Our fault...

Everybody in Popayan who is not a builder, warns you that all builders are dodgy. All builders in Popayan tell you that clients are very unreliable and often dont pay for work done.... The reality must lie somewhere in between.

We got a few recommendations for builders and contractors from friends and people we know, although everybody insisted that we must personally buy all the materials and be checking up on the workers at least once a day to make sure there´s no funny business. We took the first recommended builder out to look at the plot and quote us for the first stage, the leveling, retaining wall and foundations for the house. Within two days we had a quote back which looked reasonable, but here you never take the first quote so we invited the handyman from the hostel out to take a look. He´s the brother in law of Nata, who works here at the hostel and it turns out has been working in construction since he was 13 years old, he has a builders permit and has built many houses over the years. He took one look at the land and said that despite needing the contract pretty badly at the moment, he wouldn´t build the house on the plans no matter what you paid him because there´s a fault line running right across the width of the plot. About 2 metres from where the first wall was to be built. Seemingly water has been filtering through the earth and collecting in an underground chamber which has started to split open and according to Rodrigo, puts us at risk of slipping gradually into the forest should we try to put pressure on the land at that point.......back to square one!

Back to the architects to change the designs, back to speak to the engineers about the possibility of building on a fault that´s possibly 8 metres deep, back to town planning to see if they´d accept modifications without having to go through the whole application process again. To be honest, the whole thing was starting to look like a bit of a nightmare, we were wondering what sort of a can of worms we had bought!