furniture grade material.

A ponke in action

This photos shows the workers adding material to the mixer using a “ponke”.  The ponke is a wooden box with handles.  The inside dimensions of the ponke are 40cm x 40cm x 40cm.  The ponke is sized to hold one sack of concrete.  I asked that the ponkes be built and used as a means of controlling the concrete mixture.  We decided on a mixture of one part cement, two parts sand and three parts gravel – a 1-2-3 mix. The use of the ponkes makes it easy to get the mixture right.  Ponkes are rarely used in the Philippines now, but used to be common.  Now materials are more commonly measured using empty cement sacks refilled with sand or gravel.  I wanted the ponkes and my ever patient crew accommodated another whim of the kano.  (Anyone with information on the correct spelling and etymology of “ponke” please leave a comment.   It sounds like it may have a Chinese origin.  This makes special sense as Chinese workers were prominent in the Philippine construction trades.)

One of the crucial advantages of being you own contrator is that YOU control the quality and quantity of concrete and reinforcing bar.  If you don’t think this is important, study the photos of the Haiti earthquake.  While there was widespread destruction, many building survived with little or no damage.

Our 1-2-3 mix is almost considered to be an extravagance.  The house you buy already built probably won’t have such strong concrete.  1-3-5 is in common use.  I have seen deliveries of substandard reinforcing bar.  A poorly built house may be built with a “class B” or “class C” concrete mix and not enough rebar.  You’ll never know what’s in your house unless you build it yourself.  It might never matter, but here’s a photo of the church in nearby Oton, Iloilo which was destroyed in the January 28, 1948 Panay Island earthquake.  You can still see damage from this earthquake at the Alimodian church, only a few KM from our Tigbauan site. Also see http://earthquake.phivolcs.dost.gov.ph/update_SOEPD/Earthquake/1990PanayEQ/index-panay.html regarding the 1990 7.1 Panay earthquake which collapsed buildings in Culasi and elsewhere.

The plan of our house was designed by a structural engineer.  We’re trying to be quite strict in following the plans.  We see quite a bit of good engineering in the plans as we build.  Lots of reinforcing steel is used in critical areas, but much less in columns not carrying much load.  Sometimes Filipino builders use traditional rules of thumb not based on engineering basics.  This can mean too much steel in places which really don’t need it and not enough in others.

Magnificent Oton Church, destroyed by January 28, 1948 earthquake. This is about 6KM from our house site.

Concrete vibrator in action

Look closely and you’ll see the worker using a length of rebar as a probe.  They’ve learned that large pieces of gravel can become lodged in the rebar preventing the flow of concrete down the column.  The internal concrete vibrator (more info at http://goiloilo.com/our-house-project-equipment-shopping/) makes the concrete flow better but can’t be depended on to dislodge stuck gravel.

Our latest response was to screen our gravel exclude larger stone that could hang up in the columns or beams.  We built a simple screen for our gravel using hardware cloth with a 1″ x 1″ mesh.  About one-half of our supposed 3/4″ gravel makes it through this mesh. We will use the smaller material for critical uses such as columns and beams, the larger stone is used in footers and fill for the hollow block.

Our conclusion is that the concrete vibrator caused more problems than it solved.  Most this is because most of our workers had never used a vibrator before and over used it.  In the case of columns, over vibration caused a slurry of water and cement to drain out of the bottoms and sides of the forms.  Left behind were the aggregate but not enough cement to hold it together.  This is shown in the photos below.  Probably with trained workers and larger projects, concrete vibration results in higher quality concrete but for us that was not the case.

The effects of over vibration at the bottom of a column pour.

A column error corrected.

Here’s another worker error caught by our engineer.  Generally the column rebar goes up first, then footers for the hollow block walls.  Then the walls go up around the column rebar. The pouring of the column is the last step.

Here the workers put the hollow block almost against the rebar cage for the column, leaving no room for the concrete forming the column.  This would have resulted in a much weaker column because the block has little strength.  The solution was quite time consuming, chipping or cuting back the block to give one inch of clearance between the hollow block and the column rebar.  With hollow block filled with concrete, this took quite a bit of time.  My foremen, who have built many houses, allowed this to happen, suggesting that it was their usual practice.

Next chapter: Our Philippine House Project – Walls http://goiloilo.com/our-house-project-week-three/

Galphimia Vine (Tristellateia australasiae)

We could not resist starting to plant trees and shrubs on our lot even though a final site plan has not been done or even the final amount of filling determined.  This is because we pass through Villa, Iloilo every time we travel from Iloilo City to Tigbauan and Villa is the garden of Iloilo.  Villa is blessed with superb soil.  This has resulted in  thriving, pervasive plant, shrub and tree growing vendors practically everywhere in Villa.  How can one drive past all these beautiful flowering plants and not want to take some home?  We could not.  Here’s a tally of what we’ve planted so far.

Manila (Christmas) palms

Royal palms

Bougainvillea (lots!)

Batuan http://www.marketmanila.com/archives/fresh-batuan

Allmanda aka Golden Trumpet, Yellow Bells

Indian Mango (from a pit left by workers)

Carabao Mango

Flame Tree (Delonix regia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Poinciana Ours is tiny.  We are sad to note that most of the beautiful flame trees which graced General Luna Street in Iloilo City have been cut down to make way for a “flyover”.

Malunggay (Moringa oleifera) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malunggay

Pomelo (similar to grapefruit)

Calamansi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calamansi

Gardenia

Coconut, Dwarf

Tomato, Roma (seems to be doing well)

Tamarind, Chinese http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/Tama_ind.html

Banana, Lacatan. Many think this variety is the world’s best banana.  The common banana avialble in the U.S. is the Cavendish, a large and comparatively tasteless variety.  See http://www.marketmanila.com/archives/lacatan-latundan-senorita-bananas

Talisay (Umbrella Tree)  This came as a “weed” in another plant we were given.  We planted it and it’s growing like crazy! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminalia_catappa

Camote (for greens)

Avocado

Galphimia Vine (Tristellateia australasiae)

Madagascar Periwinkle (Vinca rosea)

Madagascar Periwinkle

Keffir Lime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaffir_lime and http://www.thaitable.com/Thai/Ingredients/kaffir_lime_leaves.htm

Lemon Grass

Kang Kong – grows everywhere!

We were quoted a price of P250 per cubic meter.  We happended to know that another major buyer of this same material paid P160 per square meter so we offered P170 for 150 cubic meters.  Our offer was accepted.

The truck drivers and helpers ham it up for the camera. Bahay kubo in background.

Four or five trucks delivered the fifteen ten cubic meter loads in one day.  The truck were constantly getting stuck in the clayey soil of the lot.  The workers were pretty good natured about that even though digging the big trucks out was a lot of work.

Perspective Drawing for our Tigbauan House

All about choosing an architect and builder for your Philippine house — our experiences and recommendations.

We spoke with many architects about our Tigbauan, Iloilo house project.  It seems to be the norm for the architect to either have his own construction crew or to have favored construction outfits they work with.  Most Philippine architects will just do the plans for you if you insist, but since most of the profit is in the construction, they are more eager to be involved in both design and construction.  Here are some of the options for the foreigner wishing to build his Philippine dream home.

1. Pay for design services and hire your own crew to do the construction work.   This approach has several advantages if you have the time, skills and confidence to use this approach.  You cut out the substantial profits which would go to the architect/general contractor.  You buy your own materials.  You get the quality you want and avoid the cut the architect/contractor would have almost certainly arranged for himself.  As construction progresses, you are free to make changes without dealing with a contractor trying to get extra pay for change orders.  You are paying your crew by the day so you are in control of any modifications or  added expense. Pay the architect to make site visits on an as-needed basis, at times when there are problems you don’t feel competent to assess or resolve. Since the architect has no business relationship with the construction crew, the architect can be on you side, looking out for your interests.

The key person in this approach is the construction foreman.  An honest and competent foreman is essential.

