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I’m moving to Costa Rica in the next 60 days and the only things I am bringing with me are my extensive art, basket, and pottery collection, the good china and crystal, and clothes. Almost everything else can be bought in Costa Rica, even good stainless steel cookware (the thing I was most worried about!) I wouldn’t even bring all that china and crystal but for the fact it was my mother’s and I’d never in a million years spend that kind of money for those things. My husband, who is an artist, is bringing some small tools, but he plans to replace the bigger items — like a tile saw — when he gets here. Even with this massive downsizing, it’s still going to cost two grand+ to bring the stuff I mentioned.
If you’re building in the NW Central Valley, somewhere near San Ramon, then it is possible you could use him as your contractor. If you are building on the beach someplace, I know for a fact that it would be impossible for him. As it is right now, he has 6 houses under construction simultaneously and is already overloaded. So where are you planning on building?
Hola Valentina:
Where are you building? My contractor is currently working on 6 houses just outside San Ramon. I don’t know if he works in any other area of CR at the moment as he can hardly keep up with the projects he has. Contact me off-list and I will give you his name and phone number.
Hola Rich!
I built an 1800 sq foot house on a half acre. With all the upgrades and custom work I added, the finished cost will be $38 per sq foot (plus the cost of the land), but that will include custom hardwood cabinets and doors, glass tile mosaics in the bathrooms, granite countertops, tongue and groove ceilings, custom light fixtures, saltillo tile on all the floors, high-end toilets and hand-carved stone bathroom sinks. Start to finish time will be a little over 6 months. There weren’t really any major problems or cost overruns because I have a great contractor. I didn’t even get any gray hairs over this project. Most people can’t believe that it all went so smoothly, but it did, and I hope to build more houses using the same crew I used on my house.
I’ve been in several pet stores and they seem to have everything one needs except for organic pet food. They have a lot of supposedly high-end brands like IAMS and Science Diet, I think — but nothing I would feed my dog. I guess I will bring as much of the brand I use as I can when I move down there. For the most part, I cook for my dog, so he only get the kibble as a side dish. So if I could wish for one thing it would be the Wellness or Timberwolf brand.
I know Trevor personally, and I know someone who bought into his project. If I weren’t heavily invested in my house already, I’d buy into his project.
There have been studies that prove conclusively that fluoride has no positive effect on teeth or cavities. It’s all bogus information. There is also a link to fluoride and osteosarcoma in boys. I was quite upset to see that everyone in Costa Rica uses that salt in those little containers with the blue cap to which fluoride has been added. It took me a while to find REAL sea salt — had to read every single label on the packaged salt to find one without fluoride. It’s almost as ubiquitous as margarina in Costa Rica, all to the peril of its citizens. Thanks for the link. I’ll see if there is anything on that site I don’t already know about this problem.
Water was a big concern for me in deciding to move to Costa Rica. Fortunately, the water supply for my house in CR originates high in the mountains outside Zarcero and is untreated with either fluroide or chlorine. It is as good as my well water here in the Rockies. To compensate for their lack of fluoride in the water supply in other areas of Costa Rica, I’ve heard that they’ve mandated that fluoride be added to the salt — only pure sea salt does NOT have fluoride added to it in CR. I’d be interested to know what you find out about the water supply in Costa Rica as there may be a time when I decide to live in another area and the last thing I want in my water is fluoride OR chlorine.
You do NOT have to live in the US to keep receiving Social Security benefits, even if you are collecting Social Security Disability. There are only a few countries in the world where SSA will not do a direct deposit to your account in another country (if you wish). The excluded countries are Turkmenistan, Cuba, and a few African countries. Otherwise, there are 200 countries that SSA works with to provide benefits.
