You know how ideas start — half-formed, messy, exciting. That’s how this whole space began: with a stupidly simple thought: “this front living room needs to be able to fit a ping pong table, or better yet, 2 tables”
The rest of what you’ll see in the video is me trying to force reality to match that vision.
I started with a roof pour. That’s messy, wet, chaotic. You dump concrete, you fight gravity, you hope things don’t crack. But that pour was necessary — it set the skeleton in place.
Then came building the base for the floor. You can’t just slap tile on nothing. You need structure, stability. So we layered, with rocks and sand and covered that in a double thick plastic and rolled out the metal, got it all level, measured again and again. And poured out the floor. Lots of moisture in Guatemala and if you dont want mold, you need to take the necessary precautions.
Pouring the cement slab and watching raw materials turn into a floor you can walk on — that moment always feels magical. It was nice to not be walking on dirt anymore, but we still had a long way to go.
Walls followed. You toss cement to even the walls up, here they call that the lechada, which translates to something like the milk layer 🤷♂️
Once the walls are evened up we stuccoed them, patched them, made them flat and white.
Next was the tiling: 72 square meters of floor in 5 days.
Doors and windows came last. You have to finish the shell before you start opening holes in it, otherwise rain, dust, insects will walk right in. But once they were in, the space started feeling real.
The Ping Pong Factor (Yes, That’s Real)
I didn’t just want a pretty room. I wanted play. I measured and put in lights to best see the little white ball. Fitting the pong table guided everything — wall position, door placement, window size, even ceiling height.
Behind the Scenes: Chaos, Compromise, and Coordination
Getting materials: it’s never simple. You order something, it’s late, it’s wrong, you improvise.
Coordinating teams: tile guys, cement crews, window installers — they all need to show up at the right time or the schedule collapses.
Adjustments: I changed things as I went. This video represent the last 4 months of my home life. My day life was running the hotel, creating hive hub, and refurbishing the roadside cafe. So this was more a side project that i needed to keep my eye one as it advanced.
I’ll share some of the vids of the cafe refurb soon.
The music in this video is original music with my band KALDERA.
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