Well it is time to give everyone a update on the events and progresses of the project over past month.

Construction continues on at a good pace as the office and suites get there finishing touches. At this stage it is a little more difficult to show the progress via pictures as the changes aren't as dramatic but are more time consuming than the structural stage is.

The front and rear balconies are now complete with roof complete along with bamboo pole supports just waiting for the application of the finished ceiling in cana brava.

You will note all the cana brava (which is a cousin to bamboo but is not hollow like bamboo is and grows like a weed out in Limon province where this came from, we like this as it give a real tropical air and does not require cutting any forest), that is standing up behind the building as it waits for its two coats of oil prior to be applied prior to
installation.

All the fine stucco coat is done outside as well as most of the interior as per this view of one bedroom wall.

The ceiling is ready to receive the cana once the cleaning, sanding and oiling of the cana is done.  The cana looks great as long as the time is taken to properly finish it prior to installation after to get the right look this is near impossible.

Our front reception area is now the workshop for the preparation work of the cana as the workers have a production line going to process this.

Our contractors for the manual labour have lived up to our expectations that we had based on the work they have done elsewhere like Plaza Coral.  We still give them a lot of daily guidance to give us the best final product in the best time possible with using our Canadian ways as well.  For example they started putting up the cana using hammer and nails until I arrived after they had maybe thirty  pieces up and stopped them from working immediately with the instructions that I would get them an air-nailer to put these up so as to drastically speed up production, stop splitting of the pieces and most importantly to hide the nails as no one wants to see ugly nail heads all over the place by the thousands.  No it was not their normal way but once they use this method they will never go back to the old.  Here we often see people working without proper tools thinking it is saving money where in fact even with the much cheaper labour than up north proper tools still pay for themselves in speed and quality.  When I went through and did the check of door and window opening  measurement to confirm such with our  door manufacturer was when I found out how good their work has been in general.  All the openings were within 1/4" of the plan measurements and that is extremely good when working with concrete, I was most impressed as from my experience this is a critical area where you separate the men from the boys in rough construction work.

 I wish I could give as praising of views of our professionals from the experience we gained in this first building, our school.  There is in fact quite a number of changes coming about for the units that you are buying in comparison to this one as we have found some rather stupid things have been put in the plans that will be changed to improve upon the quality of our final product and the speed of building such.  In fact three of our professionals are not going to be invited to work for us again as some of their book training has not carried through to the practical side of construction and I fail to see the reason to pay someone fees yet to have to correct them constantly.

Many things we have changed even on this building between plans and reality such that I see how challenging it is to build here if you don't bring a good amount of experience with you. But even with my less than praise for some of our professions there is most certainly far worse than what we have employed hence I can't help but add one picture that shows just how stupid things can be built.  All of you know how I rave about using proper insulation especially for  the roofs for air conditioned spaces at the beach.  This is an example of what I saw while out walking the beach at Easter words barely describe just how stupid this is!!!!!

So to explain what is sooooooooooo incredibly stupid here.  First of all the steel mesh in the foreground is at the property line less than 50 yards to high surf.  What you see them in the process of doing is putting tile on top of a steel roof. This steel roof costs $10 a square meter to install where as our insulation costs us $2.90.  This steel is going to rust like hell under those tiles as it gets its daily dose of air-born salt day in and day out.  It has an R value of 0.  So for a third the price we get a sound barrier, insulation exceeding R40 and something that will prevent leaks but never rust.

Now how smart does that make the professional advisors to this project I ask???  How many owners will think to ask any of these questions???? Two interesting points on insulation and energy conservation from this past week. We had a country wide black out ten days ago due to a series of failures at ICE all that happened at the same time as very low water levels due to a longer than normal dry season in the reservoirs that create our hydro  What this does demonstrate is how grid systems around the world tend to run at the limit so when we consume indiscriminately we seriously add to this problem hence one of our major reasons to spend the funds to be energy efficient in our project.  Since then ICE has been forced to turn off electricity in various areas of the country at peak times to lower consumption while these problems are repaired or resolved by more rain.  This of course would not affect us as we will not use power for A/c during peak times only during off peak.

Also this last Friday I was invited into our neighbours energy pig project Monte Carlo to see one of the residents there.  They informed me, as I have told many, that their power bill on their unit is running $300+ per month.  Most important to add is they have a lower unit to which they also commented on how the upstairs neighbour complains about how hot their unit is!

Dah!!! That is what you get when you have a rubber tile and 1/2" of gypsum between you and the noon day sun.  Aside from their units not being comfortable the costs of the air on those upper units is going to be much higher I would say $400 to $500 a month.  As an aside to that as I was in our unit taking these pictures it was still the hot part of the day you will note precisely at 3:30 when the build up of heat should occur yet as Michael and I were walking around upstairs there was a nice breeze coming through the unit and without all that heat getting in through the roof there was actually no need for air conditioning at all.  This was even a surprise to me as to how pleasantly cool our own unit was under such conditions.  It will be interesting to see during full operation how many people in these upper units choose to completely forego a/c during the day?

As many have already commented our new website came live last week with many changes being more professional, faster running even though we added a whole bunch more pictures particularly all the bird pictures thanks to Bill Tice one of our owners from Oregon.  As also has been noted on this site we are only promoting phase 1 hence a number of people have assumed that there is not a phase 2.  Well you know where assume gets you.  There will be a phase 2,3,4,5 & 6 but as an overall marketing strategy I do not want any more people selecting units further down the road as we need our phase 1sold out first prior to moving onto anything else plus I do not want to make any further price commitments until we are further down the road.  Those that have already  committed in Phase 2 will indeed be getting a heck of a deal as compared to what the final build-out prices will have to be.  Our concentration and that of our buyers must be on Phase 1 until it is sold out hence we will not be distracting prospects until the time suits our schedule.  Holding back on further sales in Phase 2 will allow us more time to assess what our competitors and the overall market does during this next few months.

