Overseas construction blog part 3: Adding a Casita
This is the third of a series of posts in which David Steckler shares his experiences of building a vacation home at Hacienda Iguana resort on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast. Here is the first and second. The goal of this candid construction blog is to reduce the anxiety levels of people who have bought real estate in Nicaragua or elsewhere in Central America and plan to build, but are afraid of making mistakes along the way.
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.
Category : Blog &Overseas construction in Nicaragua
Overseas construction blog part 7: How about this color combination? | International real estate investing in Central America
Jul 07, 2011
[...] vacation home at Hacienda Iguana resort on Nicaragua’s Pacific coast. Here are the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth. The goal of this candid construction blog is to reduce the anxiety levels [...]
Jennifer
Oct 12, 2011
I have really enjoyed reading your blog and seeing prgress along the way. I’ve been waiting to see if anyone else would ask this question but I guess I’ll go ahead. What was your construction budget (not including the land)? I’d be very interested in any tips/details on budget management, how payment to your contractor was arranged, budget busting/saving decisions, etc.