Construction Progress Report #6

We spoke with Maritza this afternoon and she and Vinicio drove over to Atenas yesterday to check on the casita's construction progress. She says it looks like it will be finished within the next two or three weeks. The bathroom tile is in and it looks beautiful. They are now working on the floor tile for the rest of the house. The garage floor is already finished too.

Vinicio will talk to the fellow that built all the cabinetry in their house and see if he can work up a proposal for our kitchen and bathroom cabinets. He is also going to see if we can get a phone line and high speed internet installed before we get there.

We are so grateful Vinicio and Maritza have been able to help us with this project. Without them, it would have been a difficult task to coordinate everything from Houston.

Wish we had pictures....
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Construction Progress Report #5 - Colors

Decisions, decisions, decisions...

John and I sat down last weekend and played around on the Sherwin-Williams web site to pick out paint colors for the casita. What fun we had using their virtual tools to visualize what the colors would actually look like.

The roof will be the color of red tile. The material is a composite made to look like tile.



The interior ceiling will be wood from the Laurel tree and it will look something like this...






The floor throughout the living room, kitchen and bedroom will be 12" tile squares and it should look something like this...




In the bathroom, we will have pale blue tile with a gray sink and toilet, so we have added accenting tile trim pieces in silver, blue and gray.

With these colors for our starting point, we ultimately decided on the colors in this swatch for the exterior and interior walls...

We can't wait to see how it looks when all the painting is done.

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Construction Progress Report #4

Here are a few photos of our casita. On the left side you can see the garage opening. To the right is the covered porch with the opening for the front door. There will be two windows on either side of the door. On the right wall, toward the back, you can see the bedroom window that faces the soccer field.


This picture is looking from the kitchen to the bedroom in the back. You can see part of the kitchen counter on the right and the bathroom wall on the left. We are installing an "on-demand" hot water tank so will have hot water for the bathroom sink, shower, kitchen and washing machine. Most typical Costa Rican homes only have hot water in the bathroom for the Suicide Shower (read this post from November '07 for more info)


This is the view inside the garage. Here you can see the crew floating the garage floor. On the right side you can see the doorway into the living room. There will be a double utility sink next to the door with room for a washer and dryer.

We will have A/C in the bedroom and ceiling fans in the bedroom and living room. We are installing tile floors throughout so it will be easy to keep clean.

We are not going to put a stove in the apartment since this will eventually be the guest quarters. We will have a full kitchen in the big house when we build it. We have planned for plenty of electrical outlets with the appropriate amperage to power a microwave, electric skillet and two burner hot plate. One of the goals for the July trip will include the purchase a small refrigerator and some furniture.

We have already started to accumulate a lot of stuff (towels, sheets, kitchen wares, etc.) which we will be taking down with us in July. We also hope we can pick up a used washer & dryer for a reasonable price.

More later...

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Construction Progress Report #3

We just received an update from Minor on the Apartment construction. The walls and roof were completed about 10 days ago.

They are working on the plumbing and electrical now. The order has been placed for the Laurel that we will be using for our wood ceiling. They should be starting on it soon.

We have made our flight reservation to fly into San Jose on July 4th for a couple of weeks and Minor feels comfortable everything will be finished by the time we get there. He will be sending more photos in the next couple of days and we'll post them here for all to see.

We are also in the middle of our Spanish II course, so John should be much more conversant in español on our next trip.

Hasta pronto...

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Baby Christopher

Photos of the new grandson have arrived! (Thanks to Christoper the Elder.)

Hey ... this kid looks like a baby. How can I send him a sharp object if he's too small to get a good grip on it? Oh well. I'll figure something out.

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A New Grandson!

Hardly any details yet, but new grandson, Christopher Coleman, arrived yesterday, March 20th, and the parents (Aimee & Keith Coleman) are probably almost as thrilled as we are. Everyone is fine and we're anxiously awaiting photos from their home in CA. Film at 11?
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Construction progress report #2

Our first structure is really going up! Here are some photos.


This is a view of our footing excavations and rebar up against a retaining wall. This retaining wall was required of our new neighbor because they are constructing a building (house?) down in an excavation, substantially lower than our natural land contour. When they dug out their lot, they exposed our planned back bedroom wall to undermining if the land ever got washed away from our property, down into their "basement" level.




Below is a typical footing pier with the wall post bolted into place, on top of it. Notice on the nearest post, there is a slot facing the lower right corner of the photo, but no slot facing the lower left corner. Therefore, this is a corner post where a wall is coming across from the distant post and then turning to mate up with the not-yet-existing post to the right.




This is the steel cap running along the top of two wall panels, bolted into one of the posts. The house is all steel and concrete. No wood for the termites! (Except for the internal ceilings and some minor indoor features.) You can see our little farm road / driveway. This view is looking south, from north of Atenas. That is the town hidden in the trees in the distant hills. To the left is our neighboring soccer pitch. That giant tree behind the truck is a mango tree. Yum.




This view is as if you're standing on a step ladder in the kitchen, looking over the wall into the bedroom. Notice the mountain view out the bedroom window. I don't know if I'll be able to stand it.





Even the roof trusses are steel.




That's all we have for now. Stop back soon. We'll be posting more.

And, don't forget to get in your time share reservations to visit [grin].


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Construction progress report #1

Minor notified us the municipality finally approved our building permit on Monday, February 18th. The next day he had his construction crew start clearing the lot and by Saturday, they had completed the excavatation for the septic system and the foundation. Most of the building material is now in place, so the construction should go up pretty fast. As soon as we have something to show, we'll post some pictures.
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