Finish work takes more time

This blog post is all about the detailed finish work that rolls in towards the end of any construction project and ours is no exception.

The Alternating Tread Stairway to the 2nd floor deck and Solar Water Heater have been set in place and the metal railing, being fabricated off-site, is a few steps back.

Behind the scenes back in Maine, Marcia and I were busy putting together a furniture ensemble that will be custom built in Masatepe and hopefully finished by the time our house is completed.

One of the lounge chairs I liked, while visiting a neighboring resort, has already been completed. One thing I started doing prior to this construction project was to habitually photograph anything that struck my fancy and then filing it away  for later in my “Wish List” folder, like this chair. 

Now it’s time to decide on fabric covers for the cushions…what do you think of this color scheme!

Remember in our last blog we had come up with a front entrance design…well it’s nearly finished, but now imagine double doors going in with the same wood lattice design seen here backed with screening to allow tropical breezes to enter uninterrupted 24/7.

The kitchen is coming together and the finish carpenters have been doing most of this work on-site, which I still find simply amazing.

In the front of the house to give our spare bedrooms some privacy we’ve started putting up the vertical posts to support the wood fencing that will also help provide shade and reduce dust from entering these rooms.

The landscaping is all in place and the plants are thriving in their new home. I can’t wait to run my toes through the zoysia grass beside the pool when I visit in March.

I’ll check in one final time with my builders and meet my property manager, Rob who’s going to help maintain and rent the house complex for us.

Until next time!

The last 1/4 mile of the journey

For our December visit, Marcia and I joined forces and ventured south to visit our house project to knock off some major tasks, mainly purchase lots of plants and score some furniture for the house.

There was one small hiccup on this trip, which occurred in Boston. As always I was taking along stuff for the house, which included a water treatment system that had been carefully bubble wrapped and boxed for the flight down.

During check in at American Airlines we discovered they were having a cardboard box embargo! In other words, I had to remove the water filtration tank from its long box, which precipitated other security issues like couldn’t you be hiding explosives in that fiberglass tank?

In the end I was able to sweet talk our tank through security, minus the cardboard box…..the bubble wrap was allowed through and most importantly my sense of humor was still intact.

We brought along a gigantic flatbed truck and our builder’s wife Nancy, a seasoned expert in plant selection, furniture decisions, and price negotiation. We visited nurseries in Catarina and furniture makers in Masatepe, both located in the Masaya region southeast of Managua.

It ended up being a very long shopping spree, but at day’s end when we landed back at Iguana with an abundance of beautiful plants and assorted pieces of furniture, it was entirely worthwhile. We even snapped up Zoysia grass for the side patio to fill in between the large field stone.

We made some final decisions about appliances, kitchen and bathroom layout and several major architectural features at the front entrance way that had been purposely left unfinished until we could visit and discuss several options with Tony, our builder. I hope to show you the results of our design choices in next month’s blog.

The devil is in the details

Rainy weather finally caught up with our construction schedule and literally bogged down progress. Still, much was accomplished during October and part of November.

The mahogany ceiling is nearly finished as well as the fascia board, which has been stained to match the Alluver™ doors and windows. The white metal roof and flashing stood up to the torrential tropical rains with flying colors and the insulated ceiling blanket helped to keep the noise level down inside.

We have incorporated decorative tiles to brighten up the look in the hallway and at poolside the infinity edge where the cascading pool water will flow got a tiled facelift.

The first coat of interior finish paint is on the walls and we’ve all agreed…… it’s a keeper, unless the colors don’t stand up to Marcia’s exacting color palette when we visit in December. We also hope to purchase furniture for the main house and casita and get our hands dirty with some landscape planting.

Stay tuned.

Finish work is on the agenda

As we plan our next visit to Nicaragua we’ve been making many decisions about wall paint, tile, decorative murals, bathroom vessels and wood finish. We decided to complete the front part of our side patio with a tile and Zoysia mix, similar to the example below, helping to make our gated entrance into the Casita more inviting. The back patio overlooking the “Colorado River” is nearly finished with cut natural stone placed right up to the pool’s edge as seen in the background of this photo.

