Zen and the Art of Wall Repair

A stranger in paradise? Not exactly, I am a "vecino Alicantino," or a neighbor who lives in Alicante, Comunidad, España, a city on the Mediterranean sea in the area they call the Costa Blaca. I have just bought an ático in the middle of the city with my girlfriend and we are discovering the Spanish way of life.

What do they call "Penthouse Magazine" in the People's Republic of China? "The Top Floor Apartment, Just Like Everyone Else's." That is an accurate description of an ático. Really, they're supposed to be a little smaller and have a larger terrace, but our terrace was closed in with windows by the previous owner and covered with a leaky sheet metal roof. It doesn't rain that much here, so the leaky roof thing is an inconvenience a handful of times per year.

The indoor leak is another matter. It is the responsibility of all the neighbors of the building, and I paid a visit to the president of the building community immediately after discovering it. The next day I went on the roof with the repairmen and watched as one of the guys rubbed what appeared to be concrete around a sheet metal patch directly over the leak area, and came up with a handful of concrete colored mud. So we found the problem. Now I hope it doesn't rain much more before the fix is in place.

We are discovering that we have a bit of a fixxer-upper on our hands. When people move in España, the custom is to leave all their junk behind for the subsequent owner. Under all the junk, we found that the terrace was in much worse shape than it first appeared. After a thorough inspection and archealogical analysis, it appears that a previous owner tried to cut out an arched doorway in the concrete wall that faces the terrace. Then halfway through, the wall started to crack, and they stopped and covered the cracks. At another time, presumably, someone tried to cut a one-meter circular hole in the wall with mixed success. So the wall was sort of botched and uneven.

I found in the rubbish that was left for me bags of assorted concrete, sand, plaster, and gardening dirt. So I went to the hardware store and bought an applicator, mixed up some plaster, and went to work. By the end of the day, I had a good first coat of plaster up, and I could see that with a few more coats and sanding, I'd have the wall pretty smooth. I went to sleep exhausted, and woke up the next morning to survey the progress in daylight. All looked good and we went out to buy more fix-up supplies. Later that day, after the siesta, I went to sand it and my plaster work fell to the ground as soon as I touched it with the sandpaper.

There's one day down. After a beer or two, I did some research online and discoved that plaster won't adhere to epoxy-based cement. Hmm... I started poking through the rubbish and again encountered the concrete. It looked like I would need to become proficient at masonry. I mixed up some cement, sand and water until it became thick, and slapped it up.

This is a very inexact type of work. You kind of throw it up there, pat it down, see what sticks, and continue, making a very large mess in the process. But it's sort of meditative too. You can't worry about the cement that falls, or the problems you see. The important thing is that some of it sticks, and provides a base to work off. As in life, you can't waste all your time worrying about things that aren't right, and there are alot of them; the only way to get on is to recognize the things that are right and build from them. Also, alot of what you do can technically be called a failure, which many people will gladly point out to anyone willing to listen, although with all the failures come some very important successes. Those keen to point out failures remind me of crows attacking hawks as the hawks slowly and patiently gain altitude while losing wing feathers to the crows.

The next morning, the cement held, and two days later the second coat of cement was up and on the fourth day, the first coat of plaster was sticking to the second coat of cement. In the end, the walls were mended, primed and painted, and the ceiling was lined to cover the original styrafoam which lined the sheet metal. The area was cleaned up, the detail work begun, the furniture ordered, and then the rain came. Three of four walls have water running down them, so I have my work cut out. After it dries up, of course. Everything in good time.