Owning A Home In Costa Rica

A common question is "Can I as an American (or Canadian or other foreigner) own property in Costa Rica?"

The answer is yes. No ifs ands or buts, just "yes".

To read more about this I suggest this page: How To Buy Property In Costa Rica

Basically all you have to do is buy the Costa Rican property - I suggest using your OWN attorney (see more on that on the site given above) - and then you make sure it's registered in the National Registry or "Registro Nacional", and it's YOURS. Forever. Well, until you die or sell it, anyway... ;-D

But what I am writing about today is the joy of being a home owner. This is our first home ever, not just our first home in Costa Rica.

It's wonderful in the following ways:

• No rent to pay
• We can do what we want with the house, yard, etc.
• We chose the location and the style of house
• We are furnishing it the way we want (according to our budget)

However, tonight I experienced the down side of owning your own home:

When one owns one's own home, one has to take care of it oneself!

So since we moved in we have had leaks under the kitchen sink. We had the builder come out to fix it and he didn't get it fixed.

We had our caretaker try to fix it and he couldn't get it fixed.

We tried to fix it ourselves and we couldn't fix it!

Finally we figured out that the faucet itself is bad, not the pipes or connections. So we took it back and bought a better one today.

When we bought it the guy at the store said "It's self explanatory to put it together and install it." We took him at his word.

But when we got home and saw the instructions we said "Uh oh! ... This is NOT easy to understand and is NOT going to be easy to install!"

We struggled with it for about an hour and a half. The diagrams sucked. The instructions sucked.

And these were in English! But.. obviously translated poorly from some other language - probably Chinese.

Let me point out that laying on my back for an hour and a half under a sink, reaching up, trying to use a wrench and pliers in a tight space, water leaking on me, my back twisted in various unnatural poses... was HELL!

I got it installed and then it didn't work right...

Back to the drawing board. Tried again. Again it didn't work right...

Oh! Wait! THIS thing goes THIS way! The diagram is WRONG! I think!

Sure enough, the diagram was not clear and I had installed part of it upside down. Now it started to work but still there was a problem... Hmmm.

By this time not only is my back killing me but my head hurts and I've really HAD it with this plumbing shit! (I've never installed a faucet in my life!)

Long story short, after about 2 hours of struggling we finally got it to work. Now we are just PRAYING that we don't have problems with it!

Plumbing, landscaping, painting, cleaning, fixing problems...

Honestly though, we do love owning our own home, because it's ours, we don't pay rent and we can do whatever we want!

But I could sure do without the plumbing problems! Hopefully we're done with that for a while, at least!

Ahh! The joys of being a first time home owner in Costa Rica!