Our houses were designed as a box with a top basically. A 24 foot by 24 foot square box which was to be delivered to the property on the back of a flatbed truck and hauled through the Maya Mountains across bridges that were no more than eighteen feet wide. On some bridges, our houses hung over the sides of the bridges above a rushing river below as they were delivered to our property for installation.
Belizean pre-fabricated housing.
They were delivered a day before I arrived in Belize to supervise the placement and construction of the houses for two weeks.
Allen Reimer had decided he didn’t have time to wait until I arrived a day later and placed one of the houses at the front of the property very near to the ocean and at a sharp angle and I decided I did not like it there and asked him to move it.
So, we placed the end of a flatbed truck under it, tilted the house up with a forklift and backed up until the house rested on the flatbed and we let the house down and drove it to where I wanted it. We then placed the pilings at the four corners of the house, lifted it up off the flatbed using the same forklift and drove the truck away gently, as we only had one forklift and the house needed to be left balanced on the four pilings.
No Steve, we are no longer in Kansas.
This really only took the better part of a morning and after lunch, I was ready to tackle our house. The biggest problem with that was I also really wanted to keep a couple of 20 foot Palm Trees, which were located only a few feet from where I wanted the front of the house to be.
It’s not that easy to manoeuver a house on the back of a flatbed and the placement of the second house took the rest of the day to get into place but by the end of the first day, we had both houses in place and ready to begin adding footings to.
The next morning it began to rain. It rained all day and all night and the crew worked putting in the pilings and levelling the houses with the forklift and by the end of the second day, although the property was covered in water, we had both houses perfectly level on their pilings.
By the third day, we had to pour the cement for the foundation but had so much water on the property we had to dig a trench the entire length of the property at an angle so we could drain the water away from the houses. I was having a blast by now. I was absolutely soaked and dirtier than I had been for twenty years and loving the hell out of it.
These were my houses at the Ocean’s Edge.
Over the coming week or so, we set about cementing in the foundations such as they were, clearing the property, and beginning the decks around the houses. By the time I left to go back to Canada to get Yim, the houses had roofs completed and doors on them, which could be locked.
I was thrilled.
Two weeks later I came back with Yim and we drove to the property to give her a first glimpse at her house on the beach and I think it was one of the most exciting days of my life. We had done it.
We had a house on the Ocean’s Edge.
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