Lanzarote Builders Blog

Archive for the ‘Hitesh’ Category

Paving the brick driveways.

We have been laying the adocin driveways for both villas. They are laid on compacted white sand.

Internal and external floor tiles have been fitted on both villas and the external tiles have been grouted. The entrance in the first villa is finished. There is a marble threshold, a ceiling rose in the center of the ceiling and we have also added coving. The bathrooms are tiled and we are ready to start fitting the baths and shower trays.

The stone walls at the front of the villas are completed and the installations to connect to the mains electricity and water have been installed. We are now concentrating on the dividing stone wall so we can finish the external tiling.

The external tiles are being laid. We start from the swimming pool edge and work outwards to making sure the cuts go against the villa and the swimming pool edge starts with a full tile.

We use a special cement adhesive for the external tiles. This will stop any damp penetrating into the garages below. The external stairs have a special edging tile that gives them a high quality finish.

We have now started the external tiling on the second villa.

The lower level garden areas are now finished and the top coat of back-fill is used to cover the water tanks and waste pipes. The shuttering has been placed to help protect the stone walls from any falling rocks. We have installed the electrics for the jacuzzis and the water pipes for the pool shower and garden water taps. We have compacted the top soil, placed all the steel rods and poured the final coat of concrete for the patio area surrounding the swimming pools.

The Canarian dry stone walls at the front of the villas are now finished. We have built the stone wall by the swimming pools up to the patio floor levels. We can now finish screeding the outside terraces and start laying tiles.

The trenches have been dug for the waste water pipes and we are finishing off the plumbing for the swimming pools.

Natural dry stone walls can be seen all over the Island of Lanzarote. In the countryside they create the natural boundaries between fields where the farmers are constantly clearing the ground for their crops. In the villages they line all the road sides and now in a lot of new constructions they are used for boundry walls to keep the traditional feel of the Island.

Dry stone walls on Lanzarote are made from the Islands natural lave rock that is quarried from a lava field between the Moñumento del Campesino (near San Bartolome) and Teguise (the Islands original capital). All lava extraction is strictly overseen by the local authorities as it is prohibited to remove volcanic lava from the countryside. The rock is removed using large excavators which extract pieces of rock of approximately 1 to 2 meters cubed. This stone is then delivered to the site in this form ready for splitting/cutting.

The splitting of the rock is done by hand. We use a diamond tipped blade in an angle grinder to cut small grooves in the stone in which we place steel wedges. These are then hit with a heavy club hammer a few times and the rock is split. The process is then repeated until the desired size of rock is reached. This is a time consuming process but gives the stone a good flat finish for us to work with.

This method of building stone walls is called “Piedra Cortada” (cut stone) and is the best quality of dry stone walling on the Island.

You can also build the dry stone walls by using the smaller stones directly from the quarry, this is slightly cheaper in the cost of labour but does not give a top quality finish.