Building our Ocean View Dream Home Part 2 by Becky Clower
We are now five weeks into construction and things are moving along on our ocean view home near Pirate’s Bay (Bahia del Pirata) in Guanacaste. The main highlights of the last week is that our waste water treatment plant by Eloy was installed. While we are happy about doing something that is better for the environment, the treatment plant itself is not very pretty to look at. Having said that, we came up with a solution to plant bamboo and some flowers around it and that way you won’t even know it’s there. The workers who live on site constructed a bathroom and shower and those are connected to the treatment plant, which is great.
The only part of our home that is going to be block is the foundation, the retention walls (both for the pool and the land) and the garage. You can now see the garage taking place, as well as the pool. The retention walls are almost complete. One of the retention walls for the pool should be complete within a week. The steel frame structure is in route from Canada, so we hope to start with that next month. I have to say things are definitely moving fast. We have a crew of about 12 men working on our house daily. The workers are usually working 10-12 hour days, and as you may know, the beach is hot. They are doing a fantastic job thus far.
We ordered our light and plumbing fixtures, electrical, and the outdoor kitchen from Canada and shipped these things to Calgary to be included in our shipment. Nothing like shopping online! It was nice to be able to pick things out online and send them alone with our other building materials. My husband Keith went to the Expo Casa (Home Show) in San Jose last week and also got some great deals on our outside patio flooring (Coralina—looks like marble, but cheaper) and our roofing (which is made to look like rustic Mediterranean clay tile, but is actually 100% recycled plastic). The roofing material is the same one that was used on a big restaurant called El Choza del Laurel, near the Liberia International Airport. We chose this roofing because, unlike clay tiles, this roof does not crack when you walk on it and has virtually no maintenance. That, and the fact that the roof is 100% recycled material and more energy efficient, appealed to us. The roofing company also gave us a 10% discount at the home show, which was a plus.
We will be picking out our brick pavers in a couple weeks. We’ll be using brick pavers for the driveway and garage areas. The flooring for the home will also be picked out. We are currently thinking tile for the main living area and wood floors or solid bamboo for the third level of the home.
I hope that part 3 of this story will have us starting with the steel frame structure of the home. If the container gets here when it’s supposed to, we’ll be slightly ahead of schedule…which seems to be rare in Costa Rica!
