Why Benguet ?
Because my wife was born and raised in Dalupirip. I met her there in 1980
and soon afterwards we got married in the Pacdal church in Baguio City.
We always wanted to return one day to build our house and live there.
We decided to start with
the building of our house in December of 1998, and from the start didn't plan
to finish it all at once, we wanted to complete the project over several years,
because we are building a lot ourselves and to make the financial burden a
little easier.
The Design
We wanted a modern house
with all the conveniences, ( we did get spoiled here), but not to large. It
had to have a guest room, so friends or relatives could stay for a visit.
We wanted the guest room to have a full washroom so we could also use it for
a Bed and Breakfast.
We settled on the design you can see below, we changed the original design
to our liking, with the aide
of a computer design program.
We knew what we wanted and had gained a lot of experience in building, after
we build our
own house and several other construction projects here in British Columbia,
Canada.
The Building
Building a house in a
remote place where all materials have to be hauled over a narrow winding dirt
road and then carried by hand over a (persons only) suspension bridge, gives
some extra food for thought.
All sand and rocks had to be carried up from the side of the river.
The hollow cement blocks were made by hand one at the time by my brother-in-law
and his partner. We needed at least 2000 blocks.
The construction started by leveling
an area where the house was to be build.
This leveling was done by a contractor from La Trinidad with a crew of 10
men, they used wheel barrows, shovels and bars as tools and finished this
job in record time.
The crew we hired for this were such hard workers and impressed me so much,that
I asked them if they were interested in building the house as well.
They told me they were not experienced in building houses as their work was
Rock wall construction, site excavation and road work.
I convinced them to do it after I told them that I would do all the layout
and would guide them
in the construction project.
The contractor brought in a relative who had carpentry experience and who
would be in charge building the forms for the concrete pillars, which hold
up the main structure and the roof. Because there are frequent earthquakes
in this area a lot of reinforcement is used in
the concrete even the hollow blocks have reinforcement in them.
The Roof
We decide to spend a
bit extra on the roofing and used painted steel roofing and gutters for our
project, this was ordered from a roofing supplier in Baguio City which would
also do the installation.
Each piece was about 23
ft long, and I was afraid it might not make it around some of the corners
on the single lane dirt road from Baguio to our place, all went well without
any problems, this again had to be carried piece by piece over the hang bridge.
The roofing supplier was actually
an architect, he was a very capable man who had a lot of experience in building
locally. He mentioned we should consider installing a thin sheet of insulation
under the steel roofing so there wouldn't be any problems with condensation,
which in turn could drip down on the ceilings inside the house.
We took his advice and let him add this to his roof installation.
The Windows
We installed aluminum
windows which were ordered from a window maker in Baguio
Aluminum windows are more expensive than steel or wood windows, which are
used a lot locally, but with aluminum there is no maintenance, no painting
required and can not rot or rust.
All windows are individually
made to measure for each window opening in the house,
not like in Canada or the USA where the openings for the windows are made
according to the size of the window.
We were very satisfied with the window manufacturer and their installation.
