Chile Forum

Hello all, being a contractor here in Southern Ca with a place in Chile, I plan to have work done on it. One of my biggest headaches here in the US is dealing with building depts and their stooges. Is it the same in Chile or am I generalizing?
Out in the country I could see it being pretty lax, just as it is in some places here in the US but along the coast?
My place is in El Tabo. They appear to have a pretty well funded building dept, always a bad sign.

In general terms It is much easy here in Chile to obtain construction permits, you just have to go to Direccion de Obras Municipales and ask.

Inspections are very rare, I haven´t never seen one and I have constructed by myself more than 200 sq. mt. without any permission and broking almost any rule of the "ordenanza municipal" see http://bradanovic.cl/page21.html

Many chileans construct that way and every 5-10 years an anmesty law appears and you can "regularizar" your property

I ran your page through Google Translate, the results are quite amusing.

http://www.google.com/translate?u=http% ... en&ie=UTF8

haha! I use a lot of chilensmos and idioms in my spanish sites so the automatic translation may be weird!

Anyway I just updated this page with the google sketchups of my "castle in a budge"

looks good, you have really made it into a home.

In Chile, our clients often have the opposite problem. There are is insufficient over site to insure the building is solid. We offer a sudo-sort of inspection and construction management over site to insure that the contractors are doing quality work.

There are building codes in Chile. The local government is the one responsible for the inspections, but as you mentioned above, they can get kind of loose. Especially when they are inspecting rural construction of a buddy or friend of the family.

Even though we do apply some of the Boca codes and Chilean codes, we for the most part try to get a balance between good solid long lasting construction, and keeping the clients budget from exploding. In consultation with our clients we work up a level quality control that they feel comfortable with. For example, in just building a small cabin, we might simply spend time making sure the foundation is done right and few other things. On other projects, say the dream home, the client might want to go all out and make sure each step is Checked.


Since we are in no way a government organization, and we are exceeding the Chilean government requirements, we can often ignore a lot of the international building requirements that are impractical to apply or where simply politically motivated sorts of codes in the United States. In the States, we often overbuild out of fear or law suits and for political winds (big contractors trying to push out little contractors), and not really for engineering motives.

I guessed by looking at the weblog of the house that the codes were a little lax (LOL!) Thanks all, you've answered many of my questions that weren't asked. Now I'm even more certain of the necessity of being onsite during the construction.
I might even bring a level
What a concept!

Really how good or bad your construction is in Chile, is more an issue of how much you want to spend. If you spend 100,000 - 300,000 US on a house, you can get all the building codes met you like and then some. Most of the time this is not needed however.



We often have clients who want to build say a one or two bedroom cabin in the remote mountains of Patagonia, and only want to spend between $10,000-20,000 US to build it. They only plan to use it for a few weeks a year durring the summers. So, it is absurd to double the price of construction trying to meet building codes that really surve little purpose in the context. However, for another say $5,000 or less in construction cost we can do things like double the life of the building or make it more comfortiable by making sure the foundation is done correctly, insulation and windows are good, electical systems are safe, roofing is apropriate.

Applying the same earthquake enginiering that goes in to a ten story apartment building in Santiago, makes no sense with a one room wood cabin in the patagonia.

Obviously, on the other hand you are building an apartment building in Santiago and the central region, you want to throw all the enginiering you can at it and the goverment inspectors will be looking over your shoulder the whole way.

So, really I would look at the lack of code enforcement as flexiablity, rather than a detractor in building your own place. That said, if you are buying a prebuilt building, get it inspected before purchase. Chileans tend to equate fast and cheap with good construction, and do not take in to account the overall life of the building in determining what constitutes good construction.