The white metal roof and blanket insulation has been installed and now the finish carpenters are busy putting up mahogany tongue and groove wood paneling, which has been treated with a termite repellent and sealer.

An important topic that should always be addressed is water quality. Our future home is along the pacific and typical of the aquifers near the coast the water is extremely hard, which causes scaling in all your plumbing fixtures and solar water heaters. My go to guy for anything to do with water quality issues and solar energy systems is Jim Ryan at Aguasolutions. As Jim explained to me on Skype from Costa Rica, even with a deep well and a chlorination system in place the water at your faucet will still be hard, but may also contain coliform.

The dramatic wet and dry seasons here in Nicaragua cause the clay-like soil to shift, which in turn strains the underground water lines and may over time open them up to ground water contaminants. So Jim has been directed to design a low maintenance, environmentally sound system that will not only condition/soften our water, without adding chemicals (sodium chloride) or wasting re-charge water, but that will also remove all pathogens as well. We can kiss 5 gallon bottled water containers good bye!

The Alluver doors and windows have arrived from the manufacturer and will be installed next week.

It’s now a proper shelter for the tropics!

The white metal roof panels from Costa Rica have arrived and they’re going up, the floors are poured and ready to receive tile and we’re on this website playing with exterior wall finishes. The paint company of choice here in Central America is Sherwin Williams so Tony, our builder suggested we start experimenting with colors online, which we found very helpful. Simply download some house pictures and start overlaying colors – Hot Cocoa, Lark Green and Respite respectively shown here – we won’t use all three I promise!

While waiting for the roof to arrive, Horizon Group was busy with pool construction and pouring the patio, which will receive the same local cut stone we’re using on our “false” chimney below left.

The pool and patio being prepared for tile and cut stone (see below right) … the motorbike is parked just in front of the master suite. A very short commute, indeed, to the infinity pool from bedside or the Casita in the background for that matter.

How about this color combination?

In the last two months the construction crew has primarily been focused on welding the roof joists together so we can place our order to MetalCo. After extensive research we decided that the roof system that best met our style home would come from this company. The metal roof will be air-proof, fasteners concealed and the surface coating galvanized and enameled white for superior heat reflection. Our general contractor Tony from Horizon Group (see below) is here making a final inspection before taking measurements for the factory that will be fabricating our roof. By the end of July we should have something similar to the rendering on the right, over our heads.

While we wait for the roof to arrive decisions on tile selection needed to be made so Marcia and I hammered out, with a willingness to compromise, the color scheme for the floors, counter-tops and bathrooms. The tile floor mosaic below was created on Conipisos’s web-site and will adorn the length of our hallway with the blues and greens carried over as accent tiles in the bathrooms.

The pool getting covered with rebar in preparation for the cement pour, which will be done in concert with a natural stone deck patio surround.

For those of you who have been following my blog closely may be wondering whatever became of that “?” window on the East facing wall that we were going to cut out…..well we decided to add two for good measure.

A productive site visit

In the first part of April I made a solo trip down to Nicaragua for my very first site visit of our house under construction. It was a very exciting 10 days that allowed me to see, touch and meet everyone involved in the project.

I stayed nearby at a rental townhouse so I was able to visit every day and spend time just walking through each room not only to imagine the adventures and good times ahead for our family and friends, but also begin the critical process of evaluating the actual living space, window placement, natural lighting and air-flow, which I basically call field proofing.

Many of our decisions, up to this point, had been based on one dimensional architectural plans and renderings so I was hopefully optimistic that we had made all the right decisions along the way. My Architect, Jose Sanchez -Reyes as well as my builder’s from Horizon Group checked in with me at the site and as you’ll see we accomplished quite a bit during this visit. I also brought gifts for the entire crew in the form of doo-rags, being modeled by some of the folks here.

A new window and an extra storage space

One of the first things we decided to do was add an additional window on the East facing wall of our house so the spare bathroom would have adequate cross ventilation and more natural light. One of the amazing things about working in country brick is that cutting into a wall to add a window like the one below is no big deal. The labor to accomplish this will add $20 to the bottom line….plus the additional cost of another aluminum window from Aluver.

