Once most of the infrastructure was finished and the temple and kitchen building were finished,  Wayan was ready to start on our two bedroom, two bath home.  We were so excited to see what it was going to look like.  Since only part of the mountain top had been removed for the kitchen, the first job was to take off the rest of the mountain top.  The usual method of dirt filled bucket on the top of the head was employed.  Wayan once again hired extra workers to remove all the dirt.  There are several photographs which show the progress of that first task.  Next, as you will see in the pictures was building the foundation and putting in the rebar for the floor and the posts.

As with everything that Wayan builds, it was made to last.  Our project is taking a lot longer and is costing us much more than we had planned, but that is because Wayan is using only high end materials and trusted methods of construction.  I believe our house will be standing solid for a very very long time.  With the temple and kitchen building we let Wayan do his thing, but we followed the construction of the house a lot more closely as we wanted to make sure that our home had what we needed and wanted.  It is somewhat difficult to build a house from afar.  Wayan would go to the shops and take pictures of things like shower heads, faucets, sinks, etc. then email them to us to pick the things we liked best. I was hoping I would finally get my dream bathroom, but alas, my idea of a dream bathroom was not the same as Wayan’s.  But that is okay because we have nice bathrooms; just not my dream bathroom. We did have one boondoggle though that had to be corrected before we visited last winter.  Most Indonesian bathrooms do not have enclosed showers.  The shower is just there hanging from the wall and when you take a shower the whole bathroom gets wet.  Well, Wayan proudly sent pictures of the finished bathrooms and we were not happy as the showers were not enclosed.  Fortunately, there was enough room to install a stall, but it required tearing things up a bit like taking the tile off the wall.  But they turned out just fine and we have bathrooms that are not going to be flooded by shower taking.

We had planned on picking out furniture once we arrived last March, as we really wanted to that ourselves although Wayan did lots of scouting for us so we didn’t have to take a lot of time going all over the place looking for furniture.  We did; however, have to choose mattresses from afar; I know; risky especially if one has aches and pains.  So once again Wayan went around to mattress stores, talked to people and took pictures.  We then did our own research on the mattresses and chose hoping that we had made the right choice.  As it turns out we did, and we slept very comfortably while there.

I think the pictures pretty much tell the story as I have put up about 200 photos of the house building.  I could not find photos of the roof installation for some reason.  I know I have them somewhere.  Anyway, Wayan put on a steel roof overlaid with high quality clay tiles.  The roof also should be around for a very long time.  There is one photo that shows a portion of the interior ceiling and you can see the steel beams.  Notice in many of the photos  all the rebar that is used.  Just another reason why our little retreat will be around long after we are.

Some of the photos show the construction of the fish ponds in front of the house. I decided to include them in the house building entry as they are kind of part of the whole house area.  When Wayan told us he wanted to make a fish pond, we imagined a small little pond in front of the house with a few fish.  Well, just like with the temple they were a lot bigger than we had imagined:-).  We really enjoyed them while we were there last winter.  We have over 300 fish in the ponds right now.

There are also a few photos of a tree being transplanted.  Many of the trees that had to be removed were replanted where they would not be in the way of building.  This particular tree was put in front of the house and very quickly it grew much bigger and has lots of greenery.  I can’t remember right now what the name of the tree is, but it proved to be very hardy.

In the last few photos of the house it looks like the house is very small. I kept thinking that we weren’t going to have much space, but once the interior was finished and Wayan sent pictures, things looked much more spacious.  Once we got there and went inside we were very pleased with the amount of space we and our guests will have when they come to stay. In the third to the last picture notice the swimming pool to the right side of the house.  Alas, it wasn’t finished when we visited last winter.  It is huge and beautiful and will be my next blog topic.  Hope you enjoy this next set of photos.  This will be it before the holidays, but I will be back very shortly after the new year with the swimming pool adventures.

It looks like when I uploaded all the photos the order was mixed up so I apologize for the randomness of the order.  I did have them in a somewhat chronological order. 🙂

Well it looks like I goofed in attaching the photos to my post so I will attempt this again in a separate post.  For whatever reason wordpress scrambled the order of the photos.  There are some photos of a ceremony being performed which ended up in the middle instead of at the end and you will also notice other time related discrepancies.  Hope you enjoy them nonetheless. Here goes again!

Due to popular demand this blogger has finally succumbed to the many comments such as “I keep checking your blog, but you haven’t added anything.”  I believe I am ready to take on the task again.  We ended up about to build a multipurpose building which goes by the name of the “kitchen building.”  You really can’t get much more creative than that, can you now? 

Now that the temple was done and land use planned and some of the infrastructure finished, Wayan decided to do a building that could house a large kitchen, public restroom and shower for drivers and staff, laundry, storage and a roof that was made so that we could add a second floor if at some point we wanted to put something up there such as a few more places to stay.

The first monumental task was to remove the top of the mountain.  Wayan hired 40 workers with strong backs and arms, gave them shovels and buckets and off they went to remove the mountain top bucket by bucket.  Who needs heavy equipment??  Once all the dirt was removed and the part of the mountain top needed was relatively flat, work began on a retaining wall which would serve as the back wall for the space behind the building. This space would provide laundry and storage areas.  This will all make a lot more sense once you see the photos I have put up with this post.

For a while I was annoyed because I was hoping that Wayan would start on our house next, but once I realized that the kitchen building serves a number of purposes while the resort is still being built,  it made sense to do it that way.  Since my last post not only has the kitchen building been finished but also the house and our HUGE pool.  The construction of the pool was fascinating and I will share it with you soon.  Work has now begun on the first small villa.

Recently, we had the opportunity to buy a piece of land that is just adjacent to our property.  It is on the pool side of the property and is very steep and heavily wooded.  There is a lot of clearing that has to be done.  We plan to build another small villa there; maybe two and Wayan wants to plant some coffee there also.

I think it is time to show you some pictures.  Notice how the roof was constructed so that it could hold another story if we decide to go that route.  There is no shortage of rebar and concrete as you will easily notice.

Once the road was completed, the parking lot could be designed and laid out and the concrete poured.  Imagine a concrete parking lot where the concrete was laid one bucketful at a time!  In the Western world of big machinery some of these tasks seem like they would take forever doing them by hand, but things go amazingly fast when you have an assembly line of workers passing the buckets down the line.  There is not much more to say about this phase of the project as it did not involve lots of designing; mostly just muscle power.  Enjoy the pictures!

Okay so I lied.  I apologize. I know I promised a new entry in less than three months and it has been four!!  How time flies to quote an old cliché.  I will no longer make any promises about when my next entry will be.  This will be the last for a few months at least as we are soon going to spend a month in Bali moving into our new home which is almost finished.  But I digress….this post will talk about moving the spirits of the mountain from their old home to their new.  You will recall that before we began to change the landscape of the mountain top that we had acquired, we needed to perform a ceremony to ask permission to live and work on the land.  The mountain had long been considered sacred by the people living there.  The ceremony of permission was successful and our terraforming of the mountain top began.  The first significant structure was to be the temple; a new home for the resident spirits because as you might remember from the photos, their old homes were somewhat in disrepair.  In the last post you saw just how the new temple was constructed. 

After the construction was finished and new temples put on it’s top, a ceremony had to be performed in order to move the spirits to their new home.  This entry will take you through the steps of this ceremony; briefly in words and mostly in photos.