This is the approach we are taking  with our house building project. We have hired an engineer to develop the plans and obtain the needed permits.  There are seven sheets of plans but no specification manual.  The total cost of plans and permits is projected to be P30,000.

Update: We’d like to reiterate the necessity of having a knowledgeable foreman. The plans were provided by our engineer were lacking in detail.  The engineers assume that many of the construction standards and details will be worked out by the construction crew.  This is a possibly dangerous delusion.  For example there was no rebar splicing plan.  Incorrect splicing makes a weaker building.  There were few dimensions much less plans for the welded steel roof structure.  Our crew, good workers, who had built dozens of houses, did not know the most basic engineering rules so they guessed and did their best. Bob was on-site and caught the problems but much time and money wasted.  Had Bob not been on-site, the crew would have built the house, but with many defects which would have been invisible under plaster and paint.  One good effect; Bob and the crew are getting an modest engineering education.

We are paying our engineer to make regular site visits.  For us this is essential.  We pay her P1,000 per visit.

Despite these problems, we feel that the best bet for a quality house at a reasonable price is finding a good foreman, hiring your own crew, buying your own materials, employing an engineer for on-site visits — that is if you are willing and able to be on-site to oversee the work.

2. Hire an architect to do the design work and put the project out for bid. Shop your project to several contractors.  As in the U.S. this approach invites contrators to low ball their bid and then to cut every corner and seek additional pay for the smallest change or ambiguity in the plans and specifications.   There is little possibility that this approach will work unless the plans and specifications are very detailed. Establish strict mile posts and a corresponding payment schedule.  Be very careful about requests for a large “mobilization” initial payment.  Do not let payments to your contractor get ahead of work actually completed.  This will be a constant struggle.

3. Hire an architect to design and build your house. This is not the least expensive option, but may be the best for property owners unwilling, unable or unavailable to hire a crew of workers and supervise the house construction project.  Here, everything depends on the integrity and competence of the architect-builder.  You must do a comprehensive background check.  Find out what he’s built and not just from him. Look at the houses he’s built.  Talk to owners.  Usually they’ll be glad to show off their houses, or share complaints.  We used this option to hire a talented and personable young Iloilo architect to design and build our perimeter fence.  I did everything wrong.  I only looked at one of his projects.  He drew up the contract and I did not review it critically enough.  I advanced too much mobilization money.  The money must have been spent for other purposes because work slowed to a crawl.  I had to take over the project.  It went well after that, but we lost a lot of money which we were never able to recover. You can read all about it in a separate account here.

With the usual trepidation,  can suggest an Iloilo design-build outfit. Joemarie Yao is a talented designer and an experienced builder.  We’ve seen a number of his buildings and spoken to satisfied clients. As with many sucessful architects, he’s a bright, articulate and charming salesman for his firm.  Once your contract has been signed, your project will probably be turned over to his staff.  The only complaint that we’ve heard is that things do not progress quickly enough for some clients.  If we were going to hire a design-build firm, it would be that of Joemarie Yao, mostly because we appreciate his design talent which tends toward simplicity rather than ostentation.  We have no business association of any kind with him.

4. Buying a lot and house package in a subdivision. Many buy their homes as a lot-house-financing package from a subdivision developer.  There are many such heavily promoted subdivisions in Iloilo City, some run by large Philippines development companies.  They buy large tracts of land cheaply, make improvements (especially lavish gate houses), and make money multiple ways;  selling the lots, building the houses and interest from installment payments.  You’ll be shown a prettily furnished model home.  The base price can seem reasonable, but often not much is included — maybe not even kitchen counters.  By the time you add in all that’s needed to make a livable home you may find that you’re paying a high per square meter price for a house of mediocre quality.  I have heard so many complaints about the quality of such houses and the unwillingness of developers to correct after sale problems.

Buying a house and lot package is an easy option, but we believe it is better to buy a lot and build your own house on it.  Most of the high-end subdivsions only sell lots and leave it to the purchasers to build their own houses. The house lot packages are mostly sold in the lower and mid-range subdivisions.

We build a “bahay kubo” bamboo guest house.  We’re planning on building our conventional concrete house in early 2010.  The plans are just about complete.  More on that later. We decided we’d build one of the pretty native houses, a “bahay kubo”  as a first step.  We selected the above photo of a Panay Island home  to guide the local workers as to what we wanted.  The photo is from the wonderful book “Folk Architecture”, published by GCF Books, Quezon City, 1989.  This book not only has hundred of photos of bahay kubos and other vernacular Philippine architecture but also measured drawings of many of them.

Our rationale for building this now is that we can use the building as “barracks” for our workers from Iloilo City while they work on our house.  It’s likely that we’ll use the same Iloilo City foreman and key crew members as built our fence.  We’d like to give them a little better accommodations than they had for the fence project.  They will stay on-site from Monday to Saturday pay day.  Saturday evening they take a jeepney into Iloilo City to see their family and give their pay — or most of it — to their family. So they spend five nights per week at the site.

Once the house project is complete, the bahay kubo will be used as a very atmospheric guest house.

The bahay kubo is 23′ x 12′ including the porch.  We decided to build using four concrete corner posts or columns which will extend all the way to the top plate.  The columns contain four 10mm rebars which extend above the top of the columns and which will be bent over the top plates to secure the roof strucure from being blown away.  The columns will be one part of the structure the termites can’t eat!  The rest of the building will be built entirely from bamboo and coco (coconut) lumber.  The roof will be of nipa — the thatched leaf of the nipa palm.

Construction began on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 with a crew of four on site.  Here’s a few photos:

The standard Filipino column footer and four 10mm rebar column reinforcement.

This photo shows the location on the lot and the surroundings.

The columns going up.  They will be hidden in bamboo cladding.

Day 9 of project, total expense so far $510

Excess rebar coming out of column tops is bent over top plate to try to stop the roof from blowing off in a typhoon. This is standard practice.

The roof will be thatch from the Nipa palm. We paid P360 per 100 panels of thatch.

Nipa thatch being laid. It is tied on to the roof structure with thin nylon rope. We are laying the nipa with a 3" exposure.

The split bamboo floor being laid over the coco lumber joists.

Our bahay kubo will be sheathed in tad tad.  Tad tad (which means chop-chop in Tagalog and Ilonggo) is bamboo which is unrolled into a flat panel using a bolo to make many cuts in the bamboo until it lies flat.

Marlo is using his bolo to split open bamboo to form a flat panel

The finished tad tad panel ready to be installed as wall sheathing

Tad tad is supported by a bamboo framework

Mortises are chisled into the bamboo studs

Wall framing. The short studs are for window openings.

More progress

Making Shutters

Installing shutters

Porch added, also bamboo shutters

Inside the bahay kubo. We project the final cost to be about $1,500 USD.

Sunset light on bahay kubo.  Note  ”security” light on right.  As is traditional, the globe is the bottom of a plastic bottle, in this case a water bottle.  Vinegar bottles are also popular.  Inside is a 26W compact fluorescent bulb.  These lights, as well as lights and outlets inside the bahay kubo, were installed over the weekend by a neighbor who does electrical work.  Next steps will be adding a porch railing and bamboo strips to hold down the nipa roof.

It’s been hot and dry lately but the bahay kubo stays cool.  The windows set high on the walls and the wide roof overhang keep the sun out of the house during the day, even though there is no trees or shade.  The very open breezy site also helps.

The completed bahay kubo. Thirty five days labor and $1,500.00

Interior with Christmas decorations

Happy homeowner!

Our Tigbauan land is surrounded on all sides by what seems to be flat rice fields, sort of a tropical Kansas.  Fortunately, we have a nice vista of the mountains of Iloilo and Antique Province.  One feature of Google Earth is that it shows the elevation of any location that your mouse cursor  hovers over.  Flooding is a real problem for Iloilo property owners. So, if you locate the property you are considering, you can “cruise” your neighborhood to see if the property you are considering is in a low spot relative to surrounding properties and relative to rivers, fishponds and other water bodies which could present a flood hazard.  I’m not sure how accurate the Google Earth elevations are, but they are well worth adding as one more way to investigate property you are consider buying.

