We bought an old house last year in a rural area close to the town of Balingasag. The house is believed too be about 50 years old but it may be more. It had been empty for many years and was very sadly neglected. The structural condition seemed fine though and the price was right so we went ahead – With a few sleepless nights wondering if we had made a good decision!
It’s actually a frame house with large posts and beams made from Nara, a very good quality hardwood, almost impossible to get today. One interesting feature is the vertical posts which are continuous from the foundations to the roof, are set in from the corners by about 12 inches, rather than being right at the corners of the building. I am not sure why but I was told this was the “Spanish Way”.
They form the structural form and the rest of the walls are non-load bearing infills. Downstairs they are cement block and upstairs hardwood framing with weather board cladding. Two new doorways were cut into one downstairs wall to give access to the new bedrooms. We found the cement blocks forming the wall were reinforced with split bamboo through their centres, which was still in perfect condition. With the low cost of labour here, material costs form the major proportion of building price. The modern way of reinforcing concrete and cement block walls is to use steel reinforcing but this is expensive. Discovering the split bamboo in such condition gave me the courage to use split bamboo in other area of the construction. Bamboo was available at no cost from a family farm and so we made considerable savings. In areas such as the suspended concrete floor of the new bathroom, I used steel, not wishing to risk problems in such a critical area but to reinforce places such as the carport and bedroom concrete floors I used bamboo. (I found a useful American Navy Site giving confirmation of the viability of using bamboo as concrete reinforcement) There have been no problems to date with such areas, time will tell.
It took 7 months to completely renovate and make additions. We replaced the roof, it was in very poor condition although we were able to reuse many of the structual timbers. This was in May, it hadn’t rained for months, the moment we took the roof off, it rained soildly for 3 days! We put in a deep well and electric pump to supply the house (Plenty of very good quality water flows down from the mountains behind us) and rewired the house completely. We built a new staircase and saved a lot of floor space and used the original staircase to provide another access upstairs to the new bathroom. We have Air conditioning in bedrooms and my office, an Internet connection (See my Post “Welcome to the Wonderful World of the Philippines” for more on Internet connections) We built 2 additional bedrooms, an additional bathroom and toilet on the second floor, a new kitchen and renovated the old one so now we have a “Clean” (a Western Style one) and a “Dirty” Kitchen, one that has both a gas powered stove and a wood burning range. We renovated and enlarged the original bathroom, made spare space into a laundry, built a wall all around the property, a car port and a “Cottage” around the well and pump system. We replaced wall linings and ceilings and decorated throughout.
We tried to make the house appropriate to the area and make it as comfortable and practical as possible while keeping a careful eye on the budget. We used local labour and local materials and are very pleased with the end result. We have a 5 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 2 kitchen house for a total cost of renovation and original purchase for a price that you would pay for a half decent car in the Western World.
