Siete....

The Spring of 2007 seemed to come fast - even though everyone else thought it was slow. We began thinking of concepts of a house. What did we want, what was optional. We disagreed... But this was a great time to work through all this as it was the second house the two of us built - and we had worked through several remodelling projects so we were conditioned to find solutions. And we did.



In early June of 2007 Jim and Dick traveled back to Costa Rica to meet with Rob and to determine, we hoped, where we would place the roadway getting from the existing road to each of our lots (Rob, Calle, D&J and Fred). We did manage to enjoy some of the Costa Rican sea shore and you can tell from this photo, we suffered...


It was during this trip we met Rob's handsome brother Fred. We trudged through the jungle, machette's in hand figuring out a path. We agreed upon a building site for our house. Rob did same conceptually for his and his sisters house so that we could consider the roadway. We made some marks, and came up with what we thought was a path. It was a successful trip!

With our potential building pad identified, we took some pictures, made some notations, and headed back to Wisconsin to motorcycle and enjoy the short northern Summer.

July took Jim back. Gerardo and crew had cleared some brush, and we once again reconsidered the roadway. We found that our original thinking was spot on. The bad news is that it encroached on Kent and Rob's lot more than any of us would have liked, but we had to follow the contour the mountain gave us. It was on this trip Jim met Rob's mate Kent for the first time. In this picture the fellow in the blue shirt is Kent. The space in front of him is our big house intended building site. At the time, we did not have a concept of building a smaller casa, much less building one first. In this picture, if you went just beyond the trees in the distance, you would be in the waterfall. So the big house was intended to be as close as possible to that.

Also during this trip, Jim hired Pietro Stagno (architect) to create a house plan for us. Rob and Kent had hired him for their casa, and Rob's sister Calle (and John) were planning same for their casa. All in all a rather heady trip! All of this set the stage for building - and the roadway was not even in yet to our lots!!! In the end, we do have a nice house plan from Pietro, but the cost to build it now exceeded significantly our ability to build it.

As we review the photo's from between early June to early July, it is obvious how much cloudier it is in Costa Rica in July. And that was certainly the case! I should mention that it was in the time between the June and July trips that we formally entered our reservation and put our deposit on lot #14. Because of that, we had our first glimmer of "owning" land in Costa Rica - and began to feel that connection of owning in a foreign country and being part of the larger world beyond the USA. It is a good feeling!


From this point forward, we were definitely on a path to our project.

Thank you for reading this far!


to be continued....