So, how did our Tigbauan property fare? It turns out that our property is the lowest spot in our general neighborhood at 38′ or 39′ above sea level.  Much of the surrounding terrain is 40′ to 42′ above sea level.  Since we are far from any water bodies, we don’t feel we face any real problems but this information will lead us to put a bit more fill on our lot to be sure that it does not continue to the neighborhood’s low spot. So, Google Earth has already helped us with our real estate project!

View into lot through gates.

Property Taxes — a welcome contrast.  When we lived on a farm in Upstate New York, our local real estate taxes were about $4,000 per year.  The annual property taxes of our Tigbauan, Iloilo property are P129.04, however since we paid them early we received a discount.  We paid P98.24 for 2009.  This is for a 1,500 square meter lot.  Of course this will go up when we build a house but still low property taxes are a big benefit to life in the Philippines.

In order to make concrete, the basic building material of the Philippines, water is a necessity.  That’s why a well is the first order of business when building a house.  Most of these wells are what we’d call dug wells but Filipinos usually call deep wells.  Drilled wells are rare here but the Iloilo Municipal Water District does have some drilled wells in Oton.  American colonial authorities and geologists gave up on wells to supply water to Iloilo City and instead built the reservoir on the Tigum River.  It’s still in use today.

We had bought a lot in Tigbauan, Iloilo in the Philippines.  Our plan is to eventually build a house there.  The first step was to build a perimeter wall around the lot.  This is usual in the Philippines and most developing countries.  We hired an Iloilo architect to design and build the wall because we had never managed such a project in the Philippines on our own.  We were a bit intimidated at the thought of hiring and supervising a crew, buying materials and so forth.

Making culvert/well tiles at Damasco, Pavia Iloilo

Philippine wells almost always use precast concrete well tiles.  Since we wanted our well to be good and to have a big capacity we specified that big tiles be used.  We shopped around and found good well tiles at Damasco in Pavia, Iloilo.  More about that at http://goiloilo.com/our-house-project-cement-blocks/

We ended up using tiles that were 36″ in diameter on the inside at 18″ high.  These tiles are very heavy, perhaps 500 pounds each. They are much larger than the tiles most property owners use.  Our theory was that the large tiles would give us a bigger reserve for peak water usage such as garden watering. Our architect-contractor brought in some workers to dig the well.  Locals had told us that wells should be 25 feet deep to ensure a reliable supply of water.

Hauling up dirt from the bottom of the well where another worker is digging.

The actual digging of the well was less drama that I had imagined.  Basically, the first tile is set in place and then workers dig under the bottom tile causing it to settle into the well hole.  When the tile has sunk to ground level another tile is rolled into place on lifted on top and the digging continues.  Since we had a big crew in site for the building of the wall, there was plenty of manpower available to wrestle with the tiles.

Carol and I left for a few days and when we came back we were dismayed to find that the well had been dug so that ten tiles were in place below the surface with two tiles above ground.  This meant that we had a fifteen foot deep well, not the twenty-five foot depth we had been told was necessary.  The well-digging crew had disappeared.  The well tile joints had been sealed with concrete mortar and the exterior of the well back filled.  I was not happy but the architect assured me that the well would be made deeper “later”.  This turned out to be wrong.  The sealing of the joints, and especially the backfilling meant that the tiles were fixed in place and digging under the bottom tile to deepen the well would not work.  Since this was in January, before the hot, dry weather set in, we had plenty of water for the time being — about six feet of water in the fifteen foot well.  The question was would we have enough water for our wall building project as the water level dropped during the hot and dry months of February through May.

Fast forward through almost three months of hot, dry weather to April.  The architect and his crew have been given walking papers and a new crew is on site and making good progress on the wall.  There is only two or three feet of water in the well and we decide we have to take action.  The father of one of our crew members, Juanito Trogani, is purportedly the ace well digger in the Tigbauan, Iloilo area.  This proved to be true.  Trogani came to the site to evaluate the well.  He said all the tiles have to be removed and the well redug.  He agreed to do the work for P800 pesos per tile.  We had more tiles delivered and Trogani appeared with his crew and a few simple tools carried in rice sacks.   We document the work below.

All the tools (rope, a couple of lengths of pipe) arrived in rice sacks over the digger's shoulders. We supplied the bamboo for the tripod.

Bear in mind how much more difficult a job rebuilding the well was than was digging it in the first place.  All of the 500 pound concrete tiles had to be hoisted out of the well using almost medieval technology.  I was really appalled at the risks being taken.  Young men were lowered into the well to tie a rope around the wet, slippery tiles which were then slowly hauled out of the well, mostly by brute force.  I shuddered to think what would happen if a tile came loose while one of the men was in the well.

Hauling the 500# tiles out of the well

This was the brake which regulated tension on the line

The tiles are out and waiting to go back in once the digging is done.

All the old tiles had been wrestled out of the well by the second day and the process of digging the well deeper started.  The well was dug to about 16.5 or 17 feet deep and then two tiles were lowered in.  Digging under the tiles continued.  The crew had to constantly bail water out of the well.  As work progressed the young diggers had to dive to the bottom of the well to continue the digging.

Diggers in the bottom of the well using the tool shown below.

This is the tool used to dig in the confined space at the bottom of the well

So far the digging had been through a very dense clay (probably a vertisol) but at 19 feet we came to a layer of pure gray sand.  It appeared to be almost identical to the volcanic material deposited across Washington State when Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980.  We lived in Washington at the time and remember the snow plow trucks plowing this material off the highways.  Certainly this layer must have been deposited from an ancient volcanic eruption.  It was subsequently overlaid with twenty feet of clay, probably deposited when the area was a seabed.  The sand layer was considered to be very auspicious and digging was ended and sealing of the joints and backfilling undertaken.

Good news - layer of volcanic sand at 20'

The tiles go back in

Total cost was P13,600 or about $285.  Of course this did not include the well tiles which were P870 ($19) each nor does it account for the fact that I had previously paid for the original well digging.  Still the redigging was a success.  We ended up with almost nine feet of water in the well instead of two or three feet.  We went on to add a concrete platform and Dragon hand pump.

Now, after several months the water is still slightly milky.  This is pretty much unavoidable in a well dug in clay, which is the finest of soils.  The particles are so small that they remain suspended in the water rather than settling out.  The heat, the slightly stagnant and swampy nature of the surrounding rice fields promotes algae growth.  Our solution is to treat the well with chlorine powder — or one can just use liquid laundry bleach.  This is a standard well treatment practically everywhere.  Chlorine powder in small packets is sold in grocery stores and given away by government to help residents keep their wells safe.  When we lived on our New York farm our fabulous water came from a mountainside spring.  Our Iloilo water is nothing like that. Filipinos struggle to find and afford safe drinking water and the situation is only likely to get worse as forests disappear and population and pollution grow.  We are fortunate to have a good supply of water from our well but we’ll likely keep buying bottled water for drinking and cooking.

Newly planted Malunggay tree

Planting Malunggay is accomplished by hacking off a branch of sprout of an existing Malunggay tree and sticking it in the ground.  I came back to look the next day and here’s what I found:

Malunggay sprouts leaves in one day!

It looks like we may be harvesting Malunggay leaves in a few weeks or months.  Malunggay is thought to be very nutritious and it’s cultivation and consumption in promoted by the Philippine government.  It seems to have been a native of India.  Lots more information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malunggay

Also note the kangkong (water spinach) spreading on the ground below the Malunggay.  This edible plant is also widely eaten in the Philippines and has virtually taken over our lot without any effort on our part.  I especially like it in the sour soup sinigang.  For more information see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipomoea_aquatica

Building a hollow block perimeter wall around our Philippine lot.

