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The House… what worked. Ventilation

Jonna — Mon, 25 May 2009 00:22:35 +0000

This is the tropics, it’s hot. Yes, I’m adjusted to heat and I’m comfortable at a lot higher temps than others. Still, when it is over 100°F or 38°C it is hot. How comfortable you are in the heat is dependent on air moving and heat rising away from you. We have the benefit of really high ceilings, they average about 18′. What also works is that air moves through the house easily, leaving the rooms high and taking the heat with it. We have a lot of options for controling the air flow and by opening the high windows in the doors at night and closing them in the heat of the day the inside of the house stays 15 to 20 degrees cooler than outside. That brings even the hottest day into my comfort range.

Terrace

May is supposedly the hottest month of the year and we have been very comfortable all month with no air conditioning. I’m actually amazed and I’ve been ready to call to have it installed but so far I just haven’t needed it. I will say that it has been very dry and while May has the hottest temps, it also has relatively low humidity. We spend most of our time on the downstairs terrace, we have wifi and comfortable seating and fans for the afternoons. We’re also a few steps from the pool and that helps in the heat of the afternoon.

afternoon nap hammock

We’ll see if we spend more time inside once the rains start. We are hardly ever in the living room right now. I do go in there and nap in the hammock on a hot afternoon. It’s always much cooler in there and I love that hammock. It’s double woven and soft as silk, plus it is extra wide so I can pull half of it over me and sleep in a cool, dim cocoon. I had to raise it higher than is usual to keep dog noses from waking me up. Tita loves hammocks, she jumps up and naps in it with me.

Hall

The long hall from the front to the back of the house moves air from all the rooms and pulls it out. The space over the inside pond that goes up to the sky lets the hot air rise up and out. It keeps the kitchen cool as well as pulling hot air from the transom windows of the living room and office. The house just stays cool, it’s amazing how well the design works. The garage is always at least 10 degrees hotter than the rest of the house because it is closed off from the hall.

So far, mosquitoes haven’t been a problem. That could change with the rains. If it does, I think we will be inside more in the evening since we have no screening on the terrace. Right now, we leave most doors upstairs and down open during the day but close them at dusk and then reopen them when it is dark. I am glad that the deck off the bedroom is screened because I would not like sleeping with it open at dawn.

entrance to master bedroom

The upstairs gets warmer in the afternoons but cools off fairly quickly in the evening. We have double doors in our bedroom that open to a walled patio with screens over the top. Opening the windows in the main doors and keeping those double doors open to the patio pulls the cooler night air through and over the bed.

We sleep with just a sheet but there have been a few times that I had to get up and get a blanket. This is what I am most surprised about, I thought I would need AC for sleeping. I’m usually comfortable in the daytime but when we were living in the RV last summer I got used to sleeping with AC and under a big comforter. I didn’t think I’d adjust so easily to the warm nights. I’m enjoying it though and it is nice not to be cold when I first go to bed. I’m the one that always had to have a hot water bottle for my feet, not now.

doors open to private patio

That screened and walled patio off our bedroom is one of the best things about the house. I love the privacy, that my shower is open to the sky, that I can see the Cathedral from the shower but still have privacy. The dog door in the door to the roof is a wonderful thing too. We close the door to our room, but open the screened windows in it, and the dogs sleep in there but they go in and out to the roof when they want. I find them out there laying in the sun in the morning, even my dogs like the heat.

master bath

I have a hammock on that patio too and I slept out there a couple times while Mimi was in Akumal and we were having a heat wave. Both nights though I woke up just before dawn and came inside because I was cold. It’s nice to have for falling asleep on a hot night.

The layout of the house has proven to be one of its best attributes. We live and sleep in the back of the house, thus I rarely hear traffic noise. Of course, it’s a Mexican city so we hear the bar at the corner, the dogs down the block, the kids in back and the guy yelling “paleeeeetas” from his trike, but we don’t hear or smell the buses and cars.

bedroom patio

A garage was one of my few requirements in the house we bought, they won’t allow you to convert to one now. They do grandfather the ones that were already converted, so what was once a bedroom right at the street, is now a garage and a sound and heat buffer as well.

