October 22-31, 2023: Our Fall Trip to Florida - Part 2
	September 21-28, 2023: Our Fall Trip to Florida - Part 1
	Return to the Index for 2023

Well, the renovations of the Ecuador house are done, and Fred and I are going to head down there on September 29th to spend three weeks. As we did earlier this year, we plan on flying JetBlue roundtrip from Fort Lauderdale. The evening of September 29th found us at Fort Lauderdale International checking in for our flight to Quito.

First, a Comment

In the pages for our first trip down to Ecuador earlier this year, you saw that we joined our partner in the house venture, my longtime friend Greg, at the Fort Lauderdale airport for the flight down. He had flown to Fort Lauderdale from San Diego, where he now lives. You also saw him in many of the pictures and I mentioned him in the commentary. When we first started the venture, it was Greg who researched the visa requirements and found the lawyers who negotiated the house purchase and set up our ownership trust (to get around weird Ecuadorian inheritance laws). He also found the architect who would act as our general contractor for the renovations the three of us decided on, and working out their cost.

On this page, he doesn't appear in pictures and isn't mentioned in the commentary, and I think I should say why.

It may be my fault, but Greg abruptly backed out of the whole venture shortly after our return from our trip earlier this year. He also backed out of a cruise and week in Europe the three of us had planned for April. And, finally, he has backed out of a 50-year friendship for, after selling his interest in the house to Fred and me, he has been silent. We have shouldered the cost of all the renovations that he'd been so avid in planning . So why was this my fault? Perhaps I should have learned Spanish, or paid closer attention when the trust was being set up. For when I actually read an English version of it, I discovered that if a trustee died, he simply lost his share of the house, and the remaining two became half owners. After a second death, the "last man standing" became full owner of the house. This was not at all what I thought the trust specified, particularly after the lawyers asked us each to specify a beneficiary for our one-third share should we all die before the house was sold.

Now, I don't maintain that anyone was trying to "snooker" anyone else. And I admit that I should have read the trust thoroughly before it was finalized. That's on me. But when I finally did read it, I emailed both Greg and Fred to say that I thought that the provisions were not fair. I didn't think any of us had gone into this thinking that if they were unlucky and died first, they would simply lose a couple hundred thousand dollars.

In my email, I said that I thought a fairer way to handle the house ownership was to keep it as a shared investment, but with protections for any surviving trustees. I suggested that the death of any trustee would not erase his contribution; the remaining trustee(s) could continue to use the house as they saw fit. To protect the ability of any of us to use the house as long as we wished, I also suggested than any sale must be by unanimous vote of all the current trustees. And, finally, when the last trustee either died or decided to sell the house, the one-third shares should be returned to the designated beneficiaries of each of us. Finally, I suggested that we could either (1) revise the trust (the cost of which I offered to pay) or (2) sign a separate agreement amongst ourselves here in the US.

Fred agreed; indeed, he and I both had the same impression of what the trust said (even though it didn't). Greg, however, was, to put it mildly, livid- a reaction I certainly did not expect. Rather than see what I thought was the fairness of a revised trust, his reaction was to declare that he would not ever again travel to Ecuador to use the house, nor would he participate in the renovations. Eventually, he suggested that we buy his share, which is what eventually happened. After that sale was finalized, Greg cut us off, and we have not heard from him since.

I admit that Greg isn't "here" to explain his own take on things. Perhaps there is some line that we crossed, some faux-pas that we made, or perhaps our viewpoint on the shared ownership of the house was not what Greg had intended. We've never gotten an explanation, and now, after six months of silence, we probably aren't going to. The trust has been rewritten, and Fred and I are going ahead. We had always anticipated sharing the house with Greg, and are sad, now, that this will not be happening.

Getting to the House in Ecuador

Of course, the first step in getting to the Ecuador house is to get from Fort Lauderdale to Quito, and that's where JetBlue comes in.

