Last year in the pouring rains of August, I was busy meeting with architects.  We tramped around the tall wet grass in my lot looking at the trees, the ground, the spaces, the shapes, and talking about what kind of wood would be good for a house like the one I was dreaming up.  I spent hours drawing and re-drawing the house on sketch paper with a pencil, a ruler, and a calculator so that it would be to scale.  I drew 3D sketches of rooms and taped the whole thing out with electrical tape on the floor of the house we live in now.  Then I picked an architect and started making payments to him.

   

  I took the water letter to the town’s ASADA and asked them to hook up my water, but it turns out you can’t get water hooked up in Costa Rica without building permits. Which, clearly, I wasn’t going to have until the architect got done with his part of job, so there wasn’t much to do except wait. Same with the electricity.  So, I waited.

               I contacted one of the banks where I have an account and asked about a building loan.  I sent them the plano catastro of the lot and I sent them the building plans as they were forming, and I sent them info about my income and employment.  It was all shaping up quite well until they learned that I am planning to build a house at least partly out of wood.  The house I am planning is called a “zocalo.”  The walls of the house will be cement block up to about a meter, and from there to the ceiling, the walls will be wooden.  This is common type of construction in Guanacaste and other parts of Costa Rica.  But the bank said that they don’t finance wooden houses.  Never mind that the house is not entirely wood—they simply won’t finance a house that is made of even SOME wood.  So that was the end of that.

               I moved on to the next bank.  A friend of Hernan’s recently got a building loan from them, so he gave me the name of his contact there and I wrote her a message.  It was January.  She wrote back immediately and we started the process all over again.

               In the back of my lot there is a steep hill with some beautiful trees—Indio Pelado and Ronron.  Before building the house, I wanted to build a little retaining wall there to keep their roots happy far into the future.  I talked to my parents about this because I didn’t want to drain the last cent out of my bank account before starting construction on the house, and they were happy to lend me the money to build the little wall. 

               I spoke to my friend Cesar, a contractor I have known for almost a decade, about building the wall for me and he said yes.  We didn’t have water, though, so I had to call the nice neighbor and ask if we might run a hose from his property onto mine for the time being so that the workers could mix cement for the wall.  This fantastic neighbor said that would be fine and that we could split the water bill when it came.  So that is what we did.  The wall went up in the scalding February sun. 

               During the time the retaining wall was going up, all the permissions for building came through.  I went immediately back to the ASADA to resolicit the water connection.  This time they approved it.  And sent a brave soul with a digging iron to locate the pipe in the ground by the gate where the connection would be built.  This poor guy dug for weeks on end, pit after pit in the blazing February sun until the ASADA finally gave him permission to quit and to just hook up the water on the other side of the lot where there was a newer pipe that they knew the exact location of. 

               The other thing that happened during the time the wall was going up is that Cesar told me about an acquaintance of his who was selling mature teak trees.  She was selling them at what he felt was an excellent price.  He calculated the amount of teak he would need to build my house and said that if I gave him a deposit, he would take care of the rest for now because he was going to be doing work for her, and she would be owing him money.   I decided to go for it.  I wired myself some money from my account in the states and paid him. 

               On the February new moon, they felled the trees at low tide for optimum wood quality and hauled enough wood for my house and also what Cesar was purchasing for other projects all out to Cesar’s home in the rural area between Huacas and Cartagena.  In the coming months, I paid thousands of dollars to begin turning tree trunks into boards. 

               So, by the end of February, I had a little retaining wall, water, and a lot of horizonal teak trees.  Ana from the bank said my income was more than enough to qualify for the loan I wanted and I’d managed to collect everything we needed for my application.  I signed it and it was filed at the beginning of March. 

               With all of this working so well, I went back to the electric company to order the electric connection.  They came out to do their evaluation and determined that I was going to need to purchase a transformer.  That’s how it works here.  If you have a name that looks suspiciously foreign, you can be sure that the electric company is going to say that you need a new transformer for your building project even if it is only a 2-bedroom house, and you will have to pay for it yourself.  Yes, that’s right.  They do not provide this—you do.  The electric company is a “cooperative” and the only sense I can make out of it is that you must “cooperate” with what they tell you to do.  The transformer was going to cost a little over $2,000, which, after paying the architect, building permits, the INS insurance policy for the future workers, the water hook-up, and having the constant payments for the wood process, I decided could wait.

               March went by, and April, and still no word from the bank.  I would message Ana from time to time and she would occasionally answer, but the answers were always that everything is fine and we need to wait.  So I waited.

               May came, and at the end of the month I left for Italy.  Before I left, Ana told me that she was going to have everything ready for me to sign the day after I came back, si dios quiere.  While I was in Italy, the bank evaluator finally evaluated the property and the project.  The evaluation was fantastic!  Cesar kept messaging me for more money and sending me beautiful photos of the wood. 

