Sunday, February 10, 2013

Kurt's Bday Trip 2013--Part 1, House Hunting



Ahhh.  Costa Rica.  My favorite place in the entire world to visit.  We took a trip here for a week for Kurt's bday, and to look at houses.  Combined kinda trip, business and pleasure.  Mostly pleasure though, because looking at houses was actually fun.

We looked at houses in various areas including Hermosa, Herradura, Esterillos Este, Playa Agujas, and Tarcoles.  All around Jaco Beach, which is where we want to be near.  Pretty much every place we looked at was nice, however, we liked two of them the best.  We ended up deciding that the closer to Jaco Beach we can be, the better.  Which is basically Herradura and Hermosa.  We really liked two places.  The first is in Herradura, which is literally only 5 minutes from Jaco Beach.  This house is in a little community of houses where you have to own at least 5000 square meters of land, so the houses are never going to be right on top of one another, even though the community is not filled yet.  This house has 1.5 acres of property.  The house is about 2150 square feet and has three bedrooms and two bathrooms.  The house backs up to some huge trees, where animals often visit and while we were there, a family of 5 toucans was visiting the tree.  The owner said that a group of capuchin monkeys were there the day before.  Love.  This property needs some things done to it though in order to have it be to where Kurt wants.  We would need to build on, adding a gym.  There is no room in the current house for a gym, and Costa Rica is severely lacking in gym facilities.  I plan on working out in the outdoors a lot with hiking, running on the beach, biking, but Kurt likes having weights easily accessible and a treadmill and a bike, at a minimum.  also, the area to park cars is a kinda car port with a storage area.  we would want to wall that in totally so it was an actual garage.  Further, we would want to build the pool area up some.  Right now, it is a pool and patio area, but no coverage.  You need that in Jaco, as it is hot during the day.  So we would want to build on a covered area to the pool, maybe like a thatched roof or something.  And, we want a covered walkway from the garage to the house for the rainy season.  The house would need some paint on the interior walls as well, since one of the rooms is painted in Disney purple, LOL.  So, we have a contractor going to the house to look at it and price these things out.

The second house is in Hermosa Beach, which is about 10 minutes from Jaco Beach.  This house's interior is gorgeous and there are two options for a gym already there (an extra bedroom that is large or using the garage as as gym).  The pool area is stunning and perfect.  I think I would spend every second outdoors, literally.  The downside to this property is besides the pool, it has almost no yard.  A pro this one has the other does not is 24 hours security and free water, but you pay monthly for this as kinda an association fee (it's very low though considering with a pool, the water is included).  It's more in a neighborhood, but the neighborhood is upscale and I would feel really safe here.  By the way, our realtor, Colin Miller, was awesome.  He really seemed to *get* what we wanted and understand our perspective.  he showed us a lot of houses we had not even asked to see, and the two we like the most were not even on our list to see initially.  Anyway, we have not put an offer on anything yet, as we are waiting to hear back on the one with the land and the cost to do the upgrades.  Labor is much cheaper in Costa Rica, so fingers crossed it is not super pricey.  If we put bids in and they are not accepted at what we think we should pay, we will simply wait and look again later.  The entire experience was really positive though.  

Will post more about the non-house hunting part of the trip soon!  Pura Vida.

3 comments:

Rebecca said...

I really like both the houses!

COL said...

What fun! Both are gorgeous!

Nancy said...

Dream houses!!! They are both so gorgeous!