Well it's been a very long time coming, a lot of anticipation, a lot of anxiety, and a whole lot of uncertainty, but it finally seems like the airlines in Canada are starting to open up and include sunny destinations in their flight schedules for this Fall. I'm not going to lie, over the Summer I often found myself checking out flight schedules to Costa Rica in hopes that I'd see some good news but was often disappointed when flights would suddenly disappear from the airline websites. I know I shouldn't be surprised, after all we are now in the midst of a 4th wave of this corona thing. On the bright side earlier this Fall Canada decided to slowly start opening its borders to non-essential travel and so did many other countries across the globe. Most importantly (for my wife and I anyways) was that Costa Rica has been open to tourists for several months and has loosened it's entry requirements specifically to those that are fully vaccinated -woohoo! All of these signs that were starting to unravel were incredibly encouraging...and low and behold, all of the sudden Westjet airline came out with a seat sale to sunny destinations including, yes you guessed it, Costa Rica. Guess what we did, as soon as that happened we hopped online and our tickets are booked!
Considering we haven't stepped foot on our property since March of 2020, you can imagine we are just a wee bit excited, as a matter of fact we are ridiculously happy - we finally get to go see the home we have been building over the past three years. The last time we stepped foot on our property, the roof had just been put onto the main structure and everything was still open air. Since that time so much has been done and we have been in the final phase of the build for a few months now. It's all about the finishing touches, as we picked our air conditioning units (what an ordeal that was to figure out the best A/C package), we picked out our patio roof material, the outdoor kitchen is well under way (not without a glitch - the country ran out of metal beams and we still needed two to finish the roof structure!). And just last week we sent a few options for appliances, oh and I can't forget, my BBQ has made it in stock and is just waiting to be picked up @MundoBBQ in San Jose. Things are finally looking up!
Obviously our journey is not done yet, it's really only starting - even though it feels like it's been going on for a lifetime...it seems we're still in the toddler stages in our journey but we may have just passed the terrible two's - or at least I hope so. Despite all of the obstacles, hurdles, and what have you, we've kept a positive outlook on everything and it's helping us stay on course. I think if there's one thing we've learned throughout this house building process is that you need to be flexible, be prepared to make some small changes, and be ready to make some concessions - especially if you are building a house from 4000 miles away - things don't always go as planned. We learned early on in the process that it was going to be important to keep in close contact and establish good relationships with our building team, and we have done just that - of course it hasn't been without issues and frustrations but at the end of the day everything is working out and our house is going to be better then we could have ever imagined.
Here are a few recent photos of some of the finishing touches going on. The large outdoor covered patio is done, including the ceiling fans and lights, the perimeter of the house now has landscape lighting, and same with the outdoor patio areas.
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