Beach books - Casa, dolce casa
The Maestro and Leaky Lopez: Adventures and misadventures of building a Residencia in Baja. By Robert Parucha. Xlibris Press, 166 pages. www.maestroandleaky.com.
by Kevin Cody
Manhattan Beach resident Robert Parucha set some ambitious goals for himself when he decided to build a vacation home near his garment factory in Ensenada three years ago.
“The first is that we would follow the letter of the law,” he writes in The Maestro and Leaky Lopez: Adventures and misadventures of building a residencia in Baja.
“Secondly, we determined to complete the house.”
“Thirdly, the workers on the project would be paid a fair wage…and get whatever benefits from the government they had coming to them.” That alone added 30 percent to payroll for Mexico’s national health care program.
No one with experience building in Baja would have set the bar quite so high. But Parucha has written a humorous book to show it can be done, though not without, patience, money and luck.
Parucha works for an Orange County sportswear company that requires his presence at their Ensenada maquila three days a week. One evening, he surprised his wife with the news that he had put $1,000 down on a lot in Punta Piedra, a gated community 30 minutes north of Ensenada. His rational, he writes, is that the house would be “a great way to keep everyone connected.” He and his wife Jenny were in their mid 50 and had three, nearly grown children, including 17 year-old Mira Costa senior Robert, who surfs. Baja has some of the best surf on the west coast.
Never mind the fact that the Mexican Constitution prohibits foreigners from owning land within 62 miles of the coastline. The 99-year-lease on coastal property is really a 10-year lease, Parucha helpfully warns.
But with local legal help the constitutional restriction can be circumvented with a “bank trust” that is renewable after 50 years, and is transferable to heirs, Parucha learns.
The real legal challenge in Baja, Parucha writes, is determining who has title to the property. After three months of legal work Parucha was confident enough of title to the property he had selected to make to break ground.
Parucha acknowledges he never would have completed the project without the onsite presence of friend Frank Binek, who was building a home in nearby La Mision.
After exhausting his budget, Binek’s house was only halfway completed.
Nevertheless, Parucha hired Binek’s contractor “Maestro” Arturo. He figured Binek experience in dealing with the Maestro and his crew would protect him from repeating Binek’s mistakes, such as paying workers in advance.
The Maestro promised the home would be completed within nine months. “Your son will be surfing here and spending the night here by Memorial Day,” he said.
The house was finished in just over two years, which is still an achievement by Baja standards, where, Parucha writes, “Manana…really means sometime in the future.”
The Maestro proved to be a talented contractor and equally talented con artist, a role Parucha, who in his youth, played Matt Miller on “The Young and the Restless,” could not help but admire, even as the Maestro’s imaginative explanations for missing money drove him to the point of abandoning the house.
When Parucha prepares an Excel spread sheet to track the work, the Maestro tosses it in the trash, saying in a deeply offended voice, “I don’t need a list. And by the way, I’m no Mr. Gomez,” referring to the eccentric contractor whom Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith wrote about 40 years ago in his similarly humorous account of building a house in Baja
“The Maestro and Leaky Lopez” won’t necessarily discourage readers’ dreams of building a home in Baja. But it does offer many cautionary lessons, among them, “an adventurous spirit needs to be tempered with a calm, reasoned plan.” B