The room behind it was originally a bedroom but when Henry suggested we add a floor for bedrooms, it became an office. Thus the first room that we would use often, the living room, is well back from the street and insulated from sound and heat.

I’m working on a few more of these, I hope it is helpful to others.

The House… what worked. #1 The Architect

Jonna — Sun, 24 May 2009 19:21:04 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile. We’ve been living in the house now for 3 months, long enough to have figured out what we love most and what really works. I think it will be a series, as I realize something that really works well, I’ll post about it. I’ll probably also do a post on what doesn’t work. Happily, that list is much shorter.

Building or renovating a house is such a personal thing, so much depends on how you live and what is important to you. An architect can only do so much, you have to get involved and you have to really think about how you live. That said, a good architect is probably the most important component in the whole process. They are the ones that know how to do what you want and there will be a zillion things that you don’t think about but the architect will, another zillion options that you have never heard of that they can tell you about.

Henry & Mimi look at original house

One thing that is different here in Mérida, and perhaps in the rest of México, is that many architects also function as contractors. They have their own crews, their own sub-contractors and they are responsible for the whole job from design through construction.

I’ve mentioned before that I picked the architect before I picked the house. I picked him because I looked at a dozen houses he had done and while some were not my preference in style I realized that I could live in any of them, happily. His eye for lighting both natural and artificial is incredible, and light is one of the things I notice first about a house. He keeps the design details simple and authentic; space, light and color flow through his houses.

Equally important is that the architect is honest and reliable. I talked to the owners of the renovations, I searched for info on forums and I found a universal respect and a very high approval from his clients. I finally found one guy who wasn’t happy and we went to see him. It turned out he never really hired Henry, but they disagreed on the preliminary ideas and he felt he wasn’t listened to properly. What it really sounded like was just a personality conflict, they didn’t mesh. Not one person complained that he didn’t do the work agreed on, that he cheated them, that things were not fixed as they wanted. The recurring comment from everyone was that he backed his work and if something wasn’t working, he fixed it. He even fixed things on houses that had been done by one client and then sold to another, his work was guaranteed in a way not often seen.

Same area now

So, the first thing that worked about this renovation was Henry Ponce. Hiring him was the best and the most important decision we made. He was easy to work with, funny and kind and he listened. He told me when he thought one of my ideas wouldn’t work and he looked away and said nothing when he thought one of them was bad design. I learned to interpret those silences and after re-thinking the ideas I changed to his version in all but a very few cases. Not because he said anything but because when I really thought about it, he was just right. A couple times I stood my ground and in a few of those cases he later told me he thought it worked.

When we moved in the first thing Henry said is that we would find things living here that had been missed or didn’t work right and he expected me to let him know right away and they would fix it. The list has not been long but what I did find was dealt with immediately. The other day, the water pressure seemed low so I called. The plumber came and discovered that the float in the cisterna was stuck and the pump wasn’t coming on. I call and someone is here in a few hours. I don’t have to worry about who to call or how to contact someone, I call Henry’s guy and he gets it done. It makes life in another country and another language a whole lot easier.

Looking at costs, I think that I have saved money by using Henry. His fees are reasonable and they include the discounts that he gets from suppliers which means that I would have paid a good portion of his fees in increased costs for materials and labor. If you consider that I am a foreigner and would never get the prices that he gets, I would spend an enormous amount of time looking for suppliers for some things, and that I would not know what to look for in many areas of construction and would be a prime target for shoddy workmanship, then it is the best deal possible – and that is without counting the benefit of his incredible design skills.

So, my number one piece of advice if you are considering a renovation or building a house in México, spend a lot of time researching and then hire the best architect you can. It will pay off in money and in satisfaction with the completed house.