Our Honduras Story - Construction of Our Villa

Our architect is a one of the most sought after and well respected architects in all of Honduras. We feel very fortunate to be working with someone of his reputation. The guest villa is his design he designed for us after we gave him an idea of size and total cost we wanted fro the guest villa. We have found on Coolhouseplans.com a Spanish Mediterranean style villa that we want for the main house. We wanted the guest villa to have a similar style and roofline as the main villa. He designed a great little villa, which is 1000 square foot, 2 bedrooms, and 2 baths with kitchen, livingroom, dining room and laundry room.

We negotiate a signed contract with a time schedule for construction and a payment schedule for completion in the end of June 2008. We now have to figure out the best way to wire money on a monthly basis to Honduras. This took a bit of time to get all the information right and the money reaching the proper account.

It took a bit more to convince our bank that we are building a home in Honduras and not involved in some nefarious business. It is our money, but they are requesting all this information so that they may do research into the recipients of our wires. It was quite annoying and very frustrating. They treated us like they needed to protect us from our decision or that we were criminals running drugs or something. People buy and build homes all over the world and transfer funds all over the world to do business everyday, but our local bank seemed to think this was a most unusual request.

While we were in Honduras we had discussed the need for a construction inspector. We were given the name and email address of a gentleman who does this work. We write him and setup a time and payment schedule based on certain points in the construction process. We felt that this was probably a very good idea as we could not be there to see the process and ask for corrections or point out problems. Plus it was nice to know someone would be in email contact and keep us informed of the progress. Or at least this is what we were hoping for in hiring him.

We were so impressed when we received not only emails that informed us of the progress of the project, but also photos of the various stages. It was wonderful to have this and invaluable when you are building in one country while residing in another country. He sent photos of not only the construction, but of errors he found and pointed out to the maestro for correction.

It was a great point of confidence in the whole process and I would highly recommend that anyone doing this should find a good inspector. It will give you peace of mind and it is also so exciting to get those photos of your construction.

The months and the payments and the emails between Ordin our inspector and Kent our real estate broker went along on a very regular basis. Kent acted as the intermediary between us and our arquitecto (architect). There were all the details of the size of our electrical transformer, the confirmation of receipt of funds and dealing with any questions or problems that come up in the construction process. As any of you know that have ever had a house built is a very involved process and one that we were doing strictly through the written word.

This was a learning curve in and of its self, learning to write a clear and precise email that answers questions or receives answers to "all" the questions asked. I have decided that writing and conveying information in a clear way or getting back the required information is an art form unto itself.

It is one thing when you write one email with one or two questions now and then, but when you are writing a continuous flow of emails with multiple questions, answers and overlapping responses it is very important how you setup the content of your email. One thing that I found that helps is to put answers or questions in an outline form. Making use of color is also a good way to bring attention to the whole of the email and the separate details. Otherwise the reader often read only the first paragraph or question and will not respond to the whole email.

We had a very good experience in the basic construction of the villa and we had a steady flow of emails back and forth and this is a good thing. We were working with people who kept us in the loop and informed us of problems, changes or other things that needed our attention or decision. We had a very hand on involvement in the project so to speak even though we were thousands of miles away. It is very important that you stay in good contact and stay involved. It keeps your project on the front burner and not pushed to the side while waiting for information from you. Or worse yet that changes or decisions are decided for you because you are not very available. You want to be very visible and very available to those that need your input. If you let things slide you can be sure that others will too and you do not want this to happen when you are investing a lot of money in a project far away.

Our villa was basically finished by the end of June as expected. There was some delay in getting the electrical done and installed so as we had no electricity to the villa there were some things that could not be completed. We needed to have light fixtures tested, light switches and outlets tested and a list of small corrections that needed to be done or finished in our villa before the final inspection could be considered done.

From here it took several more months to get the electrical done and the rest of the little corrections made.

I will continue this story in my next article in the series, "Finishing the Final Details on the Villa."