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Ok now I have been building for a long time. I have built hundreds of houses so what I say is based on experience.
Scott I noticed in your pictures of your home some odd combinations of building techniques and was wondering if they were common there or just something you have cosen to do.
For instance your shower in your new home. It is partially wood and partially tile. Also unless I missed something there looks to be no tile backer board or substrate. What is to stop the wood from rotting or the area behind the tile to stay dry? In our homes a house would never pass inspection having wood in the shower area like that. Not to mention the dangers of mould. It is just not something done here.
Now I know the humidity in your area is a lot higher than here. So how do you deal with the long term problem of the wood getting wet all the time? I am asking because I am going to build a home there as soon as I can break away from work to get started…
Also if I keep hearing not to build using wood frame construction down there how is it acceptable to use wood to build your house? Is it because your climate is different where you built your home? One last question I noticed that you have built your counters by framing it with 3″x3″ boards… do you not use a european box style cabinet there like we do in our country? I would think that the cabinets would be cheap to manufacture since the labour is so cheap there.I am curious to know the answers to these questions… We build using stick framing here and I can build a house very fast that way…
You’ve built a LOT more houses than I have ‘clarkkent’. My goal is to build an affordable vacation home in the country which will cost less than $80K
The “odd combinations” of materials are our choice, we wanted to mix wood, stone and other materials…
There is indeed a backer board behind the ceramic tile in the shower and the wood has four coats of sealant which was plenty good enough in our last mountain home shower and will hopefully be good enough in this one …
Since you haven’t told us where you are physically located we obviously don’t know how humid it is but, we are building in the mountains at 7,230 feet and not in the jungle so it’s not at all humid and gets quite cool in the evenings which is why we’ll use the fireplace every night.
You may have heard about not using wood perhaps where it is very humid but again we are in the cooler mountains and not in the jungle and there are hundreds of similar wood homes in this area, some of which have been around for a very, very long time.
Our builder is using 3″x 3″ boards for the kitchen counters which is what our builder – who’s rarely been to San Jose and never been outside of Costa Rica – normally uses. He wouldn’t know what ‘European box style cabinets’ are in fact I can guarantee you he doesn’t know what ‘Europe’ is…
Question: Just as a matter of interest ‘clarkkent’, using your stick framing method in your area how much would one of your 2,200 square foot homes cost ?
Scott Oliver – Founder
WeLoveCostaRica.comI didn’t mean odd as in the wood with tile in the bathroom. I mean it more just inside the shower area. We would never put wood in the shower area because it would get wet everysingle time you used the shower… mould would be my biggest concern well and dry rot.
I am in BC, Canada. I build approx. 40 houses a year. a 2300 sq ft house would cost approximately 125 dollars a sq ft not including land. Without going over board on finishes. That same house last year would have been over 200 dollars a sq ft. Our trades prices have come down significantly due to the down turn. the crazy things is we have already sold 28 ubits this year and are on track to beat last years sales. Proof that having the right product at the right price in the right location works.
Do all builders in the area use the same construction technique in making cabinetry? Don’t they use plywood or anything like that to make cabinets?
I have already designed my house for costa rica in 3D. it is 1918 sq ft and I figure it will cost me arount $80,000 to build not including the land. It is a 3 bedroom 2 car garage rancher style home.
I am in the Seattle area and you could not even come close to building a home for $125/SF unless you provided all the labor yourself and went with the cheapest materials. Even the cheapest split level homes run $150/SF. A luxury home on Lake Washington or Puget Sound could run $1,000/SF. Most homes here sell for $180/SF-$200/SF and lots are as small as 5,000 SF. Of course, the majority of our lumber comes from BC and last time I was on Vancouver Island I was appalled by the massive clear cuts.
Logging is never pretty grb1063, but that’s where lumber comes from. Unlike many countries we here in Canada replant all our harvested areas, unlike most of Scotland and Britain which has been largely turned into one big (and beautiful) sheep pasture.
Ansolutely true, but that happened in Scotland was well over a century ago, primarily to build ships. Cornwall in England is the same way..devoid of tress for the most part thanks to Henry VIII. BC is by far the largest lumber producer in the western hemisphere and lumber is still a building necessity, but what disturbed me is clear cuts all the way to the streams and salt water, which is horrible erosion management and a fish killer. At least in the NW US,the loggers are required to leave a significant buffer, which also acts as a wildlife corridor and it is replanted 2:1 so it can be harvested again in only 30 years. For all our technology, Victoria still dumps raw sewage into the Straights of Juan De Fuca.
The other thing to consider is private land logging, in ‘most’ cases in the last fifteen years or so logging practices all over BC have improved dramatically – and they needed to. But not so on private land, there are many restrictions on public land (the majority of land in BC) which do not exist for private land owners. I don’t think in the pacific northwest or much of BC that a 30 year rotation will yield anything but pulp wood, maybe in Costa Rica! Victoria’s sewage system is an embarrassment, but there are other places in Canada and probably the US still doing the same thing unfortunately. I think a bigger problem facing pacific salmon these days are the proliferation of Atlantic salmon fish farms which are all owned by large multi nationals that have destroyed salmon fisheries already every else they have set up shop. If you guys eat Salmon make sure it’s wild!
So not that I am complaining but how did my thread/questions go from cabinet construction or tile/wood in the shower area to logging and clear cutting????
Building is like anything else you manufacture… the more you build the better deals you get. The more you build the more experienced your people get… The more you build the better your contacts get. So that is how I can build for $110-130 a sq ft. That is without shaving any corners. I am building a house for myself right now… I am doing some of the work but mostly I am calling in favours from trades I know and I am building that for $170 a sq ft. that includes land. Also has many upgrades like in floor heating, hardwood etc.
So when you build 165 houses in a year. Your going to get some smoking deals and just for the record we only manage construction. We sub out all of our work to trades and have very few of our own personel. Mostly backframers and guys to clean up after the other trades.
In a round-about way I think your industry and the logging and clearcutting issue are connected like almost everything is. The wood that you are getting such a smoking deal on is coming from increasingly larger scale, more mechanized, and often environmentally questionable forestry practices. The same could be said for food production and agri-business and the death of family farms. The cheaper food is great for processors but not so for family farms and the average consumer eating the crap they are puking out.
I like Scott’s plan, hire locals, use local techniques that are proven to work in that area, pay what you are comfortable paying, and do it without accumulating great debt as the average North American consumer at least used to do.Farm raised seafood never touches these lips. Farmed fish is terrible for the environment. They harvest other fish (pollock primarily) to make fish food pellets for the farmed fish which is excreted in mass into the ocean. So you kill a fish to feed fish that does not belong in its local environment.
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