               Half way through my trip, Cesar sent me a message with a raspy voice telling me that he hospitalized for pneumonia, but that he was getting better and that he would be ready to get to work on the house when I got home.  But he didn’t.  Cesar passed away while I was on my way back across the Atlantic.

               That day, I lost a friend, my builder, and the only person in the world who knew what was going on with that mountain of teak.  And needless to say, no, the lady from the bank did NOT call me to sign for the money the day after I got back.  She said we had to wait more.  So I waited.

               While I unpacked, I madly sent messages to everyone asking for recommendations for  builders.  Then I interviewed them, and finally made a very difficult choice because I am sure they all would have done a great job. Although none of them are Cesar.  The builder I chose is the father of the architect I so much appreciated.

               And the bank still said we had to wait.  So, I waited.

               I went back to Coopeguanacaste with borrowed money and paid for the transformer.  That done, they had to come re-inspect the installation, and this time it was the pole I’d installed months ago on my property line that was found faulty.  While I was at the office ordering the reinspection, I bumped into a long-ago friend who works there in the admin offices, so when my inspection was rejected, I called Armando for help.  He sent his son out with a crew to tear out the old pole and install a new one that met the specs.  It passed approval on this 3^rd try and now I have electricity, as well as water, as well as a retaining wall, as well as a mountain of teak, as well as building permits, as well as a builder but…STIL NO MONEY.  So, I waited.

               At the end of July, the bank lady finally informed me that my paperwork was going to the Approvals office the next day.  And it all went fine until it hit the Income part.  She called me to say that my application was rejected because the bank won’t consider the portion of my income that I receive in the USA.  Why she only came up with this important piece of information in JULY after we’d been working on this since JANUARY, I have no idea.  Is it possible that she didn’t know? 

               She told me to have my accountant prepare a certification that includes all of my declared income in Costa Rica and that of our catering company, Tamarindo Grill Master.  So I scrambled around collecting income tax declarations and driving everybody involved in that process completely crazy with my desperation. He pulled it together, sent it in, and then the bank lady called me and said, “Is all of the income from your company yours?”

And I said, “Well…no.”  I feel this is rather obvious. 

She said, then why did the accountant prepare the document this way, and I said I don’t know, and the accountant said I only did exactly what she asked me to do, and in the end?  That was a huge waste of time and money. 

               Simultaneously, Hernan and I spent a day with Juan, the new builder, out among the weeds, half-prepared boards, tree trunks and mosquitoes “measuring” the wood.  Cesar’s widow was there with us, watching.  She needs the money I owe her.  I want to pay her with all my heart, but with what??  We climbed around counting, measuring, calculating…  What I mostly learned is that I don’t understand a single solitary thing about how you measure and calculate wood volume.  I like to think I’m generally intelligent and fairly teachable, but although I am able to repeat the formula we used to measure and calculate, it doesn’t make a shred of sense to me.  So I don’t know what we have.  Cesar said there was plenty of wood.  The new builder says there’s not nearly enough. 

I can say that while I see what has got to be more than enough boards for the walls, I don’t see the tablilla for the cielorasso and I don’t see a single viga or columna.  I have no idea how to determine whether I am going to need to buy more wood, or whether some of what is there in the uncut trunks should belong to me.  There is no one to ask.  Hernan is able to form opinions about this much more easily than I am, and even get into arguments defending his point of view.  My point of view is that I DO NOT KNOW. We can wave our arms around all day supposing whatever we want, but the only person who has the answers to my questions no longer has a voice to speak.  Or not one that am picking up.

               At present, I am doing what is possibly the last resort to get the bank to cough up the money they have been leading me to believe I can expect since the beginning of the year.  Turns out I have a friend from college who is a CPA and who drafted me an income certification and had it notarized and mailed it to an Apostille office and did not charge me a penny.  I will pay to have this apostilled, pay to have it FedExed to me here in Costa Rica, pay to have it translated by an official translator, and pray to the baby Jesus and all the angels that this checks the final box at the bank.

               We have an appointment with a huge truck and the sawmill next Thursday to haul a truckload of wood off of Cesar’s lot to the sawmill and finish processing it.  What I am going to pay the sawmill with, I actually couldn’t say, but we have to get the wood out of there.   Both my builder and my boyfriend are wildly adamant about this and I am no match for all that certainty.   I’m just having faith that somehow it will be ok.  Not that the track record suggest that it will, but I guess that’s what faith is, right?

               After the wood leaves the sawmill, it will go to my lot where Juan will have constructed a bodega to store it and a installed a guard to babysit it.  I can only imagine Juan and the guard are going to want money too, so when the bank gets my apostilled certification and accepts it and finally coughs up the money, it will be just in the nick of time.

Right?

But if you are or know of a private lender, this would be a fantastic time to speak up.  Just in case.