Katherine Boo, writing in the February 23, 2009 edition of the New Yorker magazine makes what I feel are over-politicized theories on fences in the developing world.  Basically she says that electrified fences, walls jagged with broken glass and security gates have gone up as inequality grows, “that however the rich wished to consider the details of the poor, the poor might fully consider the details of the rich.”  The idea is that the rich build walls to protect themselves from a growing revolutionary consciousness on the part of the poor.   In the Philippine context, everyone wants a fence, not to protect themselves from a revolutionary mob, but rather to protect themselves from pervasive ordinary crime.  The poor have as good a fence as they can afford and always a dog to raise the alarm.  If a relative goes overseas and sends money back, a hollow block house and glass-topped concrete wall, may well result.  Read an abstract of Boo’s article (you have to be a New Yorker subscriber to get the entire article) at:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_boo

Now that we’ve defended ourselves and the fence project from political incorrectness, here’s a continuation of our posts on our house building project in Tigbauan, Iloilo in the Philippines.  In this segment we describe building a hollow (concrete) block perimeter wall and digging a well on our lot in Tigbauan.

We described shopping for hollow blocks and well tiles in an earlier post.  View it at http://goiloilo.com/our-house-project-cement-blocks/

Earlier we described buying our property, why a wall is needed:

http://goiloilo.com/our-tigbauan-home/

This narrative will continue until we’ve moved in to our new house.   This post is about building the hollow block perimeter wall itself.  We’ve reconsidered our ideas regarding the kind of fence we want.  In urban areas of the Philippines, high solid block fences topped with broken glass or barbed wire are the norm, but in rural places such as this, we just don’t feel that such a fence is appropriate.  When we traveled through Antique Province we saw that most non-bamboo fences were built with concrete posts about three meters apart, with perhaps one meter of concrete block above grade and the rest of the fence being cyclone wire.  This keeps animals in (or out), allows breezes, does not make you feel as through you are in a penitentiary and, in our case preserves views of the surrounding rice fields and mountains.  However, we’ve recently learned that the land around our lot will be subdivided for residential development we’re going to compromise.  Our wall will be seven feet high.  The first three feet will be hollow block topped with four feet of cyclone fencing.

Job site office and lounge

A first step was building this bamboo “office” for my visits to the job site.

Digging the well

In the U.S. wells are almost always drilled.  Dug wells are a remnant from an earlier era, considered prone to contamination by surface water.  Public health officials generally will not approve their use.  That said we had dug wells at our farm in Essex, New York.  There was a well which must have been dug around 1810.  Then I put in a new dug well using concrete well tiles very similar to those shown above.  In Iloilo dug wells, sometimes referred to as “deep wells” are standard.  Many of them are contaminated and are only used by the affluent for laundry and washing.  Of course the poor have to drink well water.

Down in the well

I was not exactly sure how a 25′ well could be dug by hand, but it’s really not that complicated, at least until water is struck. A shallow hole is dug and the first tile placed in the hole.  The digging team consists of the digger in the bottom of the well, and his helper who manages a pail on the end of a rope.  The digger digs around the bottom of the bottom well tile, putting the dirt in the pail.  Gradually the tile is undermined and the well tiles settle downward.  As the top of the tile approaches ground level, members the other members of the construction crew pitch in to put a new tile at the top and then the digging continues.

We used reinforced concrete well tiles (which are actually culvert tiles) 36″ in diameter and 18″ high.  These are larger tiles than are usually used in the Philippines. The tiles cost P885 each, delivered. We bought ours from the same supplier as our hollow block, Damasco Marketing in Pavia, Iloilo (phone 329-6461). We have been very pleased with Damasco.  So far we have received 4,200 6″ block.  The count of blocks delivered has been accurate and very, very few defective blocks.

As of Jan. 30, 2009 twelve tiles were in place, ten below grade and two above.  There was six feet of water in the well.  The well diggers seemed inclined to stop digging, but January is just the start of the dry hot months.  The water table can be expected to fall further.  The original plan, based on local recommendations, was to have a 25′ deep well, with another 5′ above grade but the well diggers stopped digging, cemented the joints, and back filled around the tiles and left.  By April we only had three feet of water and the level was still falling.  We had to bring in a new crew to completely redig the including removing all the tiles which had already been placed.  I’ve made a separate photo essay on the amazing and terrifying work of the new crew.  See http://goiloilo.com/digging-water-well-tigbauan-philippines/

Digging the trench for the hollow block perimeter wall

At the same time as the well is being dug, the foundation trenches for the hollow block perimeter wall are being dug.  As you may be able to see from this photo, our rice land soil is unbelievably heavy clay.   The mountains in the distance are in Iloilo Province, in the Bucari area.  We decided to back fill the trenches with gravel fill so that we could save the soil from the trenches for use a lot fill.  The gravel fill is better for the fence and the clay soil is better for our future gardens and landscaping.  Later we found out that the heavy clay soil cracks so badly during the long dry season that the crack can cause structural damage to fence and house foundation walls.  The photo below was taken in March of 2010.  There had been no rain since late October of 2009.  Backfilling with gravel can create a barrier or buffer keeping the cracking clay from damaging foundations.  This is a growing problem in the U.S. also as reported in a New York Times article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/garden/04foundation.html

Cracking earth near hollow block wall. 3-9-10

Four foot deep fence foundation trench

It’s been a surprise to me that such extensive foundation work is needed for a simple hollow block wall.  The trenches are four feet deep.  One reason may be that the wall will be retaining up to one meter of fill, so it has to have considerable strength to resist the outward pressure of the fill.  Many poorly built walls tip.  They are everywhere.  When we were in Cebu City we saw a huge section (100 feet?) of concrete boundary wall collapse into a stream during a rain storm.

Pancit Break at the job site

On my way to the job site I stopped at Bong’s Eatery in Oton and bought saipao (steamed pork buns) for the worker’s merienda (afternoon snack).  I was completely upstaged by a this neighborhood woman and her son who arrived with an afternoon meal for the workers.  For ten pesos (about twenty cents) the workers get a plate of pancit (noodles with meat and vegetables) along with two or three small pan de sal (wheat rolls).  She and her family live nearby, “over behind the coconut trees”.  She keeps an account book on collects for the meals on each Friday payday.  Eventually I stopped bringing snacks for the workers as I did not want to compete with Mercy.

Rebar columns for fence

This worker is fabricating steel reinforcing for the concrete fence columns.  The columns are 30cm x 30 cm.  Each contains four 12mm rebar vertically, wrapped with 9mm or 10mm stirrups.  Although the fence will end up being seven feet above the final grade, each column is four meters (12 feet) high –  (a four foot foundation, two feet of fill and seven feet fence height = 12 feet).    The columns are spaced three meters apart.

Rebar column and column footer. The heavy concrete column footer is 80cm (32") square. It is further reinforced when the wall footer is poured across the column footer.

Vertical rebar is 12mm.  Also shows column footer.

It looks a little like a state prison construction site!

February 22, 2009 Update.  A litany of disasters.  The workers had done a great job digging the trenches.  Then a typhoon arrived two weeks ago with very heavy rain.  The walls of the trenches collapsed back into the trenches, almost filling them with mud and clay. They have to be re-dug.  The muddy soil is not a promising base for the footers.

Collapsed trench

Lesson: it was unwise to dig all the trenches in advance.  One side of the fence should have been dug, the footers poured, the block laid and the trench back filled.  That would have limited the trench collapse problem.  Why was it done this way?  I suspect (see below) that digging trenches is cheap because it requires only labor — not expensive rebar and cement.

We made other mistakes.  We advanced too much money to the architect-contractor at the beginning of the contract for “mobilization”.  Although we had advanced nearly 50% of the project funds by the fifth week, work was not commensurate and then almost stopped when there were no materials being delivered by the architect-contractor.  The workers had no materials to work with. We suspended payments to the contractor and had to pay the workers ourselves.  We should have known better than to let payments outstrip actual work completed.  This is unwise anywhere.  Mindful that the rainy season is not far off, we have had to start paying workers and buying material.

