Christian´s Blog In English

Here is Christian´s post translated into English.

¿Can you tell that each morning it gets colder?

The picture above gives new meaning to this sentence.

Winter is slowly coming and influencing our daily lives. In our house in Viña, Keri and I are starting to cuddle closer together at night as the temperature continues to drop. For other, however, fending off winter so easily is impossible. Before winter truly sets in, our goal is to finish the roof of the house in 6 more days.

The recent earthquake has limited the stock of roofing materials, specifically tin and zinc roofs. The majority of government housing uses these two materials to cover the roof, making it nearly impossible to buy. Therefore, we have had to change our roof due to the diminished stock of zinc and tin roofing materials. Objectively, having to change the materials of the roof implies a slightly higher cost. Normally this slight difference in cost wouldn´t be problematic, however we are working with a very tight budget. In this project, every peso counts.

We have chosen the best alternative to a metal roof from the materials available, keeping in mind the cost and the time it will take to roof the home. We chose to use asphalt roof shingles as the alternative to the less expensive but hard to find zinc roof. Asphalt roof shingles have existed in Chile for about 15 years now, and a few years ago they became accessible to the middle class. Their insulation properties are much higher than the traditional roofing materials used in Chile due to the fact that they are highly impermeable and denser than the metal sheets. These properties offer an enormous benefit to houses because they help to further insulate the interior of the home.

We have run into some difficulties when designing the roof; however we have resolved these problems and are very happy to be moving forward with our plans to roof the home. Each day our dream of building a conformable home is materializing itself, and we are happy to be helping this deserving family.

Lets talk about what we can perceive from these two images. The family is actually living in the first structure. Under the protection of nylon and a few metal sheets, this family sleeps on two mattresses on the ground.

This image is worth more than 100 words.

Our consolation is that very soon our dream of finishing the home you see in the second photo will soon be a reality.