Overseas construction blog part 6: A productive site visit
This is the sixth 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 are the first, second, third, fourth and fifth. The goal of this candid construction blog is to reduce the anxiety levels of people who have bought Nicaragua real estate and plan to build, but are afraid of making mistakes along the way.
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!
Category : Blog &Overseas construction in Nicaragua
Jed Overpot
May 23, 2011
On-site visits are so important for any house building job and could be why doing this overseas is so difficult. Seems like you have a nice team.
David Steckler
May 24, 2011
Hi Jed,
I spent a good deal of time screening through builders before I selected Horizon Group and that due dilegence paid off in spades. On several occassions they’ve stepped forward to express their concern in terms of structural integrity issues in the architectural plans that we beefed up at no cost to me. On my recent site visit our builder came up with a wonderful design idea for the pool that we’ll be incorporating, which I’ll also be talking about further along in this blog.
Jed Overpot
May 30, 2011
How many times will you plan to visit the house in person while it is being built?
David Steckler
May 30, 2011
I’ll probably try and get over in late August with my family this time to purchase furniture,appliances and cookware,then again in late December or early 2012 to christen the place w/ Mojitos and ready the main house for the rental market targeting long-term renters and keep the Casita free for our seasonal use until our daughter graduates from HS.
whatsupelsal
Jun 19, 2011
great series of articles David! thanks for following the progress with updates. Living in Central America has all kinds of issues but it’s sure worth it
Overseas construction blog part 7: How about this color combination? | International real estate investing in Central America
Jul 07, 2011
[...] 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 of people who have real [...]
Jed Overpot
Jul 07, 2011
Let me know when it is available to rent!
David Steckler
Jul 18, 2011
Hi Jed,
I will…..hopefully we’ll be finished the early part of 2012, but if we factor in Nica time it could be longer. I’ll keep you posted!
Dennis Sein
Oct 14, 2011
I love Nicaragua…been several times…the people are just so warm and welcoming. I hope to be able to buy down there in the future.