Because we had to pay workers directly, we became privy to what wages were being paid.  Wages ranged from P170 per day for laborers to P280 per day for the most experienced worker.  Payroll for the week was P9,320.00 for eight construction workers and one supervisor.

Feb. 23, 2009 a basic materials list for our fence project.  This is for a fence of about 180 lineal meters.  The wall height is about 10 feet, four feet below grade and six above.

• 6″ hollow block – 8,475 pcs – paying 13 pesos delivered.
• Cement – 1,299 bags – Apo brand, paying P209 delivered
• 10mm rebar, 6m length – 1,446 pcs – paying P111 delivered
• 12 mm, 6m length rebar 252 pcs – paying P161 delivered
• Sand 90 cm – paying P290 per cubic meter
• Gravel 111 cm – paying P340 per cubic meter
• Ordinary fill material for back filling the trenches was P170 per cubic meter, delivered in six cubic meter loads.. This is a stony, sandy gravel.  We’ll also use the material for the driveway and underneath the carport and house.

Some of these prices are a bit high for the Iloilo City area but the job site is about 30km outside of the city so transport adds to the cost. The sand and gravel costs seem high.  Soil fill is about P225 per cubic meter.

We have a watchman sleeping on the site along with his family.  Yesterday we had a big delivery of hollow block.  Our watchman, who works as one of our laborers during the day, could not work today because he was kept up at night by people trying the steal block and escape with them across the fields on foot.  They must have cursed us for the heavy six inch block!  No block was lost.  He requested a big flashlight.  I happened to have a five battery-D-cell Mag-Light that I bought twenty years ago, so I gave it to him to use.  This type of theft is routine in the Philippines.  Any more questions why a wall is necessary?

March 2, 2009.  We take our son to Boracay, leaving behind instructions that no concrete be poured until we get back.  We want to inspect the placement of the gravel, the rebar and so forth.  We return the following day to find that about sixty meters of footer have been poured.  Explanation of site supervisor, “I forgot what you said”.

The block sits on a rough pile of concrete. Somewhere underneath is the footer.

March 4, 2009.  I return to the site to see that block is being laid atop that new footer, but the block is not on the footer itself but on a hump of stony mortar several inches high.

Detail of how a badly out of level footer is "corrected". The footer is about 6" below the block.

I’m furious. A fence which will be nine feet high is teetering on a hump of mortar!  The explanation — the grade of the newly poured footer was not right and the “hump” is to correct the level.  Finally it becomes clear that this crew lacks proper supervision.  Perhaps this is the way of ordinary Filipino building, that all of these problems will be adjusted away, hidden away and that the completed fence will look fine.  The “hump” will be buried with the footer back fill.   If I had not been on site every day, the trench would have been back filled and I’d have never known about this bit of creative construction, unless the fence failed.  When you buy a already built house, or if you are not present during construction of your house, you have no idea how many sins are hidden beneath the finishing.  This could have just as easily been the foundation of a house as a fence.At least we’re learning these lessons on our wall and not our house!

We decided that we had to terminate our contract with the architect-contractor.  Although we had paid advances of almost P350,000, the project was being stalled for lack of material and inadequate attention and supervision by the architect.

We hired a new crew who began work on March 13.  So far we’re very pleased with the work.  Bob and Carol are responsible for buying and arranging for delivery of all materials.  Given the rate at which this big, hard-working crew consumes cement, rebar, sand and gravel, keeping them supplied is a real job.

This shows the column and the .8m x .8m column footer ready to be poured

Concrete being mixed. The amount consumed is prodigious!

This shows the wall footer being poured over the already poured column footer.

Pouring the footer, and unending line of buckets of concrete fill the trench.

The new supervisor and crew have made a dramatic improvement in the pace and quality of the work.

Steel and concrete stream into the project site

I am starting to feel guilty about the environmental impact of the wall project.  The amount of concrete and steel being used to fence a small lot seems really excessive.  Perhaps this concrete overkill is to compensate for local construction methods. Materials and mixing are not always up to proper standards.  Sand and gravel can be dirty, mixtures impromptu, and mixing done with a shovel. Filipino concrete construction often seems overbuilt in this way, as though the buildings are designed to last forever.  In reality, the buildings are transitory and are often knocked down in a few years.  The New York Times has an excellent article on concrete at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/science/earth/31conc.html?_r=1&hpw

The new crew built a "bodega" to store materials, especially sacks of cement.

The bodega is sheathed in "hamakan", thin strips of bamboo woven into panels. In Tagalog areas it's called sawali. This is taken from the inside of the bodega.

Tall post to receive electric power built into corner of fence

Detail showing electric cable attachment at corner post.

At long last, real progress on the fence project!

The east wall (above) will be eight feet above the preexisting grade.  If we add two feet of fill, the wall height will end up at six feet.  Th east wall is the only wall which will be solid block.  The others will be two or three feet of block topped with four feet of diamond-mesh (”Cyclone”) fencing suspended from a 1.5″ schedule 40 pipe embedded in the top of the columns.  This will allow air circulation and views of the surrounding rice fields and mountains in the distance.

The east wall will be all block because we adjoin an undeveloped subdivision on the east.  There are five five 300 square meter lots along our 65 meter long east boundary so we eventually have neighbors, very possibly owning roosters and karaoke machines.  Unfortunately we’ll lose some of the cool breezes during the northeast monsoon — the Amihan.

The construction of the wall consists of panels of hollow blocks between 30×20 cm concrete columns.  The columns rest on 80cm x 80 cm reinforced concrete footings.  The blocks rest on a slightly shallower reinforced concrete footing.  The columns are spaced about three meters apart.

Above the footing there are nine rows of filled, reinforced hollow blocks topped by a horizontal reinforced concrete tie or banding beam running the length of the wall.  The rebar for the banding beam can be seen in the photo. Then will come six more courses of block topped by a final tie beam.

Perspective problem

The above photo should show an engineering problem with the fence.  The lot slopes up about two feet during the 65 meters from the road to the rear of the property.  The footers must be level so the footer trenches so they get progressively deeper as the grade rises.  This means the fence will be lower in the rear than in the front.  Is this a problem?

Heavy traffic on the road into our lot. Barangay Namocan is dairy cow country.

Our electric utility is ILECO, the Iloilo Electric Cooperative.  Ileco’s power lines run right by our property.  We wanted to get temporary power installed.  Our crew was mostly from Iloilo City and stayed overnight at the project site.  Lighting would make their evenings more civilized — they could see the food they were eating. Power will be essential for welding.

As a temporary measure we bought a kerosene-powered pressure lamp — similar to the Coleman lamps in the U.S. and widely used in the Philippines for night fishing. Lamps and parts available from Senor Hardware, Iznart Street, Iloilo City.

A neighbor suggested we hook up to his power connection and that we could pay him for the power we use.  We preferred to have our own temporary connection so we asked our architect to apply for a temporary electrical permit to the Tigbauan Municipal Engineer’s office.  Although the Engineer’s office had a form for a temporary permit, actually getting the permit approved devolved into an endless, frustrating bouncing back and forth between the ILECO office and that of the municipal engineer’s office.  Of necessity, we capitulated and accepted our neighbor’s offer.  We had power the next day.  It seems that you get your electrical hookup when your building is complete and that ad hoc hookups are normal for construction projects.

Relaxing with some of the construction crew - Barangay Namocan, Tigbauan Fiesta April 18, 2009

We make access road repairs

Like dumb novices, we did not pay too much attention to the quality of the road leading into our bit of paradise, other than ensuring that we had the legal right to use it. We saw the property during the dry season.  The road was rough but very passable.  Of course, that all changed when the rains came.  Access to our property was just about impossible.  Fortunately, it’s only about 500 meters to a fairly solid barangay (municipal) road.  As is typical, our road served dozens of families traveling mostly by foot, motor bike or tricycle.  The road also served a dormant subdivision just beyond our property.

