It’s been awhile since we last wrote about Casa Santorini but we’re on a mission to share all the details to our journey in Mexico so we’re starting chronologically with our very first project, Casa Santorini.

We’ve repeated many times - too many to count - that we did a complete 180 on our careers back in 2019. What you may not know is that we had ZERO experience in what it takes to renovate a house. The costs, the management of the different sets of workers, the delivery date expectation, the consequences of working on an old home, the permits, the excitements and the disappointments.

Many people come to Mexico and dream of fixing up an old home. Modernizing it and making it gorgeous. What most people do is hire a project manager of sorts to help them navigate the waters. Sure, there are a few sets of folks that are determined to do all the renovations on their own, with their own two, hands but here in Mazatlan we’ve yet to encounter a success story of that nature.

Regardless, we were NOT the DIYers looking to break down walls since our lack of experience made us unsure that the existing roof would still be supported. So we went the route of hiring a project manager. This was our way of trying to pay someone to teach us how to do what they do so we could do it ourselves on our second project. We found an engineer who had a long list of vendors that he’s worked with and we together we came up with a project proposal.

With his help, we drafted up blueprints and submitted for permits both with Ayuntamiento (City Hall) and the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National Institute of Anthropology and History) otherwise known as INAH since Casa Santorini was located in the polygon of Mazatlan’s Historic Center. While we do not know how long it generally takes to get approval for permits in the States we can tell you first hand that it takes months in Mazatlan.

Paperwork was submitted in March 2019 and with verbal agreement from both Ayuntamiento and INAH that we could begin work so we got started in April 2019 on Casa Santorini. Come to find out in July 2019, we still did not have finalized and approved permits. We were thus suspended and had to abruptly stop working on the house. It took us about 2.5 weeks before we were given permission to begin working again. It was then that many of the red flags that were sort of lightly glaring in our faces started to really call our attention.

Part of the agreement of working with a project manager is that they can help you by providing the resources that are required to renovate (or build from scratch) a home. The term we use here, “project manager” is our way of Americanizing the term but here in Mexico you’ll find that they can be called anything from an architect, an engineer, director de obra (job site director) or supervisor de obra (job site supervisor). Sometimes, it’s simply the Maestro Albañil (the head mason worker) who helps people make the necessary changes to their homes by bringing all the necessary contacts. They usually won’t go the route of helping you get permits from the City or INAH.

The very first red flag that we noticed was that work would be getting done at the job site by the mason workers, but the project manager would be no where in sight. We’d encounter days of absence when part of the contract between us stipulated that he would be at the job site daily reviewing the work and troubleshooting whenever a problem arouse. Time and time again, we would be at the job site and workers would be making revisions to the structure that were outside of the blueprints and we (not the project manager) would be dictating to the mason workers that we did not agree to these modifications. And time and time again when confronted, the project manager simply said, “oops.”

Each and every time an issue would arise, it meant additional money spent to revise something that never should have been done in the first place. We had plumbers come and go and we’d be giving them money for materials only to find out that the plumbers never came back. We basically threw money away without continued work. There would be times when materials would arrive and we noticed that we didn’t actually need any more of those materials and mysteriously the materials would disappear on the backs of pickup trucks owned by the electricians.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the constant request to pay cash for social security (the equivalent of workers’ health insurance) and we found out that in fact none of the workers were on social security. So in theory, if something happened to one of the workers on the job site, we’d be responsible for all their medical expenses and could be sued in return for hosting an unsafe job site. Unfortunately, these things are very common in Mexico when you don’t know how things work. We heard many similar stories such as ours where people do not insure their workers and yet the workers continue to work without knowing that they are uninsured.

The house renovation was completed 4 months past the date that we were assured it’d be completed by and we were left to foot the bill for many additional costs that we did not anticipate to pay. This learning experience taught us that we needed to take things into our own hands, be our own project managers and be 100% involved in the entire process of renovating a house going forward.

If we could share any advice to you, dear Reader, it is that if you ever decide to hire someone to help you oversee your house renovation/construction in Mazatlán (or quite frankly, anywhere), always do your due diligence at vetting them through before entering into a contract that may be in the long run more costly and stressful.

Until next time…

xo Sophia y Socrates (and baby Soc)

Our First Child... Casa Santorini

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