San Pancho Vida

How to Build a Wall Fountain -- Part 2

So, as I was saying last week before we ran out of time, you get your ladders and your paints and your brushes and a couple of rags. You also need a yogurt container of water because -- and this is very important -- there is no water yet in your fountain!

You paint for a little while, until you get hungry. You go inside and have a half a carton of cottage cheese (which is so delicious in Mexico) and take a picture.

You paint for six hours. Then you look at your wall and have a conniption fit because it is so awful. You sulk and cuss and go to bed that night convinced you have wasted an entire day and will now have to repaint the whole wall in a solid color with a normal roller and forget this whole stupid idea.

The next morning, you skulk downstairs, avoiding looking in the direction of the fountain wall outside the living room window. You have several cups of tea to steel yourself. Then you go take a look. Huh, you say to yourself. It's not quite as bad this morning as it was last night. Let's just start messing around with it and see if it's totally hopeless or not. 

Up the ladder you go. Five hours later, you stand back. You pick up a brush again and add a bit of paint here, a bit there. You wipe some of it off with the rag, which now has a lovely impressionist look to it. You admire the rag for a while. You dab some more colors on the wall. You stand back, then spend another hour adding some more color here, some more there.

You wander into the kitchen and open a cold cerveza, just to allow the paint to dry a bit, because you've had another idea.

You go get the wax you bought at Comex to make your wall lamps look aged. Although you are somewhat pooped by now, you climb back up that ladder and smear the brown wax all over everything, then wipe it back off, leaving some of the wax behind in the deep parts of the plaster finish.

Hmmm. Getting closer...maybe just a few more hazes of color up there and down here...

By now, it's been over seven hours, and it's time to clean up and go out to Panchito's for a visit and a break.

The next morning, you wake up a little bit excited. You barely finish a cup of tea before you start applying the purple that Jesús, the genius paint-mixing child down at the Prisa store on the corner, figured out how to get just right after nobody else could. It doesn't take all that long, which is good, because it's Easter Sunday and you want to spend the afternoon at the beach.

Now you have to wait a few days, as Jesús insists there is only one epoxy-type paint that you can use on the inside of the fountain, even though Lupe put on a coat of sealer. But you've learned to trust Jesús in matters of paint. So he orders it from somewhere.

Finally, it comes, and he's had it mixed to exactly the color you wanted, and of which he approved. You spend an hour or two mixing and applying it, bent over double and headfirst into the fountain, which would make you very dizzy even if you weren't inhaling epoxy fumes the whole time. Whoof.

A couple of days later, after the paint has cured and during which you went out and bought some papyrus and some pots, you turn on the hose. The fountain begins to fill. You go pot the papyrus and come back. The fountain seems no fuller than it was when you left. Uh-oh. You reach in and push down the bathtub style plug at the bottom. It definitely seems to fill faster when it's not simultaneously draining.

You put some of your water plants in there.

When the water is deep enough to cover the submersible pump, you try all the switches on the wall until you figure out which one might actually turn it on. The motor starts to hum...but nothing happens. You count to ten...and the water starts to flow.

Real quick, you put another plant in a hanging pot you bought in Tonalá and hang it on the screw Esteban put in the wall yesterday.

Then you try the submersible light, and it works, too.

Well, can you beat that! you say to yourself. I think it's done!

And it turns out that it is.

(...except for more landscaping, and the free-form mosaic on the front curve of the basin, which I'll get to eventually (see math formula in last week's Part 1)...)

P.S. As far as colors go, they're going to look different on everyone's monitor, so I'd have to suggest you just come on by one of these days and take a look!

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Next week we'll take a peek at Día de Las Madres, Mother's Day in Mexico, which seems to last a week, as well it should.

 

How to Build a Wall Fountain

Hola, amigos y amigas, and welcome to the second installment of our sporadic series entitled “How to Build a (dot, dot, dot)”. 

The stretch of time between the first installment, published here on November 5, 2010 ("How to Build a Pool Fountain") and this second episode can be entirely attributed to a common mathematical formula: the total number of days of elapsed ÷ the amount of time actually spent at the casa × Other Projects And Involvements + normal Mexican mañanas and glitches².

The important thing is, we’re back and we have a wall fountain that might even work. 

You may remember the last time you saw reference to the wall fountain, which was one particularly frustrating day when I banged the bejeesus out of it with a hammer, ostensibly to make it look old, but also to relieve a surfeit of tension. Here’s what it looked like at the end of that day:

                     (From "If I Had a Chair" , November 12, 2010)

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, as usual. Let’s start from the beginning steps, shall we?

(1)  Pick a wall, and have your plasterer put the plaster on real thick and sloppy, sort of like a 4-year-old icing a cake. Do not lick the spoon.

(2)  Find some old pieces of cantera stone that nobody else wants and bring them home.

(3)  Have your builders make a basin up against your chosen wall, then plumb and wire it.

It's okay if your painters decide to paint the wall in there somewhere. Also, you can have Julian use some leftover cantera pavers to build an edge around the basin (optional).

