Almost Done...Or IS It?

The house on November 22, 2008. The only major change is that now we have some little lamps near the sides of the garage door and the house. I guess the only other change that'll be noticeable on the "Poor Man's Time-Lapse" Picture Show will be the painting, whenever that gets done. And any eventual landscaping.

The dining area, which leads out to the back porch.

A partial view of our master bathroom with...wait a minute! Is that a bidet? Damn right, son. If you come to visit the Sitzman/Jimenez Mora de Sitzman house, you can bet your ass that you'll leave with a clean ass!

The sliding doors in the living room, finally installed. Complete with a spectacular view of the Crappy Casita. Hmm, we're gonna have to do something about that. Angela, Honey? If you're going into town, could you pick up a few sticks of dynamite? Thanks, dear!

A blurry picture taken from our future room.

The dining room (left) and the kitchen area (right).

The tub hole, sans tub.

The door to our future room, inviting us in...Soon enough, dear house. Soon enough.

A Busy Week

This week was very productive in terms of getting some of the details done on our house. Angela had talked with her brothers to see if they could get one of their brothers-in-law to varnish the ceilings, since that's something her brothers' brothers-in-law do, evidently. So on Saturday morning at 6:30, the painters showed up at our house. But the painters were her brothers.

I like my brothers-in-law very much, which is why I didn't really want them to varnish the ceiling: it's basically just a really tedious, crappy job. But they said they wanted to do it, and they convinced us to let them. And they did a great, efficient job. Here are some pictures of the painting, and some of the other stuff that was done this week:

Angela's brothers and a friend of theirs, hard at work.

Using screws to attach the paintbrushes to a stick?? Dammit, why didn't we think of that?!

Freddy installed some of the outlets.

Me and Angela's room, with the circuit breaker looking like some sort of gutted bionic animal.

The workers also put in these steps in the back...

...and these steps in the front.

The master bathroom, nearing completion.

These guys were good.

Freddy (right) and Carney--yes, I think that's his real name--installing some of the sockets.

So, that's it for this week. I'll try to get some more pictures up as soon as possible, since things are advancing so quickly now. Thanks for reading!

October Update

October was a busy month, at least on the inside of our house. I know that our builder has been saying "Only two more weeks" for the last few months, but this time it might actually be true! About 95% of the ceiling is up, and most of the rooms have tile now (I'll put up those pics soon). We obviously need to paint the house, but that will probably be the last step of all. And of course, we still need to put in the doors, but that will probably be done this week. So, all in all, we may be moving in sooner than later.

In the meantime, please have a look at these recent pictures. Hope you enjoy!

The living room when they were putting up the ceiling.

Our in-house model, Angela Rosa de los Angeles Jimenez Mora de Sitzman, demonstrating the beauty and classiness of the tile in our bathroom. The naysayers said we couldn't put tile up to the ceiling, but we nary say "nay"; nay, we say "Yea!" Plus, this makes it have the same tile-filled ambience of a bus station bathroom.

October 5, 2008: It still looks the same, but at least they're doing stuff on the inside.

The finished ceiling on the back porch.

The living room/kitchen/dining room, before the first coat.

I now hate varnish.

Oh, sure, it'll be easy to put varnish on the ceiling... at least we had music, though. And once I changed from "Shuffle" to exclusively Bon Jovi, productivity--especially among Ticas--increased markedly.

Kati, one of our neices who we suckered into helping us varnish the ceiling. She was the one who cleaned a lot of it with a mop before the painting.

Angela, varnish-ing.

Kati flips out and stages a Mop Rebellion in order to escape from the work. We later replaced her with Mariela, another niece who naively wandered into the construction.

Kati cleaning the ceiling.

The room after the first coat. Sure, it kills your neck and arms to look up and paint for 6 or 7 hours with a roller on a broomstick, but the fumes get you so high that you don't really notice after the first two hours or so.

So, that's it for this time. I'll try to get some more pictures up ASAP, but with the novel writing, it may take more time. In the meantime, hope everyone is well!

Nothing Lasts Forever, Even Cold September Rain (Cue The Cold October Rain!)

September was a long, rainy month for our house construction. Fortunately, things are getting back on track, and they're making some progress in quite a few areas. Check out the pictures below:

Here you can see that most of the windows are almost completed. They look really dark in this weather, but in reality they're only slightly tinted black. We asked for that to make the house look more bad-ass and Darth Vader-y.

