Building a home in Costa Rica usually takes anywhere from a year to two years. During this time, if you’re taking an active hand in supervising the construction, you should be renting a place nearby and make frequent visits to the site. It’s difficult to tell exactly how long any construction will take. A simple rule of thumb (with building as with everything else in Costa Rica) is that the job will take longer than everyone tells you it will. How much longer depends on the complexity of the design.

Initially at least, your building schedule will be subject to the seasons. Workers can’t move earth, pour concrete, lay block, and tie rebar during the rainy season, so you should plan for your construction to start in January or February (starting in late December – the beginning of the dry season – would be ideal, if you can find anyone who’s not on vacation). If you have a good crew, they should be able to get four walls and a roof up before the rainy season.

Once the roof is up, your project is no longer a captive of the weather. Your timetable will now depend on the availability of labor: The plumber, the electrician, the tile guy, the gypsum guy, etc. In recent years this has been a problem. With so much building going on in the country, you had to wait in line to hire the good work crews. Things have slowed somewhat, however, and it perhaps won’t be so difficult by the time you’re reading this book.

Once your infrastructure is installed, some contractors are tempted to let the pace of work fall off and shift workers over to other jobs. This is the part of the job that gets tedious, where one team can’t finish a few details before another team finishes their details, and simple jobs drag out weeks and months longer than they should. This is the part of the construction where you or your project manager should be visiting the site every day to make sure the details are done right, and done efficiently. Costa Rican culture isn’t very attentive to detail, so keep a sharp eye out.