who needs scaffolding anyway?

i've never really stood around and watched a house go up in the united states. skyscrapers, yes. but a little house? except for watching some old movie with my grandmom where the community raised a barn, i've never really paid too much attention to construction.

even when i got here, it wasn't on my radar. short-term groups would come down and participate in "construction projects" but mostly i just assumed the "locals" were accomodating a group of not-building-savvy teenagers and therefore dumbed it down.

nope.

the foundation is dug, filled up with rebar and filled in - with cement mixed by hand on the street in front of the new building. traffic is diverted. a lot of people stand around and watch.

just this week the woman who owns the salon where i get my hair cut began an expansion on her house. the salon had been in the garage, and at first i thought she was just extending the walls out so she wouldn't need to blow dry hair three feet from the passenger door. apparently not.

she's expanding up and out.
and the up is where construction gets interesting.

instead of using a scaffold system or even... you know, metal beams, the foreman finds some sticks that are about the same height, they push them up under some plywood and pour cement. it actually works quite well and isn't nearly as frightening as it seems.

don't get me wrong, though - i'm not walking into that construction site anytime soon.
i've lived through enough simple cracks in my walls from little earth tremors and have learned not to trust the earth not to shake when we're least expecting it.

 it seems that she's building a new apartment on the second floor of her house and incorporating the salon into her "house"and building out a bit for the car-park. the ramp you can see in the picture above will eventually become the outdoor stairs to get to the second floor.

my favorite part of this crazy construction site is that the fourth "pole" from the left is the old fence column that has been broken apart (presumably when they tore down the front wall) with a little stump of a log extending it to the "roof".

cross your fingers and say a prayer there are no crazy earth movements in the next few days!