Sunday, December 23rd, 2007...12:09 pm
Construction in Mexico
The owner of the apartment building where I live is adding more apartments. The construction site is what used to be a parking area where I was able to store my pickup. The work began in the Summer, and every day since there have been from two to more than ten fellows working on the project.
The work began with the demolition of the areas of the parking lot slab where footings would be poured and a small structure that existed on the site. Demolition was completed by a group of fellows with hammers and chisels. No machinery was used.
There is almost ubiquitous here during weekdays and Saturdays the clinking of hammers on chisels and the thump of sledge hammers colliding with masonry, as workers demolish or remodel existing structures.
Keep in mind that labor here is inexpensive so everything is done quite labor intensively. I believe the minimum wage for construction workers here is about 47 pesos per day, roughly the equivalent of $4.35 US.
These photos show typical construction in Mexico, which consists of concrete columns, spanned by concrete beams, and topped with a structural slab floor or roof. The columns you see here will support the load of two additional stories and a roof. You can also see that lumber supports have been placed against the columns, upon which the beam forms will be placed. The spaces between the columns will be filled with either brick or concrete blocks, which will be finished with a layer of stucco.
Every bit of concrete that you can see in the photos, and a substantial quantity which can not be seen, has been mixed by hand and poured into the forms from buckets. The concrete is mixed on the existing concrete slab, where gravel is placed in a bowl shape; sand, cement, and water are added; and workers with scoop type shovels do the mixing. Such is how concrete is typically mixed here. A couple of days ago there was a group of workers mixing concrete in Calle Calijero, one of the main drags through the Centro shopping district, with which to patch a relatively large portion of one side of the street which had been excavated.
Kicking Calvin in Playa Baracoa.
2 Comments
January 5th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
[…] few days ago I posted pictures of the work of constructing an addition to the apartment building in which I […]
February 4th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
[…] I posted relative to the construction of an addition to the apartment building where I live, here from December and here from last […]
Leave a Reply