One reason for flying JetBlue from Fort Lauderdale is that all my American perks transfer over to their flights. So Fred and I would be able to pick the seats we wanted and board early. But I noticed something odd when I made the reservation for this trip some months ago: when I went to specify the number of checked bags and select seats, extra charges cropped up for both. I thought this a transient error, and went ahead and purchased the tickets. But a few days later, when I tried again, the same thing happened.

So I called JetBlue, and discovered that only three days before I purchased the ticket, JetBlue and American had severed their relationship (at government insistence). When I told the agent that had I known this had happened, I would simply have flown on American our of Dallas, and that I was a bit upset. To her credit, the JetBlue agent made an adjustment to this particular trip to enable us to select seats and check bags without charge. In the future, though, if I want to get my American perks, we will have to fly on American itself.

But back to this flight. JetBlue has excellent at-seat entertainment, and both Fred and I passed the four hours by watching a couple of movies. About 11PM we landed in Quito, and, since we now had a house and keys to it, we didn't have to overnight at the Quito Airport Wyndham. We just hopped in a cab and played a voice file our contractor recorded for us, providing the driver with directions to the gate for Santa Lucia Baja. (I have since found out that most cab drivers know our community, and simply saying "Santa Lucia Baja at Paseo San Francisco" is enough.

The Newly-Renovated House in Ecuador

What I want to do in this section is to compare the house after the renovations to the house before. To do that, I am going to borrow some pictures from the page for our trip here in January-February. These will be the "before" pictures; the pictures we took during this trip will be the "after" pictures. It won't be as slick as "Love It Or List It" or some renovation show like that, but I want you to see how the house has changed.

The Exterior of the House

Actually, not much has changed visibly when you look at the house from the outside. A lot of work was done outside, but almost all of it had to do with putting in a French drain system- part of the solution to the water intrusion we had found in the basement. The French drain system is, of course, below ground. But after all the digging and replanting, the house does look a bit different.

In this picture of the north end of the house, the plantings are all new (concealing the French drain), save for two of the small trees. In the corner, directly in the middle, is the new cistern system, which will provide the house with water even if the city water supply is interrupted. The bathtub in the carport came from the primary guest room.

The south end of the house hasn't changed much. Lots of minor repairs and a repainting. A new hedge has gone in- Veronica and we both think that the additional privacy (in two or three years) will be nice. All the windows have been resealed, and there is new sod over the French drain.

This is the only full-on picture of the house that I took; sadly, the gardener's truck is parked right in front.

The front door has been refinished, and the surrounding tilework repaired.

Here are two more pictures of the exterior of our house:

This is the north side of the house near the carport. You can see the top of the cistern that holds a water supply for the house, and you can see some of the new plantings.

There is a Mexican restaurant southwest of the house where we have eaten a few times. From their rooftop deck, there are perfect views of our house, like this one taken in the early evening.

The Entry

I don't actually have an old picture of the entry, but that's no problem is it didn't change much at all. The view that greets you when you enter the house is still the same:

Even so, you can pick out some changes, such as the accent walls in the upper seating area (the entire house was repainted) and in the TV room at the far right, the refinished stairs in the middle, and new tables that Felipe's dad made for us on either side of the steps up from the entry. Here are two more views taken in and of the entry area:

The Living Room

There have been a lot of changes in the living room, mostly involving the fireplace and the lighting.

First, here is the living room as it was when we toured the house in 2022. The owners, the Barallas, were still in the house at the time, of course, so the furniture and knicknacks were theirs.

There were two things about the living room we didn't like. The major one was the fireplace. Identical to the one in the master bedroom, it evoked something like "Swiss Chalet Rustic". We had learned, though, that it was done in an Ecuadorian style called "Rustica", and we had already toured a house done wholly in that style. But here, we didn't think it "went" with the rest of the house at all.

So we asked our contractor, Felipe Palacios, and his architectural team to design something more modern. We also wanted his design to be accented with lighting.

