A month of moving hell has passed already, and the new condo is slowly becoming ours. This last move seemed to be the worst. Maybe we are just getting older? The distance was probably less than 1 kilometer, but moving things went on for a whole week. Our new car got a good workout with every inch being loaded and then making the climb up our steep hill.
Steve packed most things while I was in the US, leaving my "things" for me to sort out, also leaving out hardly any kitchen dishes, utensils, etc. except for the pans. It made for an interesting week of trying to figure out what to fix to eat. He did the slepping of boxes from Paramount Bay while I unpacked. I realized after a couple of days of this that the two of us have very different packing methods. I like to pack everything from one room and then know that I'm finished with that room before going on to another. Steve had gone around the condo and looked for things that would fit into an empty box until it was full. One of our friends explained that it probably was because Steve was using his physics background and wanted to be sure that every possible centimeter of space packed into a box most efficiently. That may be true, but it makes for horrendous unpacking. I must have walked miles and miles just going from room to room while unpacking one box.
Our owners, very thoughtfully, “decorated” the condo with way too much furniture and artwork which wasn’t to our taste. Since we already had too much, our first challenge was to figure out what to do with everything. Initially, we thought that we’d have to have a bodega built, but we managed to squeeze quite a lot into the closet space of the TV room. This closet is the whole length of the room, so it’s quite big. One of the owner’s sons came to our rescue and picked up what we didn’t want to keep. It was such a relief to have the closet so that we could fill it with our things.
I can’t remember if I said in the last blog that our owners are Mexican and speak almost no English. Sorting out the contract was “interesting”! We love having “the other son”, whose name is Salvador, keeping in touch with us because his English is pretty good. He’s married to an American lady. Both are sweet, and Salvador is our savior as we are sorting out all the glitches! The owners won’t pay for any of the maintenance work that we are doing because they consider them upgrades, but this is very typical of Mexican owners. A lot of the maintenance repairs should have been done long ago, but they never happened. In our climate, things tend to deteriorate very quickly.
Boxes were unpacked and cleared, and we began sorting out things such as finding which light switch worked which lights and what power points worked. You wouldn’t think it would be that complicated, right? What we thought was an abundance of both switches and power points turned out to be about half the number of what it originally appeared to be. When we realized that several didn’t work, Steve started removing the plates discovering that some of them had nothing behind them while others had wires just twisted together but no caps. Almost all have now been replaced – by Steve. He wanted to put LEDs in our overhead lights, which are spots so when he began this process, he found that each of the spot-lights had a transformer, which was completely unnecessary. He’s now pulled all of those and put in LEDs so he’s happy.
There have been all kinds of similar discoveries. There is an internal phone system here so that residents can call security or contact each other. An old phone was plugged into it, but neither the phone nor the connection worked. Our friends upstairs kept trying to call, as many as ten times in one day and finally came down to see if we were OK. It hadn’t been a priority until our friends checked on us. We threw the phone away, and we have a new one that I tested out today.
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| TV room |
In addition to fixing a lot of things, we had to sell some of our furniture, and then buy some new pieces. None of the bedrooms had any dressers or drawers, and neither did any of the bathrooms. A lot of our new condo’s features are beautiful but not functional! For instance, we have a frosted glass wall between the main living/dining room and the TV viewing room. It has lights inside, and it rotates. On the other side is a huge TV. I can’t see that we’ll ever be rotating it, or using the awful lighting. Also on our not practical list is that our closets are frosted glass and the bottoms are glass as well with lights in the bottom. They are very pretty at night but not practical to put anything on them. The closets didn’t have any shelves, so Steve built some into two of the room-sized closets.
There’s still so much to do such as painting almost every room, more repairs, installing ceiling fans and blinds and then polishing the marble floor. Oh yes, and getting the marble vanity fixed in the main bathroom. There’s a 3-4 inch bit that goes around the front and side, and we noticed that it was coming off, so we pointed this out to the owners when we did our walk-through. Following that, Steve propped it up with a board. A few mornings ago at 5 am, we heard an earth-shattering crash. Thinking one of the cats had knocked off something heavy and might be trapped underneath; we jumped up and started searching the condo. The last place to look was our bathroom and there on the floor in several pieces, and lots of black dust was the marble piece that had come loose and fallen.
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| Balcony half were cats made their escape |
One of our main concerns was getting the cats to adjust since they had been happy in the other condo. Ali is such a trooper and adjusted immediately, Kato took about 1-2 days, and Sadie seemed fine after about three days. That was just adjusting to the inside. Our next big hurdle was getting them adjusted to the balcony. It stretches the full length of the condo, and the cats love the space but are perplexed by the pool. Our problem is that half of the balcony overlooks the roof of the neighbor’s balcony below and the top fits right up to the bottom of our balcony. Our friend’s three cats on level 11 come and go to their neighbors using the roof. Everyone seems fine with it. Our neighbor has a dog, and our cats have never seen a dog, so I’m not sure what they would do. Ali was the first to try his escape, but Steve caught him and then put up netting. Kato has made two unsuccessful attempts and one successful one. He went over to the neighbor’s side, and we had to coax him back with treats. Steve has now set up an electric wire to keep Kato from climbing over. So far he’s not tried it, but I’m sure he’s just waiting until we aren’t watching. Sadie managed to catch a bird on our bedroom balcony and left it in our closet for us.
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| Dipping pool overlooking the bay |
I’ve just had a dip in our dipping pool on the balcony. At first, I thought the water was too warm to be refreshing, but I was wrong. It felt heavenly, and since it was overcast this afternoon, it was perfect.
The past couple of months have seen unfortunate health issues for a couple of our friends. One of them had a major heart attack and was rushed to the hospital here in PV. They put in stints but then sent him to Guadalajara for a triple-by-pass. The night before he was to go into surgery, he had another heart attack so was admitted immediately. They managed to stabilize him for the night and did his triple-by-pass the following day. He’s now doing very well! Another friend found out two weeks ago that she had a tennis ball-sized tumor on the right side of her brain. They scheduled her operation for a week later. She had her surgery here in PV with the neurosurgeon from here and another from Guadalajara. She is doing remarkably well and went home from the hospital two days after the surgery. We are just so impressed with the medical care here. Both friends had major surgeries that would have cost 100’s of thousands of dollars in the US and their total bills, doctors, surgery, and hospital, have been between 22,000 and 25,000 USD. And they both have raved about the care that they had from doctors, nurses and hospital staff – 24-hour nursing care and private rooms that were like 5 star hotels. And as I was writing this another friend is having a major surgery the first of this week. It’s all so alarming that so many of our friends are having major health problems but they have the best of care here and the support of a large network of gringo friends, probably more so than in the US or Canada.
A friend of mine today suggested that I video our condo “maintenance”/upgrades and call it Condo Cures in Mexico. It could be almost placed in the comedy section because we keep finding “Mexican fixes” that just defy any logic! This of course drives Steve nuts. We should have started a month ago recording the before and after. Oh well, there’s our fortune lost.
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| 2nd bedroom with balcony |
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| Master bedroom with blacony |
We are now already into the heat and humidity of summer here and it's hit us with a blast. I can’t wait for those ceiling fans!