The seemingly inexorable pace of development in the area helped save us from our road problems.  Owners of lots in the subdivision just beyond us complained that they could not access their lots and road improvements resulted.  The improvements consisted of truck hauling in loads of rough sandy-gravel fill and dumping it on the muddy road.  The trucks appeared and then disappeared, the job only partly done.  Still we were grateful and learned how easy it was to improve the road.  We decided to continue the work in a small way.  We filled bad spots with a total of about 25 cubic meters of sandy gravel, using our worker to spread the fill.  This cost us about P6,000 and made our access (and that of our neighbors) better.

We bought this “Dragon” brand pump at Senor hardware on Iznart Street in Iloilo city for P2,500.  For many Filipino households, this would serve as the all-purpose wash area; for taking a bath (while dressed for modesty’s sake), doing laundry and dishes.  Even some rich households make their help use hand pumps to save money on electricity and to avoid using “NAWASA” — municipal water which costs money.  Most Filipinos must use ground water, whatever its quality.  They have no other option.

The water level -- a key tool

The water level is nothing more than a length of plastic pipe filled with water.  It allows builders to keep projects level.

Neighbor Mercy and her daughter arrive with lunch for the crew

Initially neighbor Mercy sold merienda to the crew but later we hired her to cook a lot lunch for them each work day.  We paid her P200 per day to buy food in the market and P100 to cook and deliver the lunch.  We also bought rice for the crew, a 50 kilo sack lasts about two weeks and costs P1600.

Filling column form with concrete

We put a short length of pipe in the top of each fence column

We put a short length of pipe in the top of each fence column.  The purpose is to allow us to easily add barb wire to the top of the fence if needed.  A length of rebar can be inserted into the top of the pipe and the barb wire welded to the rebar.  We don’t really like the idea of barbed wire but neighbors tell us we should have it.

Almost done!

This photo shows the fence nearing completion.  The north and west walls are mostly cyclone wire so that we can keep views and breezes.

A last step - installing the gates

Gates are installed by chipping holes in the newly-constructed gate posts to expose the rebar in the post.  The gate hinges are then welded to the rebar and the damage repaired with cement mortar.

Gate hinges welded to rebar in posts.

Truck leaves through new gates after leaving a load of fill.

We put more than 100 truckloads of fill.  We wanted to be sure the house, driveway and carport would not flood.

Concrete molding workshop

The workers decided that such grand gateposts were not compete without “capitals”, decorative moldings at the top of each post.  An impromptu workshop was set-up to make the moldings.

Finished concrete moldings - made on site

Filimon Asonada and crew install moldings on front gate post

Saintly project foreman Tatoy checks the work

COST OF THE FENCE: While the fence is not quite complete we can see that the total cost will be about one million pesos including the fence, three gates (two vehicle, one pedestrian), well, pump and fill.  This comes to about P5,500 pesos per meter of fence.

Several factors drove up the cost.  We used better quality six inch block rather than the crumbly four inch block usually used.  The six inch block required more concrete to fill the larger cavities.  Our footers were deep and strong, our columns 30 x 30 cm., our well had to be completely redug because the first construction crew did not make it deep enough for a reliable water supply, and our large downpayment to our first architect-contractor was never recovered.  In general, we erred on the side of doing things right rather than cheaply.  We are well-satisfied with the result.

Still, there is a danger in our approach, especially when it comes to building a house. Being so perfectionistic, choosing the quality  (and more expensive) option for each of the hundreds of decisions when building a house can really drive up the cost.  Speaking for myself, building can be an addiction or compulsion, especially in a place where labor is cheap and the foreigner can indulge every building fantasy.  The foreigner builds his dream home but, if circumstances change, he can be imprisoned in it because he has too much money in the house and cannot sell it except at a big loss.  He more have spent more of his savings than he really could afford leaving him (and his widow) short of money.

Using 20-20 hindsight, we could have done things quite differently.  Consider this.  We could have brought in fill to raise the level of the footprint of the house, the driveway and the carport and surrounded the property with a simple, durable fence of concrete posts and barbed wire, or we could have used bamboo for fencing.  These approaches would have saved a great deal of money.  The environmental and aesthetic impacts would have been much smaller.  From an investment perspective the fence we built probably is OK.  Buyers appreciate strong fences and filled, ready-to built lots.  Our fence gives us a level of privacy and security.  We learned a hundred lessons about building in the Philippines — that’s invaluable!  Anyway, we hope that others can learn from our mistakes, our choices, experiences, as we have.

Finally, Carol and I would like to pay tribute to our construction crew.  Over the years we have read various complaints about Filipino workers.  We were so fortunate.  Our crew consisted of the amazing and indispensable foreman “Tatoy” Fortunato Pornel, 73 years old, and nine to fifteen other workers.  Tatoy has worked construction all his life, all over the Philippines and in Saudi Arabia and Guam as well.  He’s a natural leader and a gentleman who had the respect of the crew and enforced a discipline through example, high standards and constant and good-natured exhortation to the crew.  The rest of the crew consisted of local workers from Tigbauan and workers brought by Tatoy from Iloilo City.  They were a great bunch of workers; good humored, hard working, honest and intelligent.  Nothing was stolen.  When I miscalculated and overpaid a worker.  He came to me to point out my error and return the money.

Carol and I tried to treat our crew well.  We provided a sack of rice every two weeks.  We hired a local woman to cook a hot lunchtime meal for them and paid them a nice bonus at the end of the job.  We endeavored to treat them all with respect.  Carol and I both felt sad when the job was over and these great guys left the site for the last time.  I have overseen numerous construction projects in the U.S.  Our Filipino crew measured up in every way.

Almost done...view into lot through gates.

Now on the the next steps, drafting plans, getting permits and building our house……

We’re fencing the lot we bought in Tigbauan with a cement block wall.  Why?  To keep out roaming carabaos, but mainly because we will be filling the lot to raise its level so that our house won’t flood during typhoons.  Since we’ll be putting in up to one meter of fill, a wall to needed to retain the fill.  The wall may add to our security to some small extent.

Carabao "helps" our surveyor at our Tigbauan lot.

Why do we need to fill our lot before building a house? This photo is just after typhoon Frank left Tigbauan.

The above photo shows usual flooding conditions in Philippine rice growing lands.  The soils are very heavy clay and tend to retain rain water — perfect for growing rice but not really ideal for residential development and especially not ideal of septic systems.

Many expats are willing and able to get personally involved in construction projects; hiring, supervising and firing local employees, shopping and bargaining for materials, getting permits and all the rest.  Bob did not feel comfortable with doing that so we hired an architect to develop the plans and to oversee the project.  Plans?  Yes, a building permit is required for the wall and to get a permit plans are needed.  We also wanted plans and specification to ensure that the wall was actually built the way we wanted it to be built.  We heard lots of stories about poor quality block. We told the architect that we wanted top quality block and that we wanted to approve the quality of the block in advance of its purchase and delivery.  That is proving to be more difficult than we thought.

Our architect knew of a major supplier of block to the Iloilo area so we piled into his car to visit the Damasco block plant in Pavia, Iloilo.  The firm had a small storefront in “downtown” Pavia, so that was our first stop.  They showed us their standard 4″ block.  I really don’t have much experience with block and don’t know proper methodology or equipment for testing it, but here’s what I did.  I brought along my 20 oz. Estwing hammer.  My theory was that rapping a block would at least determine if it would easily crumble.  The ring of hard concrete would also contrast with the dull sound of a over-sandy block.

It was immediately clear that the block we were looking at was weak.  When hit it, there was a very dull thud sound, not the ring of hard concrete.  It was easy to tap a hole in the block.  Anyway, this is a standard block used in most Philippine building projects.  When used in a house or wall they are not really structural.  The block is are reinforced with rebar, filled with wet concrete and then parged with concrete on both sides.  So, the explanation is that the strength of the individual block is not that important.  These blocks are made to sell for little money.  The block I ruined with my Estwing cost P9.75.  Doubtless, this price would be reduced with discounts.  Hence the block is mostly sand with not much concrete.  I have seen worse.  I went to one block plant that made blocks so weak you could crush them with your shoe.