The house from the back. They also were putting up this structure to go around the bottom of the roof, to hold the gutters. That was also a long, slow process.

The house on September 25, 2008. Getting there...

The living room-kitchen area. The white stuff on the bottom of the rafters is a sort of insulation. We bought it mainly to reduce the noise of the rain, which sounds like a jet engine when it really gets going. Hopefully it'll also help with humidity and mold prevention, as well.

On the outside of the house, there is an overhang of a meter or so in some places, so we decided to put wood panels there, since that's one of the common ways to go about covering them. Once again, another long, slow process. But at least it looks nice.

The area in front of the main entry to the house.

Here you can see how they put it together, one piece at a time.

Finally, a picture from today, October 5th, 2008. As you can see, they've got the garage door up. That whole process took only about half a day, and it covers around 18 square meters of wall space. My free advice to you: If you ever decide to build a house, build the whole thing out of garage doors.

Anyhow, hope you enjoyed the pictures a bit. I'll try to get some more up for you soon! Thanks for reading!
-Ryan

Small Update: September 9, 2008

Hi there everybody. I've got a couple of recent pictures to show you:

This is EPA, a big hardware and home-improvement store in Costa Rica. Unfortunately, it only has branches in or near San Jose, which invariably means getting lost if you try going there. In any case, last weekend Angela and I took the chance and tried to get there, and after a few wrong turns and a lot of profanity, we finally made it. As you can see, EPA takes its style cues from both Home Depot and IKEA. Home Depot, because of the incredibly large and varied selection in comparasion with the crappy little stores where we live. And IKEA because...well, it's all blue and yellow. In any case, it was really nice to go there, since you can actually look at and touch the products that you'll later buy and take home...all in the same day!

Back to the house, here is that tree branch we planted, which continues to amaze me. I'll probably be putting new pictures of this thing on this blog until the late 2050s.

The aluminium and glass guys started putting in some of the windows, and we hope that they'll be finished by the end of this week. That's pretty essential, since the fog was bringing in so much humidity that our wood ceiling panels were beginning to get so wet from the atmosphere that they were dripping. Dammit dammit dammit!

See you in hell, rainwater!! These two tubes take runoff from the gutters on our roof and throw it to the side of a small cliff on the edge of our property.

Angela talking to the window guys.

Saturday, September 6, 2008.

Well, thanks for reading, and check in again soon for another update!

Week...Holy Crap, HOW Many Weeks Are There In A Year??

Well, I know it's been a few weeks since I've posted anything to the construction blog, but those weeks have been busy with a lot of other things, most of which weren't related to the construction. Plus, the house is still going fairly slowly. Actually, it's not that slow, but it's hard to see big changes like you could at the beginning of the construction. As a result, I'll probably continue to put up pictures every few weeks, but not every week. So, here are some new pictures:

All of the walls were completely finished in terms of forming them and covering them with a layer of cement, so the next step was to cover them in a sort of paste to help protect them and let the paint adhere better. I don't know what this would be called in English, but they call it "Repemax" here. Anyhow, here's Freddy mixing some Repemax.

Here Harvey is putting on some Repemax. This picture is looking from inside the TV room to the garage. In other words, the TV room doesn't have to coolest view in the house.

Once again, here is this weird tree branch that Honorio and I planted. Sure enough, that thing's sticking, and a few weeks ago it started putting out buds. Now they're leaves. Within a month or two, I'm expecting a new-growth forest in the backyard.

Here you can see the window frames with Repemax (above) and without (below). We're hoping to get the actual windows put in as soon as possible.

Another with/without picture: Here are the fixtures and drainages for the washer, dryer, and sink in the garage. We were going to have a laundry room in the middle of the house, but it's now a TV room. Or a guest room. So come visit us!

Harvey (above) and Oscar connect some tubing to feed water to the solar panels we installed for hot water.

The solar panel guy with his son, installing the panel.

August 9, 2008.

Moving the panel. Denting the roof. All in a day's work.

August 10, 2008: With the finished solar panel.

As you can maybe imagine, this is the first prominent solar panel like this in Berlin. As a result, the regular load of bored hicks stopping by the property to rubberneck has boomed. Since most of them have no idea what that thing on the roof is, though, we've been considering saying it's an anti-theft bomb that senses when someone's stealing from the house, and destroys everything in a three-block radius.

Either that, or we'll say it's a UFO that we found in Angela's family's coffee field.

Anyhow, hope you liked the pictures. I'll try to get some more up soon!