Overseas construction blog part 11: The last quarter mile
This is the 11th in 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 are the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth. The goal of this candid construction blog is to reduce the anxiety of people who own real estate in Nicaragua and plan to build, but are afraid of making mistakes along the way.
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.
Category : Blog &Overseas construction in Nicaragua