As it turned out, the Barallas left us some of their furniture, and much of it was the living room furniture. Here are two pictures of the new living room- one in daytime and one at night:

As you can see, the fireplace (which works) has been radically re-designed, and it now suits the modernity of the house. And we really liked the accent lighting that Felipe installed as part of a general re-design of the lighting throughout the house. Here are two more views of the re-designed living room:

Here is one nice view taken from the living room looking across the entry towards the stairs.

The Upper-Level Sitting Area

At one point in our discussions, we thought about turning this into a first floor bedroom, but when the project came down to just Fred and me, we decided against it. So this upper-level sitting area didn't end up changing much. Here are two pictures that show the room when we first saw it and then after our renovations:

From this sitting area, of course, you can look down the transverse hallway to the TV room and kitchen entry at the other end of the house. Had we tried to make this into a small bedroom, the curved wall with glass block (that shields the entry to the social bath) would have had to go- and that is a feature we both liked. Finally, here are two more pictures of the sitting area with its new accent wall- in daytime and at night:

The Social Bath (Powder Room)

Adjacent to the sitting area is the entry to the social bath which is concealed behind a curved wall with some inset glass blocks. I don't have a picture of the social bath as it used to be, but I can tell you that it, as well as all the other bathrooms, were basically gutted when one of the major renovations, the overall re-doing of the outdated plumbing (which was leaking in some spots), was undertaken. Since every bathroom wall was going to have to be torn out anyway, we decided to have Felipe pick a general style of new cabinetry and fixtures to use in this bathroom and all the others.

The glass block curved wall didn't change, but the social bath sure did. It has the new fixtures and cabinetry, and a signature strip of colored glass tiles that we suggested (having them already in Florida and Texas) to add color to the tile walls. Here are pictures of both the curved wall and social bath as they look now:

The Dining Room

The dining room changed very little; in fact, other than the house-wide repainting, it is identical to its former look.

But I can contrast the room with what it looked like when we first toured the house. As you can see in the picture at the far left, the Barallas had a nice dining-room set, as well as other ornamentation (pictures and such) in the room. That table was important to them, and so they took it with them.

We don't plan on using this area as a dining room anytime soon; we eat our meals in the kitchen at the large kitchen table that the Barallas did leave us. But we did have Felipe's dad make us a game table, although we left the design to him. What we got was the table you see in the picture at near left. It is rectangular, but with a few simple operations on its mechanism, it converts to a square table suitable for cards or games. So we got two pieces of furniture in one.

Here is a view of the dining room from the TV room, and below are two more views of the dining room- one in daytime and one at night:

The Transverse Hallway

The "transverse hallway", which is really a bridge over the opening to the basement below, changed in only one respect (so I haven't gone back to find a picture from earlier this year or our house tour in 2022. Here, looking from the TV room, are two views of the hallway- one in daytime and one at night (to show the new lighting):

Here are two more good pictures of this part of the house:

The "TV Room"

What we call the TV Room used to be a kind of second living area when the Barallas were here. They took with them everything that was in that room, so we began with a clean slate.

This is the way the room looked before we bought the house.

When we came down early this year, we bought a big-screen TV and three recliners, and this is what the room looked like then.

The only real changes to the room were the new accent wall and the furniture what Felipe's dad built for us.

Felipe's dad built a very, very nice table for the TV to sit on. It will hold any other electronics that we might acquire.

He also built two custom tables to put between the recliners. They are angled so they fit neatly into the recliner layout.

The TV room also got new lighting, and here are pictures of the room in daytime and at night:

The Kitchen

This was one area that didn't change much- at least not visibly. The plumbing renovations took place behind the cabinets, and while we did get a new, deeper sink, a dishwasher, and an electric oven/cooktop (which, with the new electric water heaters, freed us from the task of constantly replacing gas tanks), these are not all that visible in these pictures. We did get our curved kitchen wall painted with one of our two accent colors.