Since our fence was not to be parged, we wanted a less crumbly block.  The worker at the storefront sent us back to the yard where the blocks are made.  Damasco’s was an impressively big operation.   The owner was very articulate about global warming, the Greenland ice cap and Al Gore.  He said the standard block were manufactured at seventy blocks per bag of concrete.  (A bag of concrete costs about P200.) He said the strength of these standard blocks is 300 PSI.  He showed us some well-cured 700 PSI block.  Forty blocks are made with one bag of concrete. I did the “Estwing test” on these.  These were much better, but still not comparable to block I had handled in the U.S.  The owner said he would custom make 700 PSI block for us, but the cost quoted to us is just about double that of the 300 PSI block.  Is it any wonder that most use the cheaper block!  Using better block would add about $1,000 to our fence project cost.  Also the better block is custom made.  The special order takes three weeks to produce.

After looking at and testing dozens of blocks, I decided to use the Damasco 6″ standard block.  The quality of Damasco’s standard block seems better than the competition.   Why 6″?  The price is only P1 more than the 4″.  That’s the only justification I can advance.  We are paying P13 per 6″ hollow block delivered to our Tigbauan building site.  The first 2100 block have arrived and we are very pleased with them.  However, keep in mind that we probably could have bought local block for P7 each.

We have friends in Dumaguete who feel our approach to fence building is extravagant.  Here’s the comments:

“For a fence, 10mm rebar is fine, 12mm is over kill and costly, IMO, if the footings is half again wider then the block size and 10mm rebar in the footing.  6″ block is over kill for a fence also, IMO.  4″ block fencing has stood for generations, even the not so good blocks and without finishing, unless your building a 8′/10′ walls? Also, I DO NOT do the columns with fencing or any hollow block building. IMO, that’s over kill also and more costly with the rebar cages. Over lapping each row of blocks by a  half block and filling with concrete is what is done in the States and has served well. That gives you a solid wall when finished. What I’m saying is, filling each row make the hollow blocks the form for the wall and no form materials left over. The problem with Pinoys, they want to use the block set mix to fill. That’s a NO-NO! Concrete with chipped rock is to be the fill! In other words, two different mixes are needed in building with hollow blocks, fence or building!!”

Other expats have said that the only way to get good quality block is to make it yourself.  You can buy some forms and hire workers to make them just the way you want them.  What we’ve seen so far lends support to this approach.

We also looked at 36″ x 18″ precast tiles for our well.  We got to see them being made.  The quality seemed excellent.

Making culvert/well tiles at Damascos, Pavia Iloilo

Making culvert/well tiles at Damasco, Pavia Iloilo

Poor quality hollow block, crushed with my shoe

We are researching this because we plan to build a house there.  Our first stop was the Globelines office at SM City in Iloilo.  They said that Globe offered DSL Internet service in Tigbauan, but that we could not sign up for it because “all ports are in use”.  Next we asked about the Globe Visability wireless service.  Visability is a wireless service using a “dongle” which plugs into your computer’s USB port. We were told that there is no high speed Globe 3G HSDPA (High Speed Data Packet Access) service in Tigbauan, so Visability service would be limited to GPRS or EDGE.  That’s quite slow and the cost is high, so not a good option.

We  checked with PLDT before we bought our Tigbauan property about the availability of PLDT’s “SmartBro”.  There are now several varieties of SmartBro.  The older version uses a rooftop antenna, costs P999 per month and supposedly delivers 384KBS.

The other versions of SmartBro uses cellular technology similar to Globe’s Visability.  We don’t know if PLDT has 3G/HSDPA available in Tigbauan but we doubt it.  Then there’s the possibility of PLDT wired DSL in Tigbauan. That would be great!

It’s going to be sad to give up the Globe 1MPS DSL we have in Molo, Iloilo City.  It’s not perfect but it’s pretty good and reasonably priced at P1299 for DSL+landline.

UPDATE May 29, 2009.  We’ve now moved to our new Tigbauan apartment and have been using SmartBro wireless Internet service for two months.  We have the “999″ plan which gives us unlimited Internet access at “up to”  384K for P999 per month.  So far, we’re quite satisfied.  It’s not suitable for streaming video or large downloads but works pretty well for routine web browsing but it is surprisingly reliable, more reliable than our Globe 1MPS DSL which rarely reached anything like 1MPS and often just stalled out loading pages.

UPDATE September 17, 2009.  Both Globe and PLDT DSL now seem to be available in the town center.

A major undersea cable comes ashore in Tigbauan and is relayed on through a microwave tower.  We hear rumors that BayanTel, operator of the cable and tower, will offer high end Internet service in Tigbauan.

Smart Telecom technician with SmartBro rooftop antenna

Mounting the SmartBro wireless Internet antenna, Tigbauan, Iloilo. The antenna is pointed toward a Smart cell tower. The towers are equipped with special wifi transceivers. The system works best if you're within one kilometer of a Smart cellular tower.

Here’s the speedtest.net results measured on my SmartBro connection very early in the morning:

Additions and corrections to this info are welcome.

A classic bahay na bato - location uncertain.

Bahay na bato literally means house of stone but almost always means a house with a stone (or concrete?) first level and a second floor of wood.  See http://www.aenet.org/photos/bahay.htm for a little more narrative.  If you’re in the Cebu City area be sure to visit the Casa Gorordo Museum.  Casa Gorordo is a 19th century bahay na bato which has been beautifully preserved and restored (but not over restored) by the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation.  On the grounds of the museum is a bookstore.  I bought a copy of a study of Casa Gorordo “Casa Gorordo in Cebu: Urban Residence in a Philippine Province” by Resil B. Mojares.  You won’t find better writing about old Philippine houses.

Casa Gorordo, Cebu City

The oldest house in Cebu City c. 1738, a classic bahay na bato

Note the fantastic old tile Chinese gambrel roof – “hsieh-shan” (sliced-off mountain).  Studies have shown that the vast majority of skilled building trades workers in Cebu were Chinese.  This place is a treasure.

This looks to be a bahay na bato but a modest version

Leyte House with the feel of a traditional design

Arcade in Florida

House in Florida

Enclosed porch - Florida

Commercial building in Lucban, Quezon Province, Philippines

Excellent new construction on plaza in Lucban, Quezon Province, Philippines

Roof structure on old house, Molo, Iloilo City

Roof, San Antonio Street, Molo, Iloilo City, Philippines

Bamboo over block wall - Sol y Mar Resort, Tigbauan, Iloilo, Philippines

Bamboo wall (over block) pebble over block foundation, Sol y Mar Resort, Tigbauan, Iloilo, Philippines

Classic Panay Bahay Kubo, San Miguel, Iloilo, Philippines

Gate in wall, Montebello Villa Resort, Cebu City, Philippines

Balcony without an entrance - San Jose Street, Molo - not an idea for our house!

Cottage - Pandan

Tiny Cottage - Pandan

Bedroom window 2m high and 2.5m wide (on a 3m ceiling and 3.5m wall). Also note sliding screens. These windows were custom fabricated.

Painted on moldings - it's hard to get more economical than this!

The best window screen system and security grille I've seen for casement windows.

Pretty arcade

Perfect place for afternoon nap!

The systems are not necessarily centralized. The idea is to get wastewater to a nearby ditch, stream or river. Ideally, each residence will have a septic tank or cesspool. This can provide some very basic level of treatment of human waste. The output of septic system (septage) is piped to the subdivision or barangay drainage system. Sometimes the drainage system is more or less underground and sometimes it is open concrete ditches. This can be smelly but cheaper and easier to keep clear than covered drainage systems. In many places the drainage system is under the sidewalks, the sidewalks consisting of concrete slabs covering the drainage channel. Sometimes these are broken, so walk carefully or plunge a few feet into the malodorous mess. There is no further treatment of the waste before it plunges into the nearest stream.

