How to read a crack, what it costs to build per square metre, and what a building permit demands in each city. Technical notes, with the sources in plain sight.
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It gets decided on taste, and it moves five things at once: how much of the plot the rules let you cover, the structure, the heat, privacy and what the house can grow into later. Neither option is cheaper by definition. What changes, with Colombia's seismic code and Cali's climate in hand.
Houses and country homes15 min
Three bedrooms, a study, an open kitchen and "somewhere for the dogs" are not yet a commission. How a wish list becomes a brief with areas, relationships, priorities and a budget, what the architect will ask, and why adding up the rooms never gives you the size of the house.
Process11 min
The yellow sticker does not say the building is fine, and it does not say it is about to fall down either. What each colour means exactly according to Cali city hall, what you can do today with each one, who signs the assessment that follows and what to ask them.
Building defects14 min
The POT of Cali has been annulled and is running on borrowed time, which the court has extended to 9 July 2027. What is protected if you already hold a permit, what gets frozen when you file, and why the planning ruling you have filed away does nothing for you there.
Permits and planning11 min
A school is not sized in square metres: it is sized in learning spaces, and the area is what comes out. What the Colombian school standard requires of the site, the daylight, the toilets and the escape routes.
Public works14 min
A pool is not heated: it is stopped from cooling. Evaporation carries off some 86 kWh a day, more than any piece of equipment will replace cheaply. Here is the comparison per useful kWh, on August 2026 tariffs, and the regulatory fact nobody mentions.
Pools and hot tubs9 min
Nobody publishes prices, and the two guides in circulation contradict each other by a factor of three. What does exist: a methodology with a breakdown by stage, and a law that explains why half of what you pay is not the architect’s fee.
Costs13 min
Jamundí has no curador urbano, so the permit is issued by the municipality and no charges are payable. How much you really save, what you do have to pay, and why the real obstacle is not money but a water certificate.
Permits and planning10 min
A salt pool is a chlorine pool: the cell makes the chlorine on site instead of you buying it in a tub. And the proof is not chemical, it is regulatory. What salt really buys you, what it really costs, and what has to be measured in both.
Pools and hot tubs9 min
All three can be built well and all three can be built badly. What really decides it in Colombia are two things no brochure mentions: the width of the road the shell has to travel down, and the water sitting under the ground.
Pools and hot tubs8 min
There is no single figure, and anyone who hands you one without saying what it includes and which month it is from is inventing it. What does exist: what the DANE index really measures, what is and is not inside a construction cost, and why the same square metre is not worth the same in Bogotá, Medellín, Barranquilla and Cali.
Costs16 min
Eighty pages and a single decision: bid or not. How standardised tender documents are assembled, in what order to read them, and where the conditions that disqualify you without showing it are hiding.
Public works12 min
The areas per student did not move. What changed is where you get them from: the table that gave you the size of the site left the normative body, and the playground became programmed area.
Public works22 min
There is a factor of eight between the cheapest quote and the dearest, and both go by the same name. One answers what the rules allow on your plot; the other, whether the business works. What to expect from each, and why no reference rate exists.
Costs10 min
The expensive question is not the price of the new square metre: it is where its load goes down. The code has a chapter for this, it separates growing sideways from growing upwards, and only one of the two forces a fresh analysis of the whole house.
Costs14 min
Width is not the only thing that matters, and the threshold half the internet repeats is wrong. How to read a crack with the criteria of the Colombian technical guide: what caused it, when to call somebody, and what looking cannot tell you.
Building defects16 min
Most owners discover this number after they have signed. Here it is, worked out from the published water and electricity tariffs, with what has a public price kept separate from what does not, and with what the rules require to be done every day.
Pools and hot tubs10 min
Which POT governs today and exactly where it stands in court (which is not what the press reports), how many curadurías there are, when the deadlines really start running, and the four procedures they will ask of you at the same time that are not the permit.
Permits and planning18 min
Nobody publishes official pool prices in Colombia, and anyone quoting you a figure without having seen your plot is making it up. What can be worked out, and is worked out here from the published tariff schedules: what it costs to fill, and what the month costs.
Pools and hot tubs10 min
Sharing the machinery between the two sounds like a saving and is the most predictable failure in the field. Since 2026 the rules require independent recirculation, and there is a physical reason behind it worth understanding.
