Backing Up - pt. 1

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Well, finally hit some problems with the house. It's too long to go into detail on the blog, but unbeknownst to me, one of the days that Juancho (proper spelling, not Wanchow) and I went to Almirante for supplies, he let his crew work on the finishing the framing. As far as I can tell, he was having semi_skilled laborers try their hand at some unsupervised carpentry in our absence. You know that's gotta turn out well. They didn't follow his instructions and cut some corners - literally. When the floors and walls were put in, it became evident something was seriously cockeyed with my house.
Advice - if you ever build in Bocas, bring your own tape measure and level, so you can personally check work. These guys just have their eyes on the finish line and the $$$.
The disturbing thing is the 2 guys on his crew that knew better (the guys he brought in for floors and walls) went right on putting on the floors and walls on a house that they knew was not square.
Basically it was one big mistake that everyone ignored, until I put the brakes on everything. Imagine your mattress is a house and you pull up one corner of it and keep it that way. That was it, one corner concrete pylon was too high. Instead of leveling it, the clowns cut 3 1/2 inches off the 8 ft. corner post and 1 inch off the 2 adjoining ones.
Luckily, I'm smarter than my builders, and after studying the problems extensively (not much else to do when you're sitting there with no power, no water - that was supposed to be in yesterday in a no-problem scenario, no furniture, no books, etc.) I came up with some simpler solutions to level the floor and roof without dismantling the whole house. We did the floor yesterday, after about an hour of explaining it, the lightbulb in Juancho´s head went off, and it was smooth sailing after that. That corner looks bad, but when I realized it was my kitchen and everything would be covered up I thought it was a good solution. So now I have level floors.
I'm running out of computer time, and I'm out of building money, so when they finish my terrace extension and water catchment that's already in the pipeline, I'm going to have to shut it down. Total cost thus far with these 2 unfinished projects are completed -- about $9700. I figure about $15000 to $16000 total for a complete furnished house. Still needs plumbing, septic, kitchen, and furnishings. Until next time............

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Photos

I built this from scrap
It matches the house in craftsmanship.