Well, here we go, builder has been selected, our house design is complete, everything has been given the green light..let's go!...but wait a sec, is it a good idea to start building during rainy season in Costa Rica?...I think the picture below sums it up a little bit...
..................................We knew that we wanted a pool, but not quite like this...
Yup...got a little wet...
If you're following my posts you'll know that my wife and I encountered a few speed bumps when it came to our house design and finding a reliable architect that wouldn't vanish at the start of the project. We honestly weren't expecting to end up needing to hire a firm from the USA but, that's how the cookie crumbled and at the end of the day, maybe there is some truth to the old saying that everything happens for a reason. Our architects @EmporiumDesign did a great job putting our vision onto paper, and now the next step was the daunting task of finding and choosing a reputable builder to get this thing going. Now, keep in mind that my wife and I have never built a home before...ever...so why not start by building our first home in Central America, about 6,900km from our current home in Calgary, Canada. Seems like a good idea, right? Hmmf...We started by reaching out to the developer that was on site in our community to give them a chance to bid for the job, and then we also reached out to our legal team in Costa Rica to help refer us to some reputable builders. In Costa Rica a Lawyer is much more than just a Lawyer, they seem to be the people that you contact for just about anything, big or small. The problem with this is that they will have the tendency to reach out to the more "local" builders and people they know (which is all fine and dandy), but with this you can also expect to encounter a lot more issues with the ole' language barrier...Try deciphering a quote for a construction project - predominantly in Spanish...you learn to use any available translation app just to try to figure out what you're reading. While we appreciated everyone's willingness to submit quotes (I think we ended up receiving 4 different quotes), we could only choose one lucky builder. Choosing a builder was a bit of a painstaking process to go through, but was an important one, as we were putting our trust in someone to build the home of our dreams while we were sitting in a snow bank in Canada yearning for warm weather, sandy beaches, and swimming in our pool...
Ya, that's me..."swimming" where our pool would be. Yes! we found a builder - let's get started.
Updated: Jan 23, 2020
So, my wife and I had a house design in mind; we had some pretty specific must-haves in what is going to be our dream home...so where do we start? How the heck do we find a good reputable architect in a foreign country? Well, we decided the best thing to do would be to reach out to some of the home owners in our gated community, there must be a few people that can offer referrals right, most of the houses in the community are brand new? Yup, shortly after reaching out to some of our soon-to-be neighbours we started getting some architect names and websites to visit...So the search ensued. We spent some long evenings reviewing the various architect websites to make sure we would be chosing one that could deign our house the way we wanted. Heck, we knew we didn't want a typical Latin American design, we were on the search for someone specializing in a modern contemporary design...clean, straight lines through and through with a nice modern, yet comfortable feel. So we knew what we wanted, we just had to pick the right team to put our vision onto paper and all of the other fun stuff that comes with design process.
After a few weeks of searching through the sites from the referrals we received, we decided on an architect company that we thought was perfect, there designs and current projects looked awesome - just what we were looking for. We reached out to the architect (we'll call him Pedo) and started relaying our vision to him and shared a few inspirational pictures and drawings that my wife had made (I think she could have been the architect at this point! she did a damn good job). Pedo was kind enough to mock up some drawings and he even agreed to come to the property the next time we would be in Costa Rica, and go over his drawings (again pretty much a mirror image of my wife's drawings). Great! this is so awesome, super nice guy with a seemingly reputable architect business. He met with us onsite a month or so later, had some nice conceptual drawings so we thought we were well on our way....
Well, a few weeks after we got home from our trip to Costa Rica we sent Pedo a few emails to see how he was making out with the changes we had requested and to see where he was at with the final drawings (and most importantly to see when he would need some payment for the services he had already completed)...but "poof" it was as though he vanished like a fart in the wind...we tried calling him, we texted him, and we even had our project manager stop by his office to see what was going on...but no where was Pedo to be found................................where oh where did our architect go....We were barely started and we had already hit our first speed bump.
Seeing our frustration from the sudden inexplicable disappearance of our architect, our project manager offered to help, and was kind enough to set up a meeting with some fine folks from @Emporiumdesign, a talented group of architects in New York that were more than happy to take on our project and get us the house design we had been dreaming of...
