re-modeling

7 October 2008
About remodeling a house in Morocco. Lessons learned (could probably be applied in any country, actually): 1—assume that you will not be moving in on the day you are originally told you will be moving in.2—be prepared to be amazed at the number of ways rocks can be used in building3—being involved in the building process will help to ensure that you get better quality, and that little things don’t get forgotten.
I wish I had taken before pictures so you could all see the transformation (as yet not-quite finished)! The house had not been lived in for 8 years. It had been neglected, used as a good place to slaughter goats, and to store random bits of stuff. There were broken pots in the back room along with old shoes and an inch of dust, and the roof needed structural help in a couple of places. The roof was also leaking very badly, I remember looking at the floor when I first got there and noting the drip marks in the dirt floor… not a good sign. Why, you ask did I decide to live there when I had another perfectly good option? Well, there was the fact that my host family really wanted me to live in this house (for a variety of reasons; money, proximity…), and then there is the balcony. ( Like my mother, I looked at the view from the balcony and was more or less sold on it. It’s a pretty typical house for Ouled Ali: mud walls, and floors. Kind of like an adobe house in the southwest, actually. The roof is made of logs and sticks with mud, plastic and more mud over top of it all. The windows don’t have glass in them but do have iron grating in them and wooden shutters. The house is built onto my neighbors house. Most houses are sort of paired up with at least one neighbors house. The result is a kind of warren of curvy, narrow, steep walkways between chunks of houses. For example, my host families house shares roof and walls with both their neighbors and the mosque. This meant that at prayer time I had to be careful about going from my room to the kitchen, because the east facing windows looked right into the courtyard area of the house. Not so good to be distracting the men while they are praying. Anyway, the point is, houses are built together like combs in a beehive here.
4 months, major structural work, plastic on the roof, concrete added to the floors and half the walls, after the installation of stairs (instead of a steep and rickety ladder), and the installation of a bathroom, and a sink and counter, running water, electricity, two windows, a clothesline, a new metal door, a layer of whitewash and the rebuilding of the door frames later… I am living in a comfortable house. No furniture… cooking appliances for sure, though! I am lucky to have electricity, so I can have a refrigerator.
I painted a goodly portion of that whitewash myself. I don’t know what the whitewash is made of here, but it is super, super corrosive. I have scars on my arms from where some of the whitewash caked and dried and gave me chemical burns. Needless to say, after that I decided to buy some heavy duty rubber gloves so that I could whitewash with my skin intact. Whitewashing has been followed by scrubbing. LOTS and LOTS of scrubbing, to get the drips off of the wall and the floor. I still have some scrubbing to do. The thing is that I’m trying to keep things moving along as far as getting projects going and integrating into the entire community. This keeps me out of the house and away from scrubbing and washing and furniture building that needs to happen. Oh yeah; I’m stealing my friend Dan’s good idea and building myself some furniture. I bought 50 stalks of bamboo and a roll of wire to build myself some risers and shelves for storage. It should be an adventure, I’ve never worked with bamboo before, nor have I ever built furniture! Good thing I have wire-cutters with me. Thanks Dad!
Most creative use of building materials: my host father installed a new lock on my kitchen door using the old top of a sardine can as a backing for the lock… talk about reusing possible trash materials!!! It looks good, too, with its brassy finish. Kudos to him!