To Build in Costa Rica

Every once in a while, this little old blog gets a visitor. This time, I figured I should make a little post on how our home has held up over the past 4 years since completion.

We love our home. The MgO SIP panels have been true to their promise of keeping the house cooler for longer. We did install AC eventually (maybe after a couple years), as we had plumbed in for it just in case. The SIP panels keep the room super cool after just a short 20 minutes of using the AC so in that way, we really do minimize our energy costs. Honestly, we live a fairly minimalistic lifestyle. Our monthly electric bill is $90 and mostly that is because I use the clothes dryer a lot for my job.

When we first moved in, we had an issue with sounds we later identified as tiles breaking and the house settling… when our original builder had a bit of a hissy fit and our developer made it close to impossible to reconcile to complete the finishings on our home, we had to hire someone else to do all the finish work. This person didn’t understand how to work with lightweight flooring and didn’t listen to me when I explained what our builder had explained, about installing an underlayer. So, we have tiles stuck directly to the MgO board which moves, expands etc and therefore we got a lot of cracking. Fortunately, our tiles are kind of rustic/ wood look and it isn’t super obvious when we look at it.

The rest of our house- we love the teak wood, we are super happy with the glu-lam beams and all the wood quality of our home. This is great because we waited a LONG time for the wood, and we paid a lot of money for it!! The builder was very emphatic that this particular supplier of wood from down south near Perez Zeledon was THE best and I do believe he was! The wood supplier is called Eco Maderas del Sur.

Now, since starting the blog, I have been contacted a few times by people excited to build with the same builder as us. This week, I was contacted by a man who said that we got very lucky, that he had paid out thousands of dollars to purchase his SIPs and then never heard a word from Trevor. So, I would caution anyone at this point to really do your investigation thoroughly before wiring any money to anyone.

Update…

We still absolutely love our home, yet we are putting it on the market. We recognize that there is a huge increase in demand for homes that are already built, and that not all people coming to Costa Rica are brave (or hopelessly optimistic) enough to embark on such a project as building your own home (in a foreign country in a foreign language!)…. I do believe that you CAN do it, and it sure is a great way for instant immersion into a new culture, however, the risks can be great and I see it is not for everyone. Here is a link to our listing– as you can tell, we are 100% transparent with what are the pros, cons, caveats…

We have acquired 30 acres of gorgeous land in the far south of Costa Rica, and are excited to embark on a new journey, in a remote, off-the-grid setting. Check out our view!!