Bienvenidos a Quito! - Getting the hostel started

Hello readers! The time is finally upon us! The team members of Community Hostel have all arrived in Quito to start working on the hostel. After so many months of planning and preparing it's hard to believe that we're finally here and ready to get to work. And there's a lot of work to be done! While the building is beautiful from the get-go, it's full of merchandise for the store located below the hostel. The first thing that needed to be done was to empty out the place so that we could start cleaning, sanding, painting, and decorating!

Some of the merchandise stored in the soon-to-be hostel.

Marco and Renee helping each other move the merchandise.

Marco carrying out a 50kg bag of merch. Que fuerte es!

Dan and Ryan.

Marco and Renee getting their groove on.

It was hard and dirty work!

After clearing out the rooms, the next step was to start working on redoing the floors. To do this, the floors first had to all be sanded down. Afterwards, the floors went through several coats of finishing, meaning we had to stay out of the hostel for about a week.

One of the rooms emptied of merchandise with the floors sanded down.

The completed floors, redone and shining like new!

With the floors done, it's time to move up in life. As you'll see from the pics below, our walls and floorboards were filthy and in much need of some fresh paint. In order to preserve the colonial feel of the house, we decided to keep the original colors of the house.

Soon-to-be-eradicated wall grunginess.

Ryan and Dan gettin' their paint on

The finished rooms! Colonial goodness.

Finally, the windows needed some good cleaning. The process was long, and attention to detail was much needed. Luckily for us, Ryan is an expert window cleaner! To get to the outside windows, we needed to set up scaffolding to get to the second and third floors. A few of the windows needed replacing, which meant smashing them out and puttying in new ones. 

Building the scaffolding. Definitely the most dangerous thing we've done here at Community Hostel.

Nathan getting strapped in to the safety harness.

"What're those gringos doing?!"

Breaking out a pane of glass.

Dangling from the third story off a safety harness tied to a chimney. NBD.

With the building spick and span, the next step was to bring in the beds! The beds were hand crafted from a local artisan wood worker. Carrying them up three flights of stairs was not easy though!

Loving the heavy, awkward lifting of the beds up the stairs. 

The finished product!

It was a long process, and a lot of hard work, but Community Hostel is up and running and ready for business! We've only just begun, so be sure to check in often for updated blogs about the hostel, local events and attractions, and trips around Ecuador. Come visit us at Community Hostel! We hope to see you soon!

Comments

[Chris]

Hey, how you doing?

Looks beautiful! I wish you good luck!

greetings chris :-)

[Christine]

Marco y los amigos...this is looking amazing!! Muchas felicidades! I can't wait to get back to Ecuador to see the place. I'm so proud of you guys! Abrazos muy fuertes a todos.

[jeffrey flores]

Marco,
Amazing! The place looks great and the set up is nicely done. I would like to stay and visit one day.

Jeff Flores

[Lynden]

Looking Good Marco! Can't wait to come stay with you guys on my next visit! Semper Fi brother.