I also noticed that there appeared to be a convenient narrow niche on the outside wall just to the left of the master bedroom sliders that we hadn’t planned for, but realized it would make a great open storage area for towels and miscellaneous pool stuff so, instead of walling it in we’ll be using that space.

The landscaping gets underway

Since April is close to the front end of the rainy season, this was an excellent time to start landscaping; I made a special visit to Catarina to select nursery plants and get them in the ground before I had to return stateside. With the help of our builder and his truck we loaded up palm trees and several varieties of tropical tree vines and headed back to Iguana for a day of planting.

I spent a small part of each day bushwhacking with a cutlass to remove prickly vegetation between the house and our river so we could get a better view and decide which larger trees needed to be taken out. My antics with the cutlass supplied some good laughs from the crew I’m sure.

I also went to Managua with the builder to look at flooring and he introduced me to a wonderful tile store that produce all their tile locally and I ended up selecting most of our material for the kitchen counter and floors from them. Their website is very clever and with a small bit of patience one can create their own unique floor pattern from this site.

At this point the house walls have been erected, rough stucco completed and the upper metal studs secured that will eventually be welded to metal roof joists as soon as we can get our transformer in place to do the welding.

See ya next month!

Cause and effect

Cause/effect refers to the philosophical concept of causality, in which an action or event will produce a certain response to the action in the form of another event.

I got a dash of this not so philosophical concept during the month of March, but thankfully it precipitated positive outcomes. It all started innocently with a small, but pivotal shift of the house’s orientation to improve the views and location of a group of shade tree to the east of our pool, see below. The effect of this shift caused the screened wood privacy wall we had planned for the West side of the house, see brick layout below, to run smack dab into one of our desirable shade trees at that location.

Our only other option was to move the privacy wall west, but that put us into the buffer zone with our neighbors, which would have not been permitted. We decided to eliminate the screened wall altogether – I love simple solutions! – and plant more ‘privacy’ trees instead. The BBQ station, being an integral part of  this outdoor area, was moved to the west side of the stone deck, not a bad thing as it offered better access to the kitchen and it’s created a small privacy wall on the deck!

During our Architects’ second visit to the construction site he noticed that while viewing the river from the living room the staked square corners of the future stone deck allowed him to see the potential problem of our line of sight down to the river being blocked…. so Jose decided to eliminate these corners and replace them with a soft curve, see Plan View below.

As I’m planning on a site visit in April I’ve been busy purchasing faucets for the kitchens and Bathrooms thru www.everyfaucet.com, which I thought offered a quality product, great pricing and free delivery.  As you may have noticed I also took the opportunity to design a drip irrigation system for our future raised bed landscaping that will automatically water our plants, see Plan View-beds in green, on a battery back-up and rain sensitive controller during the 3 + months of dry season.  I found www.dripirrigation.com for this project and they were very helpful with the initial design work before I placed my order.

My conclusions so far … When things move from the drawing board to the ground things do happen and you’ve got to be flexible and open to thinking outside the box. The cause/effect phenomenon we’ve been talking about here, which some folks call Murphy’s Law, is a force that needs to be reckoned with during the construction phase  and the team you’ve assembled is critical during these impromptu episodes.

I’ll have lots to talk about next month after my 10 days visiting the construction site in April……sweat equity here I come!

A few bumps on the dusty road

This month our builders from Horizon Group made great progress on our home at Hacienda Iguana……., but there were a few surprise bumps in the road. We discovered that to bring electricity into our future home we would need to purchase a transformer from Union Fenosa, see No. 5, but why don’t we let Jeff and Tony tell you in their weekly construction report to me, which is accompanied by photos.

Hola David,

Lots of progress again this past week.