What is visible is the mess usually make, just dropping things all over the counter and the kitchen table where both set up our laptops. Here are four pictures of our messy kitchen:

The Patio and Garden

There have been changes on the patio, and there will be more, but the changes don't really show up in the few pictures we took our here this time.

In the far left picture, you can see the "gutter" for the new French drain system. Water that collects here is drained through pipes down to the main drain in the center of our common driveway. In the near left picture, you may be able to see that the entire patio has been re-tiled with the same tile and at the same level. The Barallas or earlier owner added the patio in sections.

One project still to be done is to replace the cover over the patio. Over the years, it has discolored and deteriorated in spots, and we intend to have Felipe replace it. The supports are fine; it's just the plastic that needs to be replaced. Felipe says there is a new "frosted-glass" product that people are using for this purpose.

At right is more of our garden. The avocado tree is producing many fruit, although I will say that we are running out of the ones that are easy to reach, so high has the tree grown. Eventually, we will have to look into some kind of device we can use to pick the ones that are high up out of easy reach.

The lemon trees are still producing more lemons than we can use; I end up giving some of them to Veronica across the way.

The Outbuildings

The outbuildings (laundry room and storage room/maid's quarters) were not themselves remodeled, although the re-do of the plumbing changed the look of the open area between the kitchen and the laundry room. Take a look at these two pictures:

In the left-hand picture, the black box hanging on the outside of the laundry was our house water heater, run on the gas canisters that the Barallas purchased from the trucks that came around periodically. We wanted to get away from all that, so we had Feliped remove all the gas lines and make the house all-electric. So, as you can see in the right-hand picture that this water heater has been removed. So where did it go?

The New Water Heater and Outdoor Sink

The old tub from the master bath is in the carport awaiting haul-off.

In the left-hand picture, the new water heater for the downstairs and basement is in the black cabinet, next to the outdoor sink that has been moved from the center of this area to just outside the kitchen's back door. As you will see below, there are two more water heaters for the upstairs plumbing. We can shut off the water heaters when we are gone to reduce electricity use, but since the electric bill is usually only about $25 even when we are here, that doesn't save all that much.

Here are some miscellaneous pictures taken in and of the laundry room and maid's quarters; I had not taken pictures of these areas before.

This is the walkway that leads from the back door of the kitchen to the carport.

This is the laundry room.

This is the bathroom in the maid's quarters.

We are currently using the maid's quarters for storage.

The Stairs

The stairs have been refinished and rebuilt along their sides to eliminate the odd wood pieces that we used to see. The two pictures below will show you what the stairs were like before Felipe worked on them:

This picture, taken earlier this year, looks down both flights of stairs from the top landing.

This picture, taken when we first toured the house, shows the stairs up from the first floor to the second.

What we asked Felipe to do was to entirely refinish the stairs, changing them from the light oak color to a darker, richer color, and he succeeded extremely well. There were some odd finish pieces on the exposed side of the risers, and he replaced all of these. He also put tile on the vertical part of each riser, and also added guide lighting in the wall beside the stairs- lighting which makes them look very good at night.

We have lots of pictures of the stairs (since they look so good). Here are some of them:

Here are the stairs up and down from the first floor.

Here are the stairs up from the basement. We asked Felipe to leave electrical connections here should we ever decide to add an elevator.

Here are the stairs leading up from the basement, showing the transverse hallway "bridge".

Here are both flights of stairs looking down from the second floor common area.

Here are both flights of stairs in the early evening.

The Stairs at Night

Looking Down from the First Floor

The Basement

A lot of work has been done in the basement, although it's appearance isn't radically changed. I do have some pictures of the basement as it was when we toured the house, but they just show it being used mostly for storage. Nor do I have a picture of the basement bathroom, but we did have it redone as part of the general plumbing repair. Here is the re-done basement bathroom.

The visible changes here in the basement are, in addition to the new bathroom, new lighting and a new accent color on a couple of the walls. But the major change was the stripping of all the walls, cleaning out deteriorated plaster and concrete, sealing the walls against moisture, and then refinishing and repainting all the walls. This work doesn't show up well in pictures, but it was a sizeable portion of our overall renovation project.