This month also brought about another necessary change to one of our team of professionals that being our lawyer.  Due to various issues of compatible attitudes and excessive billings it was mutually agreed that Rick Phelps and Alliance Law would no longer represent our project hence we have changed over to Lambert Cruikshank and Angie Cruickshank.  This change came about at a crucial fork in the road as once our condominiumization process after the permit issues was started it was near impossible to effect such a change in midstream just like most of the rest of the professionals as is mentioned later.   We are now working through the process of moving deposits from the one office to the other.  I had been test driving the new office on other issues as of this year and noticed a rather large difference in billings like in the range of 50% to 90% with no visible difference in quality of service hence I felt it best to make the move now and have our clients become familiar with this office on a more favourable basis.  An additional benefit of the change is Angie is totally bilingual being raised on both English and Spanish with a dash of French as well.  I also know her personally much better as her father Clinton is a close friend and being an ex congressman here he is connected up the wazoo which to say the least is quite helpful at times.  This is just another example of fine tuning the team to get it up to peak operating efficiency for our future endeavours.

Another change this past month was our change in banks from Cuscatlan after four years of service over to Banco Improsa.  This was brought about due to two things with Cuscatlan A) their buyout by Citi Bank and  B) the fact that their offer to mortgage our clients sucked and I would not have insulted anyone by even suggesting their terms.

This change has been quite shocking to say the least.  I have never experienced a bank with so little red tape and such responsive service!  I have heard over the years what European private banking is like and this experience has been most similar to what I have heard described of such.  This is a small bank which I think has everything to do with what I have experienced as remarkable service and never any line up such as banks here are famous for.  A website both bilingual, friendly and functional ease (Cuscatlan's sucked by comparison I just did not realize how much until experiencing this).  They are most welcoming of new clients which of course we are going to feed them starting this Friday when I take our first client to meet the new account executive in charge of all of our clients that we bring along with us.  Most noteworthy they also stroked us a far better deal to handle all of our credit card transactions at a 43% reduction to what other banks want here.  If it did not occur to you those fees affect everyone by how much we earn net from our tourist when they rent our units since next to no one pays cash anymore transactions fees are most critical to our bottom line. For  this new and refreshing relationship I have to give credit to Antonio Echeverria at Birdleaf Financial for bringing them to my attention.  He of course is the broker that will be handling all the paperwork for our mortgage applicants.  He is a fine example of the quality of person that I look forward to be part of our team to service our clients at an exemplary level, he has been a most welcome and refreshing addition to that
team.


Permits Permits Permits?????

Also a hot topic with many is when and if we are getting such.  To say the least this has been a thorny issue with me as well and another reason some of our professionals are toast once we have our permits in hand on phase 1.  We had another long meeting last week to address where we are, when and why's of this issue.  First off the tax issue is settled with the municipality and last Thursday the permits for our storage unit and equipment building were re-submitted.  I expect to get such this week once I deliver another document they requested last week to them tomorrow.  Hence we will break ground on that this month.  At this moment our plans are at INVU the housing authority here for their second pass through.  Our design layout was approved on the first go around now the buildings are being  approved by them as well as the fire department, water department and health department during this same process.  This is the final step that they assure me will complete in June however meanwhile Guillermo from DEHC also assured me that he can and will get me an excavation permit next week so that we can start on underground infrastructure.

Not much more to say other than wait for the process to complete and to never again hire the electrical engineer (or talk to the so called friend that referred this clown to us in the first place) that held all our plans up from progressing at a more acceptable pace.  Believe me I have chased down all avenues to solve this problem over the past couple of months and gotten several other opinions on how to fix and how long this process should take on our type of project and the answer always comes back to 6 to 7 months being the normal accepted standard to get a project like ours approved.  At this point we must continue with the engineers and the architect in place as any changes would be the equivalent of shooting our selves in the foot.  Besides at this time now that we have the plans from the one missing cog in the wheel the process is proceeding at a normal and acceptable pace.  In essence the problem is resolved now and we can do nothing about the past problem other than not hire him again or the architect that failed to get faster action or communicate sufficiently with us to intervene more aggressively when it was critical.  This is the one part of the entire project that is so important and that is who is on the team and no matter how hard one tries to find the perfect team the first go around that is near impossible.  Going forward from here we will have a tested a tried team together to do other phases and this frustration will not need to be repeated and our time lag will not exist as we will have a jump start by starting the process on future phases well in advance plus having a known time to go through all the required processes.  In the process of looking forward to who will be on the next team, on Monday I had a meeting with another architect that believes he can shorten our construction schedule by a month on each building with a modification of our structural design.  This is most significant as such a change would not affect the approval process at all but would give us a serious method to gain back some lost time.  Hence needless to say we are going to take a serious look at this option in the next few days to see if this change is worthy of consideration.   Hindsight is always 20/20.  Regardless of the delays I am most thankful we took the approach to permit and build an actual building rather than a simple sales office that teaches you zip, like most tend to do.  What we have learned about materials, suppliers, processes, methods and the professionals while building our school house has been invaluable and can only be garnered from actual construction not on paper and will greatly improve our speed and ability to deliver to our clients the best possible product that is available in all of Costa Rica.  That has always been our goal, never accept  mediocrity, to do the best that is humanly possible in the situation by delivering a final product we can all be proud of.

With that goal in mind we shall continue to forge ahead in creating the dream for all concerned.

Regards,

Trevor