1. All of the fill material was compacted into the foundation of the main house and casita. The fill was brought in one wheel barrow load at a time, spread 6″ deep at a time, watered downed and hand compacted with one-gallon sized paint cans, filled with concrete and a carved tree limb as the handle.  (See the photo on the right)
   
2. The crew continued on the rough stucco coat of the interior and exterior walls. This is a very tedious task, but we are making headway.
3. The rebar is being tied and set on top of all the walls. Once José from JSRA comes out this week and we confirm all of the structural aspects of the roof, we’ll be able to finish this and move forward with framing the tops of the walls for the concrete pour to set everything in place.
4. The casita progress is now in line with the house and we are marking out the terraza right now. Since we had to move the casita back a couple of meters from where we originally planned, more rebar, concrete, bricks and fill are required to bring everything up to the correct level. Hopefully we’ll be able to make it work financially. We’re keeping close tabs on the costs, but won’t know for sure until we finish.
5. We received the bid for the transformer installation and electrical connection. It comes to $6,500. Here is the breakdown:

• Materials – $3,300 – 15kW transformer, mounting brackets, 1/0 cable, meter
• Labor – $1,300 – Installation of transformer and underground house connection
• Union Fenosa – $1,900 – This is the electric company’s fees (ridiculous!)

Tony thinks a 15kW transform can power up to 4 houses about the size of yours, but I’m going to confirm this with the electrician and I’ll get back to you. I know this is a bummer, but unless you have worked something out with Iguana, I’m not sure we have much of a choice.

Sorry to end on a sore subject, but I hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend and the Super Bowl.

Jeff, Horizon Group

The other event that happened, which I’ll call our silver lining to the $6,000 dollar surprise transformer investment, was our Builder’s stepping forward with a concern that was structural in nature they felt needed to be addressed. Near our main entrance way, see construction plan above, we have a floor-to-ceiling glass mitered corner, which is positioned underneath a flat cement slab roof. We asked our Architect to confer with his structural engineer and Jose got back to us with these comments.

Hi Guys,

The structural engineer had calculated the live loads for the entry slab at 220 lbs/m2, so the slab strength is not an issue. But, he did agree that the cantilever would require at least 1” expansion joint between the glass windows to avoid breaking. I think we should introduce a 3” round metal column at the glass corner (interior side) leaving 4” clear on either side to make it easy to clean the glass. This solution should reinforce the slab while keeping the design concept of the open corner.

Best,

Jose, JSRA

And as always here are some construction pictures from our builder to complement the progress report for this month:

Photo above: Casita coming along nicely

Photo above: Casita veranda

Photo above: Progress on the main house

A mid-stream decision to add a ‘Casita’

Lots of construction activity on our 3 bedroom river lot at Hacienda Iguana this month.  We also decided several weeks ago in mid-stream that there was an important decision we needed to make at our neighbors suggestion.  In Central America it’s called a ‘Casita’ or small house, which is primarily built to house the caretaker.  In our case it will most likely be used for our short school holiday visits until our daughter graduates to college.

As is always an issue, we needed to fit this guest house into our budget so we met with our builder at Horizon Group and architect on cyber space to try and figure out how we could have our pie and eat it too. We negotiated a sqm construction price and then challenged our architect at JSRA to design this addition with less than 26 sqm of living space, which he was just able to accomplish.  As you can see from the Design Proposal below, we are utilizing vertical space by constructing an elevated queen size loft bed. The living area needed to be very efficiently planned so we could have a small kitchen, dining and living room, bathroom and a private veranda with views of the river through the double doors.

Now in hindsight the Casita was definitely worth our consideration, especially for those who choose to build their homes outside a gated community for the security of having someone residing at your property while you’re away. We decided that to build this section later would have been too expensive and we were also attracted to the added flexibility of being able to rent the main house and still be able to visit using the guest house. Basically, for the cost of a new economically priced compact car, we now have a studio apartment on our property.

And the main house?  At this point we are at the 2nd payment or 20% of the total cost, which will cover the 2nd floor terrazzo and rough electrical/plumbing and also the metal roofing material that will need to be ordered and shipped from Costa Rica. Here are some recent photos of our progress to date.

Photo above: NW view of Living room/Dining room at left and Master Bedroom on right.

Photo above: Southern view of Casita foundation looking towards river.

Photo above: Interior view of Hallway at left and behind Scaffolding, the kitchen area.