This is the south end of the basement. The high window looks out on the garden.

This part of the basement is below the entry above. The high window looks out to the front of the house.

This picture looks towards the basement bathroom and, of course, the stairs up.

Here is one end of the basement at night, so you can see some of the new lighting.

We have no idea what we will eventually do with the basement. Probably nothing- at least not until we find ourselves living here full-time.

The Second-floor Landing and Common Area

The only picture I have of the common area is one that I took as we toured the house originally.

The common area stretches from the top of the stairs all the way to the front of the house. The master bedroom and one of the guest rooms open directly onto it (with the third bedroom being a short walk after you turn right at the top of the stairs.

As you can see, the Barallas used this area as kind of a sitting room and picture gallery, but we were thinking that we would use it as an area to set up our laptops when we were here. We thought this would be good because the modem and network router were on a table outside the master bedroom. As it turned out, though, we ended up working down in the kitchen; it just seemed closer to everything.

We did ask Felipe, though, to replace the dark wood laminate in this area with a nice, neutral tile, and we found that this opened up the area quite a bit and made it seem much larger.

Before we discovered that we'd be spending most of our time in the kitchen, we had Felipe's father build some workstations for this area. Originally, we were going to have three, but when it came down to just Fred and myself, we didn't see any need for the third one. If we ever live here full-time, I imagine we'd use the area for more different things, as it bright and airy. Here is what the area looks like now, in daytime and at night:

And here is the landing, again in daytime and at night:

The Large Guest Room

Turning right at the top of the stairs, you will come to the door of the larger of the two guest rooms. Walking into the room and looking back, you can see walls of closets. Bedrooms here in Ecuador don't have walk-in closets; we saw almost none of them in all the houses we toured. Either there are small closets like in old homes, or walls of closets like you see here.

This bedroom got new paint and lighting, as well as its own A/C unit (seen above the bed in the right-hand picture):

The Barallas were not really using this room. (I understand why they were downsizing; they were hardly using much of the house at all.)

Those are two collapsable lamps on the nightstands, and you can see the new A/C unit up above the bed.

I should say something about the A/C units. It was my idea to add them. Not only were they relatively inexpensive, but I thought the I, and guests, might find use for them on extremely warm or extremely cool days. That Cumbaya has almost none of these did not dissuade me. I am used to sleeping cold, so I wanted at least one in the bedroom Fred and I would share. Since we had to upgrade the electrical anyway, putting one in each of the bedrooms was pretty easy. I will say that nights in Cumbaya are almost always cool enough that if there were good cross-ventilation, A/C units wouldn't be worth it. Maybe I should have suggested just a big exhaust fan in each bedroom?

I do have pictures of the bathrooms on the second floor as they were when we toured the house, and you can see the bathroom for this bedroom at left. Like all the bathrooms for all the bedrooms, this bathroom had a shower but no tub. The only tub in the house was in the master bedroom bath, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Our former investment partner had taken this room, and he wanted a tub, so part of the renovation was to install one. Had we known how things would turn out, we would not have done so, but in the picture of the renovated bathroom below, you can see that one has been put in.

This bathroom got the same renovation treatment as all the others- new tilework with the signature color stripe around the room, new fixtures, new cabinets, and new floor tile. Again, the old bathroom was perfectly serviceable, but since the plumbing repairs required so much tear-out anyway, upgrading everthing was a simple decision to make. The window in this bathroom looks out to the back of the house.

Here are some additional pictures of the renovated large guest room:

Each of the bathrooms got a rainhead shower fixture as part of the plumbing redo.

Here is the large guest room at night. You can't really appreciate the lighting. I think the hanging fixture needs a dimmer; it is a bit bright. Better is the accent lighting that runs around the base of the ceiling. That and the lamps provide a good ambience.

