17. STEEL BEAM INSTALL Top Floor

Metal work on this video was performed by Eduardo Santana's team. Cesar Domínguez, Fernando Felipe, Alejandro Peñaloza, René Hurtado

As we did on the bottom floor, we're using horizontal steel beams instead of the traditional concrete and rebar beams often used in house construction in Mexico. There are numerous advantages to this approach given our specific circumstances. We are targeting having the roof in place on this house before the rainy season hits hard in June. The steel saved us a couple of months time. The labor saving is also significant and we purchased all the steel for the house before the prices skyrocketed for all materials, no just for steel. This was not due to any brilliant foresight on our part. Even from the perspective of not knowing about the coming price increases the steel made more sense for this particular project.

For those of you asking about whether we're going to leave the steel beams exposed the answer is no. The finish work on the house will dress it to look like traditional Valle de Bravo construction. We'll install bricks inside the flanges and apply aplanado (stucco) to the surface. The interiors will have wood dropdown ceilings.