Pools and hot tubs12 min
The word "portable" makes you think of an appliance. It is two tonnes on four square metres, water at 40 °C and electricity, all at once. Since 2026 Colombian rules finally name it.
Pools and hot tubs16 min
Two problems, in this order: will it hold, and will it leak. NSR-10 does deal with pools (it has a whole chapter) and the terrace load table circulating online has been superseded since 2011.
Pools and hot tubs15 min
It gets priced as builder’s work and it is a machine. Until Resolución 929 de 2026 no Colombian rule governed it; now one does, and it requires things almost no existing plant room has. Plus the level decision you cannot undo later.
Pools and hot tubs15 min
It is not a finish on the shell: it is a whole other hydraulic system, and since Resolución 929 de 2026 it is in the rules. The pump does not draw from the floor, the surge tank is compulsory and has a minimum size, with an ambiguity worth knowing.
Pools and hot tubs13 min
You do not win with the best proposal: you win with the best proposal among those left eligible. How a concurso de méritos is put together, what is assessed, and why price does not decide who wins.
Public works8 min
A refurbishment is not budgeted per square metre: it is budgeted room by room, and what sends the figure up is not the size but touching the structure, the waterproofing or the layout. Where the legal boundary lies, and why almost everybody puts it in the wrong place.
Costs13 min
The municipality grew faster than its instruments: a land-use plan from 2002, no curaduría urbana, and a judgment that ties permits to the availability of water. What that means for your plot.
Where to build8 min
The same plan, the same budget and the same plot give you two different houses depending on who sleeps in them. And there is a line, at thirty days, beyond which the difference stops being about brief and starts being about legal status.
Houses and country homes13 min
You have been told your building needs strengthening. What that means in terms of the code, who may sign it, which permit modality applies, and why the procedure costs less than you fear, while the works do not.
Permits and planning9 min
"Every country house needs a water concession" is wrong in four separate cases, and the concession you do need runs for ten years, not fifty. The four sources of water and what each one requires.
Houses and country homes15 min
In the city the question is what you may build. In the countryside there is an earlier one: whether the person selling can sell at all. Title, falsa tradición, access rights and public land, with the statutes in hand.
Houses and country homes15 min
Roofs get chosen on looks and on price, while the variable that actually decides sits in an official table almost nobody opens: weight. Clay tile weighs ten times what a metal sheet weighs, and that ratio changes the whole structure.
Houses and country homes11 min
The house itself costs much the same. What does not is everything the city already had and here has to be built: the track, the power, the water, the treatment of the waste water and the ground itself. Five items that do not fit inside a rate per square metre.
Houses and country homes12 min
What everyone calls «the septic tank» is really four units in a row, and the regulation requires all of them. How much land the last one needs, which permit sits behind it, and why the minimum distance to your water well you have heard about appears nowhere in the code.
Houses and country homes14 min
The budget you were handed is for the works, not for the project. These twelve items are almost never in it, every one of them gets paid anyway, and several are a condition of the permit being issued. What each one is, why it gets forgotten and what its size depends on.
Costs13 min
Supervision and interventoría are not the same thing, and the difference decides who is answerable. The regime that separates them, why interventoría is engaged through a concurso de méritos, and how far its liability reaches.
Public works7 min
A curador is not a department of the town hall, and you pick which one. What they do, how the charges are assessed in UVT, what they cannot charge you for (starting with verbal enquiries) and what documents you have to bring.
Permits and planning13 min
Of the five points where a roof fails, four are matters of design or of maintenance and only the fifth is the waterproofing. Almost every quotation proposes changing the fifth. That is why the drip comes back.
Building defects17 min
You choose with documents and with six questions, not with a handsome portfolio. How to check the professional registration in two minutes, which certificate to ask for, and the nine signs worth taking seriously.
Where to build8 min
There is a point at which repairing stops being maintenance and becomes diagnosis. What the signs are, in which four cases the seismic building code requires the study, in which one it expressly says it is not needed, and who can sign it.
Building defects11 min
Almost everything repeated about this law is wrong: it requires neither a 1.20 m enclosure nor a permanent lifeguard in a residential development. What it does require, article by article, and the technical gap that makes "type-approved device" mean almost nothing.