(4)  Get Lupe. (Not optional) 

(5)  Figure out, with Lupe, how best to mount the old cantera pieces so that they look nice and will enable a gentle flow of water into the semicircular basin.

Lupe will then do some fancy chiseling followed by some measuring and drilling in order to insert pieces of rebar into the wall and the cantera pieces so they will stay put.

Then he will attach them to the wall.

(6)  Pick up a piece of burnt cooking wood from beside the fountain and trace a shape for Lupe to fill with concrete.

(7) Add a submersible pump, a lamp, and switches for both, any or all of which may or may not operate.

Later, get a hammer and bang up the new concrete (see above).

(8)  Wait. (See above, mathematical formula.)

You can buy some plants in the meantime.

Eventually, when the time finally comes, bring all your leftover paint up from the studio. It will probably be all dried out, or moldy, so go buy some new paint and gather up a bunch of other stuff.

Borrow Jack’s tall ladder so you can reach the top of the wall, and start playing.

Oops, I see we're out of time. I guess we'll have to continue this installment mañana, by which I mean next week.

Don't forget to come back! We can find out together whether we have a working wall fountain...or not.

Have a great week, pleasant travels to those of you who are returning to the States this week, and Happy Mother's Day!

♥

 C

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How to Build a Pool Fountain

Hi there, and welcome to Part One of our new (limited!) series entitled, "How to Build a (dot, dot, dot)".

I've been waiting a long time to post this. Since last January 11, to be precise, when this project entitled "Pool Fountain" (or, in español, "Cascada de Alberca") commenced. I remember thinking how weird it was to be working on the pool when we didn't even have rooms. I still think it was weird, but what the heck. 

Here's what the house looked like back then, just to refresh our collective memories.

Yet we were building a pool. I think it was because someone needed Christmas money, but that's all water under the non-bridge.

Speaking of water, let's get on with our educational step-by-step non-Video Presentation, How to Build a Pool Fountain.

First, send some guys out to get you a whole bunch of really nice ocean rocks.

Second, get Lupe.

Third, get Lupe a helper.

Probably, by the time you start your project, your rocks have been sitting in a pile for a couple of weeks and are spattered with concrete and other construction detritus. Don't worry, Lupe's helper will clean them all off with muriatic acid. You can watch, but stand back, it stinks.

You notice he is barefoot and wearing neither gloves nor a mask. You don't say anything, though, because that's the way it's done.

Examine your rocks carefully and pour on more acid if necessary.

Once your rocks are cleaned off and well-rinsed, wander around selecting the prime specimens. Begin moving these into the general vicinity of the future fountain, making use of whatever construction scrap you have on hand.

Now you will commence the delicate task of placing the rocks just so. If you are this blog's writer and her arquitecto, you will become quite absorbed in this operation, selecting the position of every rock, turning each one to the left and then to the right, trying this view and then another, a quarter turn that way, no, an eighth, and then back again because it was better the other way.

You can afford to do this because you are not doing any of the heavy lifting whatsoever.

Fortunately, Lupe and his helper, who are doing the heavy lifting, seem equally absorbed and eager not only to listen to your endless discussion, but also to manipulate the rocks. Let's not put those two white ones right beside each other. Wouldn't the round one be better nearer the spout? Where shall we put the one that looks like an ice cream cone, and what about that one that looks like a baby seal? 

In fact, although you are aware of the muffled hysterics of the other jobsite workers sneaking peeks at this operation, you might spend three whole hours getting those rocks just the way they were meant to be.

If you want to, you can use some of the leftover rocks to make a sculptural array on the other end of the pool.

At this point, you turn to your arquitecto and ask, "What happens next?"

He will say, "Now Julian puts the blue tile all the way up there under the rocks," to which you will reply with some emotion, "I don't think so!"

Your arqui will give you a puzzled, slightly frowny look and ask if you have a better idea.

You will say, "I do, and I have Lupe."

You will ask Lupe to mix a grout the exact same color as the beach sand into which your rocks were nestled before they were snatched up to become parts of a Pool Fountain.

He will do this, of course, after which he will use the grout to tuck in those rocks like so many fat happy babies all snuggled in for a long peaceful nap.

Then he will apply a sealer to the whole shebang.

You can stand back now and admire, but make it quick, because with all the mess of construction still underway, you must wrap your pool.

It doesn't have to look pretty.

And now you wait...for ten months.

If you are as patient as a beach rock, the time will come when the pool equipment to go with the pool is installed, when the lights are connected and working, when the pump is connected to the cascada.

One fine day, your design and labor will come to fruition...

...and you can stand for a while and appreciate it, bathed in a San Pancho sunrise.

 

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P.S. Yes, I know I promised last week to show you what was going on with that other fountain that came unexpectedly in the load from Salvage Guy, but we had a bit of a glitch this week. On Saturday, the %$#@*& contractor called the electrical crew back to Guadalajara for five days so they could work on setting up for some who-knows-what function for the &*%$@# governor of Jalisco instead of putting in the measly two days left to finish my house!

God, I hate politics.