Missing slabs show a typical "sidewalk over sewer" Philippine municipal sewer system in Tigbauan, Iloilo

In squatter areas the the above scenario breaks down and there can be more obvious, surface pollution.

Iloilo has some big rivers with strong tidal flows so all that goes into the rivers seems to get promptly flushed away. My impression is that the situation is better here than in Cebu City where the streams used for drainage were really disgusting.  Check this link for a reality check on sewerage disposal in Iloilo City, but remember that the situation is the same everywhere in the Philippines and in most poor countries.

When you look at property, ask about and confirm the easy availability of a good drainage system. We have looked at property in Iloilo City which seemed so nice but actually had no access to a drainage system. Further, access to the nearest drainage would involve going through other properties. This may or may not be easy. Do NOT expect anyone to inform you of such problems when you look at property.

All comments and corrections appreciated.

Beachfront for sale, San Joaquin, Iloilo - about two hours from Iloilo City (this is an example only - don't contact me about buying it)

Buying rural real estate in the Philippines.  Real estate in the Philippine provinces. There are so many beautiful rural areas in the Philippines.  I think of the lush, unspoiled area around Lucban, Quezon Province, I think of the spectacular rural landscapes in the hills of Bohol.  Closer at hand for us, are the mountains and unspoiled beaches of Antique Province on Panay Island.  When the foreigner sees that fantastic ocean front is so affordable, that the promise of living the beach-front dream is so easily obtainable in these eye-catching rural places.

But, before you leap, consider why such undeveloped rural and beach properties are so undeveloped and so inexpensive.  For the Filipino there is no work.  Whenever one (Pinoy or foreigner) needs decent medical or dental care, whenever you want the most rudimentary imported groceries, whenever you want to dine out, whenever you want a shopping mall, whenever you need a hardware store, you may have to drive hours over rough provincial roads. Not once, but each and every time you need to see the doctor or dentist, for every shopping trip. Emergency medical care in the Philippines is poor in the cities.  Outside the cities there is none. There will be no Internet access, no Goggle and easy access to the world wide web’s rich resources for you or your kids, no Skype to keep up access to your family at home, no email and no blog. For all practical purposes there will be no police protection.  If you have kids, the public schools for your kids will unlikely be what you have in mind. There will be no private school alternatives.  You will be tremendously exotic to your neighbors, some of whom may never have seen a white foreigner before.  It’s likely that there will be no English speakers to chat with.

Don’t get me wrong, living such a life in the rural Philippines can be richly rewarding, but I contend that it’s a rare foreigner who could really be happy without the conveniences and necessities mentioned above. Bless those that can.

I’ve spent decades living in rural and very rural places in the USA; in the mountains of Washington State with no road access, in Maine when I was the only year-round resident of my township and twenty-three years on a farm in upstate New York in a town with a population of 750.  No matter where you are in the USA, you really are not disconnected from essential services and your home culture in the way you are in the rural Philippines.

Here as elsewhere, land prices seem to be directly related to distance from the city.  In Iloilo City (depending on location) land is about 5,000 pesos per square meter.  In Oton, ten kilometers out of the city, land is about 2,500 pesos per square meter, in Tigbauan, twenty-five kilometers out of the city, we paid 1,200 per square meter.  Tigbauan is a far commute to the city.  Continue further out, you’ll find beautiful small towns such as Miagao, and the prices continue to drop.

My wife and I ruled out places we really liked for some these considerations.  We ended up buying property in small town, twenty-five kilometers from Iloilo City.  The town is a very attractive rural place, quiet and beautiful, rice fields, carabaos ploughing, with the mountains of nearby Antique Province as the backdrop, a 250 year old Spanish church and good beaches.  We feel it’s a good compromise for us.  We like small town, rural life.  We’ll get that but we’ll also get reasonable access to the necessities and amenities of the city.

See also my Philippine Real Estate Primer: http://goiloilo.com/a-primer-on-iloilo-real-estate

Pastoral landscape looks like Vermont

The lot we bought is not far from the Tigbauan, Iloilo village center, maybe about 1.5 km.  It’s walking distance to the market and the ocean.  The road we are on is short but really rough, almost impassible after heavy rains.  No one else using the road owns a car or maybe even a motorbike.   The road peters out beyond our property, but dozens more families must live further on, beyond the end of the road.  We see the families walking out though the fields, fresh-scrubbed and neatly dressed as Filipinos almost always are, even if they live in a native-style house with no running water.  Perhaps they’re going to the market in Tigbauan or they might even be riding a jeepney to the big malls in Iloilo City.  Some might be going to work or to school, hoping for a nursing  or merchant marine job overseas  We just never see cars on our road or on the municipal road it connects to.  They’re filled with people walking.  On a school day, you’ll see school kids everywhere, lining every road to and from the many schools.  They’re adorable in their uniforms, but by the hundreds and thousands — laughing, smiling well-behaved.

Our neighbor's SUV

So, I’m slowly adjusting to a new meaning for rural.  My kids grew up in small towns in Upstate New York.  Perhaps we liked Tigbauan because it reminded us of home -  a pretty small town, a stone church, a cluster of old buildings downtown surrounded by farming countryside.  While Tigbauan looks a little like Westport, New York there’s one big difference.  My kids went to the only K-12 school there was.  The total K-12 student population was about 300.  Tigbauan, with about 50% less land area has eight high schools, five primary schools and sixteen elementary schools.  The population of Tigbauan is over 50,000.  Westport NY has a population of 1362.  So, Tigbauan may have reminded us of home but it’s not.  Perhaps this is emblematic of the foreigner’s experience of the Philippines.  We see big shopping malls filled with the usual chains, we see Pizza Hut and MacDonalds and theaters showing Hollywood blockbusters, people speaking English and we feel right at home — but we’re not at home.

Property Taxes — a welcome contrast.  When we lived on a farm in Upstate New York, our local real estate taxes were about $4,000 per year.  The annual property taxes of our Tigbauan property are P129.04, however since we paid them early we received a discount.  We paid P98.24 for 2009.  Of course this will go up when we build a house but still low property taxes are a big benefit to life in the Philippines.

Carabao (water buffalo) "helps" our surveyor.....

Foreigners can mostly shield themselves from the foreignness, the good and the bad, by living in a Western-style house in an upscale subdivision and hanging out at the big malls.  That’s not going to be possible in Tigbauan.  The only shopping is in the public market.  It’s open every day, but market day is Sunday and on Sunday it’s packed with shoppers and vendors, many of which come in from remote farms to sell their farm products.  The older ladies like to smoke cigars which they roll of locally grown tobacco.  There’s a tobacco section, in fact just about everything is sold there.  But this is not a farmer’s market that’s a colorful adjunct to regular shopping.  It’s the only shopping there is.  If you’ve ever wished the mall and supermarkets would go away and things could be like in the old days, this is it — the near-medieval market!  I don’t want to overdo the image of hardship.  Much of what’s on sale is wonderfully fresh and inexpensive; tropical fruits especially mangos, papaya, jackfruit, bananas.  Fresh vegetables — eggplant, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, peppers, green beans, okra, squash, onions, garlic, tomatoes.

June, 2009. Carol holds our first harvest from our now fenced lot. We also have an inexhaustible supply of kang kong which has spread over the lot.

The rice fields around us are mostly owed by a big landowner.  We have seen a tractor adapted for work in wet, muddy rice fields.  We have seen walk-behind tractors, similar to roto-tillers.  But mostly we see Filipinos in conical straw hats, plowing with carabao – water buffalo, planting rice by hand,  just like one of those grainy old movies about China.  One of reason we bought the particular plot of land we bought is because wireless Internet access was available.  We’ll build our house, sit on our porch surfing, watching the carabao plowing the rice fields around us.  We’ll walk to that medieval market to shop.  For sure, it’s going to be a seismic change.  Stay tuned!