I’ve crossed those bridges between Esterillos and Quepos — the first time it was hair-raising, after that, it was just part of the routine. Our bridges in the US aren’t as safe as we would like to think — we have fatal accidents all the time; last year a family of 3 were killed when a girder fell off an overpass on I-70. Their cas was crushed beyond recognition. Thank you very much, I’ll take that rickety old bridge over the alligator pond any day — and speaking of alligators, remember when that train crossing some delapidated bridge over a river in Louisisana collapsed and several dozen people were killed and/or eaten by the alligators below??? In reality, we may only be a trifle safer in the US.
Dear Senta:
I just got back from an entire month of being in Costa Rica working on my house outside San Ramon. We are in the final stages of completion now after only 6 months of construction. The exterior doors and windows should be in at the end of next week, and the finishing touches — interior doors, cabinets, etc. — should be installed within two weeks. Scott as asked me several times to write an article about my experience of building a home in Costa Rica, which, so far, has been nothing but a positive, although at times stressful, experience. I hope to be able to sit down and compose the entire sequence of events in the next couple of weeks — my experience is probably unique in that I went to Costa Rica on vacation one year ago and was there only 5 days when I bought property and now I am only weeks away from having a beautiful home in the countryside. Please post your questions here and I will be happy to answer them.
“hope to move in 5yrs….so all the info i can get,….i appreciate…
i don’t know where to begin….what do i do first….who do i ask…who can i trust if i don’t speak Spanish?”Get busy and learn Spanish. You have 5 years; plenty of time to be really proficient in the languange. Please don’t be another gringa who moves to a Spanish-speaking country and then expects THEM to speak English! It’s THEIR country. You need to learn the language if you want to particpate.
And if these people didn’t treat me fairly, they’d have to deal with me afterwards, and that is NOT a good thing! LOL
I guess this is where the fast-talking, heavy-handed, persuasive salesmen circle the trusting gringos like a school of sharks, selling them property and then building a shoddy house. I remember reading a post on another board from a woman who had lived in CR for two years and had finally had enough and was moving back to the STates. She listed her reasons for deciding CR was not for her. 1) They spoke Spanish (DUH!); 2) there were bugs and snakes; and 3) it rains. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how someone could NOT know about these things BEFORE they pack up and move to another country. So I suppose you are right — people don’t have a clue what they are getting into and are gullible enough to trust anyone who speaks their language. I also suppose those people don’t last long in CR, and THAT’S a good thing!!! Of course, they also go home and bad-mouth Costa Rica and the people who live there, when their own bad experience is of their own making. As an example, who in this country would give some developer with a dubious professional history huge sums of money for the privilege of looking at a piece of raw land? It’s a feeding frenzy among the people hawking their product to unsuspecting gringos with a fat checkbook! And while it may all work out in the end for everyone, I still can’t imagine how anyone thinks this is a good business practice.
“Idiot” is the perfect word to describe someone who plants themselves in a Third World country and tries to build a house without doing any preparation or investigation. What makes these people think that the rules don’t apply in Costa Rica? When I hear horror stories like this, I wonder who is giving these people the advice upon which they chose to rely? I guess it really is true that people get off the plane in Alajuela and leave their common sense behind. I don’t like to see people lose money, and I don’t like to see people taken advantage of in the name of greed. But if someone doesn’t do their homework, doesn’t check references, doesn’t find out what it REALLY takes to do construction in CR, then what they get is what they deserve because truly, building a house in CR is NOT that complicated if you are working with professionals who DO abide by the rules and who DO get permits and who DO take their jobs seriously. I wish everyone could have the experience I did in building my house — my contractor was the BEST I have ever worked with even in the US. Even when I gave him thousands of dollars in cash (up to $9,000 one time) he gave me a receipt for every penny. He was frank about the problems with the lot and proposed ways to deal with it and told me upfront how much that would be. He told me repeatedly that having me be happy with the finished product was all that he cared about. I could not have asked for a more honest and forthcoming guy to do this work for me. This is not rocket science, but it does require some vigilance and some fact-checking — the same things that are required to build a home in the US.
