A false start before we broke ground

We bought the land in September 2022. We sold our apartment in Santa Maria that November. By the turn of the year we had the plot, the plans and a start date in mind: January 2023.

We did not break ground until the end of March.

That photograph was taken on the first day of January 2023, the month we expected work to start. The container on the left was not ours at the time — it came with the neighbouring property, and we bought it from them later, when we needed somewhere secure to keep tools and materials.

Two professionals, two different jobs

It is worth explaining how this works here, because it caught us out and it is not obvious from the outside.

Our architect drew the plans. He is still our architect today, and none of what follows is about him. But architect's drawings are only the beginning. Cape Verde building regulations require a second set of plans, prepared by a structural engineering firm — the stress calculations, the detail that demonstrates the building is safe and meets the standards, and the drawings the building contractors actually work from. The build licence is not granted on the architect's plans. It is granted once the engineer's plans have been approved.

So the engineers were not a formality. They were the firm standing between us and permission to build.

The arrangement, and the change

What we had agreed with them seemed straightforward. They would produce the engineering plans and obtain the licence. The build itself would be run by our own building manager, who would subcontract each stage to the appropriate firms and specialists, and the engineers would inspect the site as work progressed to confirm the standards were being met. Their expertise and oversight; our delivery. Everyone knew their part.

They obtained the licence. And then, almost immediately afterwards, they changed their minds.

They would continue, they told us, only if we handed them the management of the entire build. The figure they quoted for doing so was very high.

We thought about it, and then we went back and asked them to honour what we had originally agreed. They would not move.

The timing was not an accident. The first stage was groundworks, followed by the concrete and rebar frame — not a cosmetic phase but the structure of the house itself, the part everything after it depends on. We were at the point where we had the most to lose by stopping, which is exactly the point at which a change of terms carries the most weight.

We said no. It was not a calculation about money so much as about what it would establish. If a working relationship begins with one party changing the terms at the moment the other can least afford to walk away, that is the relationship you have signed up to for the whole build — and a house takes a long time to finish. We were not willing to start on that footing.

Finding a replacement

Saying no was the easy part. Replacing them was not.

We had been entirely comfortable with the arrangement we thought we had, which is why the change landed as hard as it did. There was nothing to be gained by dwelling on it. We settled up fairly for the work done to date and started looking.

What we found was that our original arrangement was not the norm here. Most of the firms we approached were straightforward about it from the outset: they would provide the engineering sign-off and the monitoring, but only if they built the house themselves. The two came as a package, and the package was not what we wanted or could justify paying for.

It took two months. In the end we found a firm prepared to take on the groundworks and the skeleton of the building at a price we thought was fair. Just as importantly, they were willing to check the plans and put their name to them, which is what we needed if the licence was to mean anything without the firm that had obtained it.

We thought we had found a good firm. In time they would test the terms we had agreed in a different way — but that is a story for a later entry.

March 2023: cleaning the site

On the first day, a bulldozer arrived to clean the site and dig a trench for the perimeter wall. Cleaning is the local term for clearing the plot and roughly flattening it — the first thing that happens on any site here. The trench ran around three sides of the perimeter. The wall was going up before the house did: security first, which is simply how you build here.

There were four of us there: the two of us, our building manager, and the bulldozer driver.

It was exciting, and at the same time faintly surreal, because what we were standing and looking at was a cleared plot and a ditch. Months of waiting, and then weeks of wondering whether the build would start at all, and the result was a trench around three sides of a plot.

But it told us something worth knowing. Digging it showed that the bedrock was not far below the soil — which was good news, and the first real information the site had given us about what we were building on.