Pools and hot tubs23 min
There is no such thing as a "pool permit": no national rule names one. The answer depends on where, on what, and what you touch. And there are safety duties that apply whether you hold a permit or not.
Pools and hot tubs8 min
The legal term is identical to the urban one: forty-five working days. What doubles is everything that has to be ready before you file, and that is where the months nobody counted go.
Five different kinds of damp produce similar stains and are repaired in five different ways. How they are told apart on site, with the tests that decide it, and why condensation is not cured by waterproofing.
Building defects16 min
Colombia does not have one climate but four, and the state has already classified them and attached mandatory savings targets. What changes in the house from one to the next, and why humidity rules the coast.
Houses and country homes12 min
"Prefabricated" is not a system, and masonry comes in seven. The honest comparison between them, and the question nobody answers: what happens when you want to take a wall out ten years later.
Houses and country homes10 min
You paid for a diagnosis and were handed a quotation with photographs. Which sections a report that is of use carries, what the only Colombian legal definition of a well-made technical report says, and seven signs of one that will do nothing for you.
Building defects8 min
You extended, added a storey or enclosed the terrace without permission, and now you want to sell, to mortgage, or simply to sleep at night. What you actually risk, what an act of recognition is, and where to start.
Permits and planning5 min
Ordered by what they cost, not by how often they happen. The first can leave a property that can never be conveyed; the last only costs money. All ten are avoided before the works begin.
A sloping plot is cheap to buy and expensive to build on, and what makes it expensive is not the architecture: it is the ground. Soil study, cut and fill, retaining walls, drainage and the items never in the budget.
Houses and country homes11 min
You want to knock a wall through, enclose the balcony or change the window. What is yours and what belongs to the community of owners (even inside your own flat), what majority is needed, and why the meeting’s permission does not replace the building permit.
Permits and planning5 min
It is hardly ever because somebody lied. There are eight specific causes, every one of them foreseeable, and seven are controlled before the first bag of cement arrives. What they are, and what to do about each one.
Costs6 min
Nine stages between buying a plot and holding the building permit. Which of them carry a legal deadline and which depend on you, what can run in parallel, and the three points where almost every project falls behind.
Process5 min
Rural land is not urban land with more room: it runs on harder rules and on three separate authorities. What may be built, who decides it, and the limit that voids the deed.
Site coverage ratio, plot ratio, setbacks and land dedications, explained without jargon. And the rule almost nobody states: national law gives you the vocabulary, but the numbers come from the POT of your municipality.
Permits and planning12 min
These are not questions born of mistrust: they are the ten whose answers change what you will pay, what you will get and who you can claim against if something goes wrong. With what each one ought to be answered with.
Process5 min
Most design commissions in Colombia are agreed over WhatsApp and a bank transfer. The six clauses where the arguments are actually lost, including one copyright rule, peculiar to architecture, that surprises both sides.
Process7 min
You have been handed a set of drawings and you do not know where to start. What the scale means, where the dimensions that matter are, what that thick line crossing the plan is, and the six things worth checking before you approve anything.
Process6 min
"Just send me some drawings so I can apply for the permit" is the request that skips the stage where everything is decided. What each design stage is, what is handed over at each one, and why changing your mind costs a hundred times more on site than on a drawing.
Process5 min
It is neither mistrust nor red tape: it is that nobody finds their own mistakes with the same enthusiasm they bring to finding somebody else’s. What an interventor does, when the law requires one, and when it is worth having on a house.
Process6 min
These are not three versions of the same service, nor three price brackets. They are three different trades, and the law reserves certain signatures to certain professionals. What each one does, what each may sign, and who answers if something goes wrong.
Process8 min
The round figures in circulation ("eight months", "a year") come from nowhere. What does exist: the real sequence, what depends on what, and the one construction deadline Colombian law put in writing.
A plot is bought with documents, not with a site visit. The twelve points to check before signing the promise of sale, where each one is looked up, and which of them can leave a piece of land unbuildable for good.
Where to build11 min
Why Plano Base exists: building a business out of architecture, after the pandemic, with one concrete mission: to add value on every project, whatever its scale.
Case studies3 min