Here is the bathroom at night. We were really impressed with all the lighting choices Felipe and his team made, although they don't really show up well in my pictures.

The Small Guest Room

The small guest room is at the front of the house, and the entry to it is right off the common area. For this bedroom, the closets line the entry hall- way more closets than any guest would probably need.

After we bought real beds on our first trip to the house, we put the inflatable beds that we'd brought with us in this room. They are actually comfortable, so we aren't in any hurry to buy another real bed and mattress for this room. When we get our first guest, though, we'll have to bring a chair and a nightstand into this room to make it accommodating.

This room got a new paint job and new lighting, as did all the bedrooms.

But the biggest change was, of course, the bathroom.

While the original bathroom, shown in the picture at far left, was perfectly serviceable, all the plumbing repairs that we made necessitated a good deal of tear out here, and so it made no sense just to put back the old fixtures. So we gave it the complete update treatment, and you can see the results both in the picture at near left and the picture below:

As I mentioned, the bedroom got new lighting treatments, and so did the bathroom. You can see both of them at night in the pictures below:

The Master Bedroom (Ours)

The master bedroom is at the southwest end of the house. In the bedroom itself, the changes include new paint and an accent wall, new A/C, and the old fireplace (which was identical to the one we took out of the living room) has been taken out.

Here is how the corner of the master bedroom looked when we toured the house.

This is that same view, with our new bed and desk, accent wall, and A/C.

Here are two more views of the bedroom area, one at daytime and one at night:

To get to the master bath, you walk down our own "hall of closets" (again, more than any couple not clinically classified as "hoarders" would ever need).

The "closet hall" is just to the left inside the bedroom door.

The hall has a skylight, and I wanted a way to block its light in the morning. Felipe installed a remote-controlled shade.

The entry to the bathroom is about two-thirds of the way down the hall.

The master bath was entirely gutted and re-done, and it turned out very, very well.

The Barallas had a jacuzzi tub, but said they hadn't ever used it and weren't sure it even worked.

Here is a picture of the renovated bathroom, looking approximately in the same direction.

We replaced the outdated sliding door shower with a new frameless enclosure, a rainhead shower, and of course entirely new tilework.

I know the vanity is messy, but this picture shows the continuation of the same cabinet and sink style as in the other bathrooms.

The back wall of the shower is glass blocks, carrying the theme from downstairs up here to the master bath. Fred likes glass block a lot, and even though they aren't commonly used here in Ecuador, Felipe was able to find some. The new bathtub isn't a jacuzzi, but rather a very nice standalone fixture. Had we known how things would work out, this would have been the only tub in the house, but perhaps it will be useful to have one in at least one of the guest rooms. The bathroom also got completely new lighting that looks very good:

The Rooftop Patio

The rooftop patio had already been retiled before we arrived in January; there had been a leak into the kitchen and it was essential to get that fixed right away. So the patio doesn't look much different now, except that the cabinets holding the new water heaters for the upstairs bathrooms have been placed in the corner.

We had one cracked pane of glass in the curved stairway window replaced, but that was the only other thing done out here.

That completes our tour of the renovated house here in Ecuador. But I have one more addition to this section, and that is a complete video tour of the house. It'll show you everything, and perhaps give you a better idea of how the house is laid out. I hope you will watch it, and you can use the video player below to do so:

(Mouseover Image if Video Controls Not Visible)

We're ready now to receive guests (even though there are a few punch-list items to take care of). Jeffie tried to get down here this time, but passport issues kept her from doing so. Our next trip down will be next February, and we hope she'll be able to join us then.

This page for our trip to the newly-renovated house is already quite large, and we have more pictures yet from this trip. To avoid problems when such a large page loads, I have put the rest of the pictures from this trip on their own page. Please click the link below to go to the page for this trip.

	October 22-31, 2023: Our Fall Trip to Florida - Part 2
	September 21-28, 2023: Our Fall Trip to Florida - Part 1
	Return to the Index for 2023