Building Materials
Buy and sell building materials in Panama.
Cement milled in Colón province and Chilibre, block from the block yard down the road, corrugated bar for the columns and zinc sheet for the roof: building materials are the heavy part of a house, bought new from a supplier or left over once the walls are up. Panama still orders most of it in inches and feet, so a seller describes block by its thickness in inches and a roofing sheet by its length in feet. New stock and surplus are both traded, from the pallet someone over-ordered to half a box of floor tile or sheets lifted off an old roof.
Cement from four local plants, block from the nearest block yard:
the two are bought together because one lays the other. Argos, Bayano, Interoceánico and Chagres all make cement in Panama. The general-use bag lays block, renders walls and makes everyday concrete; the structural type goes where the engineer’s plans call for it. Concrete block is sold by thickness, the thinner one for most house walls and partitions and the thicker where the plans want a heavier wall. Corrugated steel bar comes in fixed lengths by diameter. Zinc roofing is sold by the foot, plain galvanised or enamelled red, in a narrow or a wide wave profile, and screwed down to galvanised purlins. Moving it around a lot takes a wheelbarrow, laying it takes construction tools, and once a wall passes head height you will want scaffolding.
Reading the grade mark on steel bar before reading its price:
the plans decide which bar and which cement go in, not the price tag. Grade 60, the stronger steel, has its grade rolled into the bar as a number or as an extra line running along its length. Grade 40 carries no grade mark at all, so a pile can be checked without a receipt. On zinc, a higher gauge number means a thinner sheet. Of two sheets the same length, the cheaper one is often thinner or carries less coating, and that shows up as rust years earlier. For block, match what is already in the wall: same thickness and, if you can, the same yard, so the courses line up.
Why leftover block holds its price and old cement does not:
a 42.5 kg bag of general-use cement is around $8 to $9 new and a thin wall block costs under a dollar at the yard, so the value in surplus lies in the quantity rather than the piece. Clean, whole block keeps nearly all of it, because block does not age: it sells close to yard price minus what the buyer spends hauling it. Cement goes the other way. A bag bought months ago and kept on bare concrete may be worth nothing at all. Zinc off an old roof is already cut to the old span and drilled at the old purlin spacing, so it fetches a fraction of a new sheet and suits a shed, a fence or a chicken run better than a house.
A cement bag that has started to set, and tile from the wrong lot:
press the bag first. Good cement gives like flour; lumps that will not crumble between your fingers mean moisture got in and it has begun to harden. Ask when it was bought and whether the bags sat on pallets or on the floor. Block that crumbles when you scratch it with a nail, or arrives with half its corners knocked off, is no bargain. On bar, surface rust that wipes off is normal; flaking scale and pitting are not. Tile boxes carry a shade and lot code, so buy leftovers only if there are enough boxes from one lot to finish the room, because a second batch rarely matches the first.
Pallets left over when the roof goes on:
give the count and the unit before anything else: bags, pieces, sheets, bars or square metres of tile, with sizes in inches and feet the way they are ordered here. Add the cement brand and type and any date printed on the bag, the bar grade and diameter, the sheet gauge and length, and the lot code on the tile. Photograph the stack, the labels and any breakage. Say whether a truck can reach the pile, in a yard in Chepo or at the end of a gravel road outside Bugaba, and whether you will help load. Whoever collects needs a vehicle sized for the weight: a full pallet of cement is more than a family pickup should carry.