Nine months or so ago everything connected with the sale of our existing home, and construction of the new one, seemed a tangle of dead-ends. It was about that time that a black-and-brown mutt appeared in the parking lot of our condo complex. Her life was a much bigger mess than ours. A medium-size female, …
Author: Alfredo Lanier
My husband and I live on an off-the-grid ranch outside San Miguel, along with the challenging but dear company of four off-the-street dogs and three cats. My interests lie in politics, writing, photography and sundry forms of spirituality.
A Day's Hard Work
According to a newswire story just a few days ago, Mexico's unemployment rate had "spiked" to 5 percent in January 2009. That is still almost three percentage points lower than the latest national jobless figures for the United States. Indeed, in some specific U.S. markets like Oregon, unemployment approaches 10 percent. More incredibly, two years …
Off the ground
It looked and felt like an apparition. After almost three years of watching our house plans stumble over endless obstacles and delays--architects, legal problems, squabbling neighbors, plus the occasional waffling and changes of mind on our part--on February 10 we actually broke ground. We showed up at the land early in the morning and a …
It's Not Easy, or Inexpensive, Being Green
Building in the country will force us to revisit assumptions and calculations about how much we are willing to pay for a so-called green or sustainable home. Hey man, using photovoltaic cells or wind turbines to generate your own electricity sounds awesomely cool and progressive, doesn't it? Maybe so, but when you get an estimate …
Architectural Plans Take Shape
Voila. The sudden appearance of architectural drawings might suggest this project is leaping forward. Well, hardly. Or at least it doesn't seem that way to us. It has taken over six months, and a change of architects, to get where we are. We're delighted with the results, though. Friends keep telling us this is the …
Fast forward to 2009
When the deal to buy the land in Taboada fell through in late 2006, our home building project went into hibernation for nearly 18 months. We were as exhausted as we were frustrated. Then in the summer of 2007 a friend who already lived in the country mentioned there was land for sale nearby. We …
What's in a Dream Home?
While the paperwork related to the land in Taboada worked its way through the Mexican legal system, we hired an architect who asked us for a description of our dream home. It was a good exercise that forced us to think this project through.Here is what Stew and I came up with. [Notes in brackets …
A House in the Country
In March 2006, approximately four months after arriving in San Miguel, a tiny two- or three-line classified ad in the real estate section of the English-language newspaper pointed us toward open land outside the city and upended our notions of what kind of house we wanted to build. Ultimately the deal fell through but along …
San Miguel in a Bubble
Stew and I had visited San Miguel three times before we finally moved here in 2005, and arrived armed with the notion--I'm not clear based on what information--that a house in San Miguel could be had for somewhere around, say, $250,000.And not any house, mind you, but an authentic, centuries-old colonial with an interior courtyard, …
The Jungle Gyms of San Miguel
On Nov. 1, 2005, Stew and I took off from Chicago to Mexico, driving a VW Passat station wagon crammed to capacity with suitcases and sundry junk that spilled over into a shapeless roof carrier held down with ropes. Think "The Clampetts Head for Mexico." Along for the five-day drive were our two cats, Ziggy …
El Rancho Santa Clara 