The surprises of a renovation project and others…

The Highlights

· The return of a dear friend from South America… alive and in one piece!!!
I want to say welcome back to Mexico Octavio after few months of travelling with Namibia through Central and South America; she will be waiting for you in Argentina patiently to continue on to the tip of the world.
I am just extremely happy for you to have come back in one piece and full of experiences, good energy and friends; I wish you accomplished your goals.
We still need to connect... I would love to hear about the journey and the one to come…

-Thanks for the lovely gifts, you will see me wearing each of those items, I truly love them!!! Brian thinks you have great taste!!!-



· Our Volunteering efforts, Sunday at the beach picking up garbage.
This month we participated in a Sunday Activity called “Primera Campana de Conservacion y Limpieza de Playas”, basically a campaign to clean the busy beach of Progreso where all the locals go in the Summer (more than visitors/foreigners) and dump their garbage.
Quite interesting to see foreigners (Brian and Deya) cleaning the locals’ beach. It did not take long to get couple of locals embarrassed and getting up to help… An enjoyable activity organized by “Na’Lu’Um Colectivo”, another organization to which Merida Verde supports.

-In Progreso picking up garbage from the beach…-






· Fun with friends…
Less words, more pictures.
Our dear friend Lic. Alberto knows where to find good food; I love the poc-chuc of this place: El Principe Tutul-Xiu in Merida.. and with Betty having ice cream on Paseo Montejo close to midnight.




· Our Renovations Project: Centro #1.
We are full throttle into construction so please excuse the short update. What is next: executing, control and monitoring and iterative planning.
1- Some of the unknowns.
Like in any project there are unknowns and those can be devastating if the planning phase did not consider them.
In this project we found couple of items that need attention: some of the columns in the first floor do not have a foundation and therefore we need to build those. We also found a well under one of the walls which requires some Engineering to avoid sinking of the wall with the weight of the second floor.




2- Some of the interesting knowns.
Have you seen a cistern and septic field being built? Here some pictures of the beginning of the septic field which will be located far enough from the cistern to avoid contamination.

-The septic field, the cistern later!!!-




3- Our stakeholders.
A great deal of work keeping the stakeholders engage and understanding their expectations to best meet the client’s expectations who at the end looks for reasonable answers. Our neighbour in the back was willing to remove his invading roof after having proper communication with him, helping him to understand our rights and needs.
The neighbour in the right side facing the property had made a bunch of assumptions and operated based on those to complain about the noise produced by the nature of the project: CONSTRUCTION. As a Project Manager I need to make sure that he is engage and does not cause grief, in summary. I was very patient and in simple language I explained to him that we have the permits to operate (which is not normal and he had made the assumption that we don’t have them) and that we could assist with lessening the amount of noise on the roof (the one that most affected him) from 10am-1pm under the understanding that we were going to do that to support him not because we had to; I also reminded him that if he had built his own wall rather than using ours, the noise would not be as cumbersome.
One way or another, I have made intense efforts to keep our stakeholders engage but yet I still need to work harder because these stakeholders are not the most problematic…

-Neighbour at the back taking his roof from our property-



-Our neighbour from the right side facing the property using our back wall to hold his roof-



4- The beauty.
When the walls were uncovered to treat the humidity on them we discovered beautiful, tasteful walls that we are thinking to preserve in that way. We will see…

-The overall progress-



-Look at the beautiful rocks that may remain uncovered!!!-




Regards,
Deyanira MD.