September 22 - 28, 2008

In an effort to upgrade your user experience, my very good friend Luciano assisted me in embedding Snap Shots, by Snap Technologies, into the the blog. You can take advantage of Snap Shots by mousing-over links to get the most appropriate shot of content for that link without leaving the site. Hopefully this will address the "interesting but needs photos" comments I have received from a few of my, ironically, more tech-saavy friends (hint: Ted Nelson coined the words "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963!).

Luciano was also kind enough to stitch together this panorama of the fazenda using Adobe Photoshop...it nicely conveys a bit of the grandeur of Alfheim.

All of the blog's photos have been taken using my Nikon D80. If you are considering a mid-range dSLR, I highly recommend this camera. A complete review of the Nikon D80 can be found here. As Lone so delicately put it the other day when I e-mailed her a photo of a bird I had taken (and which she liked): "It's amazing you can take such a beautiful picture when you can't even see". Credit the Nikon.

With phase I construction on track to conclude on Tuesday, September 30th, I used a few hours during the latter part of the week to review costs, which I have been tracking since we began construction a little less than 11 weeks ago (once a consultant, always a consultant). While about as glamorous as pouring cement for a water tower -not something I would wish upon my worst enemy- hopefully these figures will prove useful to someone else out there.

• Labor (excluding Johannes, Esben and me..sorry guys!): R$23,980 (€8,900 or $12,9914)
• Materials: R$44,489 (€16,511 or $24,102)
• Other: R$1,500 (€557 or $813)
• Total: R$69,969 (€25,967 or $37,906)
  

As with most other things in life, The devil is in the details. In total, then, we have built/rebuilt three structures totaling 390 square meters or 4,198 square feet. This equates to a unit cost of R$179 per square meter (€67 or $97) or R$17 per square foot (€6 or $9).

You will have to wait until next week's blog to assess whether we received value for money (there's that consultant thing again); the rain has prohibited us from painting all week -even inside.

Finally, the Fazenda Alfheim blog has had visits from readers in 11 countries: Brazil, United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Costa Rica, Canada, Switzerland, New Zealand and Portugal.