A Year in Oaxaca: Part 5 — Home Improvements

Now in our new home, we turn our eye toward renovations.

Author’s Note: Today’s entry is part of a recurring series excerpted from the book proposal I am working on. The same type and variety of other posts I’ve been writing will also continue to appear. The previous entry is linked below. Thank you for reading!

A Year in Oaxaca: Part 4 — A New Dog

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The upstairs living room with the old, brick floors.

A curious change in perspective occurs when a place you’ve visited as a tourist becomes your home. The main draw of a good vacation isn’t just that you’re not doing what you typically do; it’s that you’ve completely and deliberately removed yourself from the circumstances of your normal life. Even if you love and cherish the minutiae of what you do on a normal day, visiting your regular unexciting grocery store and seeing the neighborhood dry cleaner who always takes the time to wave at you, vacation lets you slip, for all to brief a period, into what is more or less a fantasy. You eat and drink more than you should, sleep too much (or perhaps not enough) in a bed that isn’t your own, and, if you’re fortunate enough to be able to travel somewhere far from where you live, pass your days in a series of places so removed from your typical life that it can feel like you’re wandering from the scene of one postcard to another. 

A great vacation is one where a place so thoroughly captivates you that you feel content even when you might be thousands of miles from home. That’s what we experienced in Oaxaca. Picturing ourselves living outside of the United States was easy—the country seemed to get worse with every passing day—but leaving New York, despite its abundant flaws, had been unthinkable before. We were so taken by Oaxaca, though, that, for the first time in our lives, we could truly picture ourselves living somewhere else. The house, and Penny casually mentioning that she and Victor were interested in selling it, anchored the fantasy.

The veneer a vacation liberally applies to a place begins to wear off, though, once you’re confronted by the daily realities of life. Most of life is spent doing the rather unglamorous activities necessary for daily survival. You’ll burn through more of your days on this plane of existence cleaning your toilet, doing dishes, and folding laundry than you will enjoying joyfully traipsing around on vacation. The small things, the daily things, matter, and having moved into our new home in Oaxaca, we began to apply a more critical eye to our space than we did when we first visited as guests.

Small realizations crept in gradually. “The bar holding up the shower curtain keeps falling down!” Andrea exclaimed angrily one day from the midst of a shower. I came in to rescue her and readjusted the inexpensive tension rod that was being used in lieu of a permanently installed stainless steel curtain rod. With the shower curtain once again hanging more or less securely, I glanced around the small, steamy, rectangular room. “The wall sconce for the light is also rusty,” I said to her, “and I noticed this morning that the faucet of the sink twists in its mounting.” A deeper examination revealed that the wood vanity had begun to rot, the edge of the sink needed to have more silicone applied to it, the wicker light fixture hanging from the ceiling was old, dusty, and covered with spiderwebs, and the toilet seat needed to be replaced.

As is true about all things in life, if you go looking for problems, you’ll find them. As tourists, we didn’t need to worry about whether a faucet oozed water from its base or if a wooden drawer wasn’t properly set on a pair of rails, but as homeowners, we were abruptly on the hook for every minor detail. Soon we began poking into corners and more deeply examining the nooks of our home. What we found spoke to maintenance that had been deferred.

The grouting of the downstairs tile was old, to the point that in some places it was missing entirely. Some of the screws holding up the hinges of the bedroom cabinets had completely pulled out of the medium density particle board that someone—likely a cheapskate carpenter pocketing cash on the side—had used instead of real lumber. Hooks screwed into the backs of bedroom doors, intended to hold items like light coats or bathrobes, had been installed upside down. The kitchen sink leaked, the cabinets smelled like mold, and the overhead lighting (a feature most rooms didn’t even have) flickered and was almost uselessly dim. 

Edgar spent a considerable amount of time during those first few days leading me through the house and gardens while pointing out small details I never would have noticed otherwise. He gestured as I gaped, and while he considerably slowed down his Spanish so that I could better follow along, it was immediately clear that one reason for a lot of the smaller issues was that he had a thousand different problems to worry about.

While Edgar was capable of doing minor electrical work, light plumbing, and even some construction, for the bigger projects we’d need to bring in experts, and before we’d even purchased the house we’d identified three projects that needed to be done before our possessions and furniture arrived: replacing the upstairs floors, redoing the upstairs bathroom, and replacing the cabinet doors in the upstairs kitchen.

The original floors were brick that had been interlaid in a basic repeating pattern and coated with some type of clear varnish. They were pleasing and had a warm, worn-in, rustic/industrial look. The problem was that bricks in Oaxaca tend to be made locally and fired with wood, a process that makes them soft and not particularly durable. Over time, the coating had worn off, and many of the bricks had loosened, chipped, and cracked. The floors had become mottled and stained, and in a few places the bricks had already been replaced, making the floors look patchy and uneven. When we told Edgar that we wanted to replace the floors, his wife Adi, who had been Penny and Victor’s housekeeper, chimed in to say, “It’s important the floors are smooth, dirt will get trapped in any small spaces.” Given her vested interest, her feedback was weighed heavily.

Our decision to update the bathroom required no debate. Penny and Victor bought their home partially finished, and one of the strangest inclusions in the home was a large therapeutic-style bathtub, a monstrosity made from cream-colored molded plastic set with multiple massaging jets embedded in its surface. Despite being rather gargantuan, it could only fit one person at a time, and not a large person at that. They hated the tub and rarely used it, and strongly urged us to replace it with a shower. We needed no convincing, and because the entire room was made from poured concrete, removing the tub meant we’d have to redo all of it from floor to ceiling.

Lastly, we wanted to replace the cabinet doors. Like the rest of the house, the cabinets themselves were made from poured concrete, meaning that they were effectively unchangeable unless we wanted to bring in a bunch of guys with jackhammers to wreak havoc on our kitchen. But the cabinet doors could easily be changed. Blonde colored and set with old lengths of carrizo, a type of local reed similar to bamboo, they were made from what seemed to be a motley assortment of cut 2x4s and had chunky wooden blocks as handles. They were badly showing their age and we wanted something different.

Sitting on the couch one evening, Andrea and I discussed where to start and agreed that the floors were the obvious answer. “We need to start this project right away,” Andrea said somewhat fretfully. “Our stuff is supposed to get here by late October or early November, and if the floors aren’t finished by then, we’ll have to move everything out so that they can do the work.”

She was right. Not only would replacing the floors mean that they’d have to be completely clear, removing the brick would be filthy and destructive. We had a narrow window of time to choose the tile, find someone to install it, and then have them complete the work.

We had been very fortunate to have Penny and Victor’s help, and happily took their recommendations on any number of things related to life in Oaxaca. When they said we should hire a builder named Antonio and that his prices are fair, his work of good quality, that he and his crew are trustworthy, and that our gardener and handyman Edgar likes him, it was an easy decision. Plus, if we liked the job he did on the floors, we could also use him to replace our bathroom. If he wanted the work, Antonio was our man.

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