Home Building in Portugal

Unlike my other musings posts, this one is focused on just one subject.  Not that it had to be.  We’ve certainly had our share of . . . adventures if you want to call it that, navigating our way through living here, but I decided to focus on something a bit more light-hearted and informative as well.  Not that it doesn’t really dive home the fact that things here are different in some very fundamental ways than life in the US.  

Like in the US, there’s a lot of homebuilding going on here.  However, unlike the US, there isn’t a wood shortage that is driving up the cost of housing.  Not that I’d know whether there even was a wood shortage if there were one, but that’s the point - they don’t build wood houses here in Portugal.  And because they don’t build stick houses over here, the tell-tale sign that a home is being constructed here in Portugal is that you’ll suddenly find a crane at a vacant lot.  Like this one that’s pretty much right across the street from our house.

For the better part of a year there have been several vacant lots along Rua Padre Feliciano that we’d walk past nearly every morning, and drive past anytime we were pretty much going anywhere.  Then all of a sudden we saw backhoes excavating at a couple of sites and it took them a couple of weeks to get the sites ready.  Every morning we’d find out how much process they’d made the day before and eventually they wound up in some very precarious positions, on thin strips of land on the back of the lot, 8-10 feet above the area around them.  I didn’t think about doing this post until a bit later, so I don’t have any shots of the backhoes, but this is what pretty much both of the sites looked like when they were done.  They moved a lot of earth!

Yes we live on a hill, so most of the houses around here have a basement (or garage) that opens up on the downhill side, with a floor or two above it.  

Strangely enough, while both sites completed excavation within days of each other, and had their prerequisite crane installed within days of each other, the site across the street has sat idle since the crane went up. The same can’t be said about the site farther down the street.  

Now you can begin to understand why cranes are an integral part of normal housing in Portugal.  This shot was made a couple of weeks ago when they were putting up rebar for the ground floor and walls.

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Again, these images were taken a couple of weeks ago, so on this morning’s walk, everything you can seen that’s rebar in the photographs above and below is now concrete - either already cast or in the forms curing.  We must say, though, that the folks working on this house are moving a lot faster than many of the houses we’ve monitored over the year here.  Construction tends to be . . . in a word, slow, around here. 

As you can see, construction involves a lot of concrete.  That applies to all types of housing, from single family residences, to row houses like below, to apartment buildings. 

Not only do you have columns going up, they cast concrete on each of the floors, which means they have supports under them for quite a while afterwards.  This is a row-house strip that we can see from our back windows.  

And as you can see, they fill the area between the concrete with solid block.  The exterior walls are these reddish blocks that look like cinder blocks (except they’re pink) but aren’t - they’re denser and much more solid.  Interior walls generally use a very dense terra cotta brick, so that you can’t just nail things into the wall - you have to drill into it.  So how do they get all the concrete, blocks and bricks on and around the site?  The crane!

And as I said, they use them for apartment buildings too!

A bit down the hill from our place, on one of our morning walking routes, there are several cranes working different sites and different scaled buildings.

As I said, construction is going on pretty much everywhere in the Braga area.

But cranes were just the entryway into my musings.  It’s not really the cranes that let me to write a blog post, but what they hang on the cranes during the off hours. Now that has been the subject of some amusement during our wanderings around town.  

As for the crane across the street, it seemed no big deal that they’d just hang the concrete mixer and the pallet lifter from the crane while they were waiting to begin the project.  I mean, really, the site isn’t seriously fenced off and I suspect construction sites are the same in Portugal as they are in the US (or Liberia, or Iraq), which is to say that if you’re not cautious, things will likely get taken. 

But other times, Ann and I are left scratching our heads.  I mean, really, a table saw?

And the first few times I saw a big box I let my imagination roam free . . . I mean, that would be a perfect place to hide the body!

But then one day Ann and I were on an early evening walk when the construction site was shutting down (no 3pm cut-off time for construction workers here in Portugal).  We saw the workers tossing  all the hand tools (shovels, sledge hammers, tool-belts) into the box just before the box got lifted off the ground.  I guess that makes sense.  

Although I didn’t quite get why they would hang a pallet with the pallet lifter.

So while Ann and I wander around on our morning walk, we always check out the cranes - you never know what you’ll find hanging 50’ up in the air.  

And, as I said, construction is all around us.  Not only are they building some high-end homes up the hill from us,

they’ve just started clearing the old vineyard below the fancy houses.  I wonder how long it will be before the cranes appear down here.  

So we’ve got cranes all around us - from the front of our house (ours is the home with the black deck umbrella on the right),

to our view from the back (towards Braga).

Signs of homebuilding are everywhere!