Costa Rica: Calahonda Home

Belen wins the poll with 63% of the vote. Escazu was in second place with 25% of the vote. This means that 2 of you were right (and I know that Jen voted for Escazu, so that really only means that one person was right).

We opted to head to Escazu due to the fact that the neighborhood is more westernized with better sidewalks and more stores in the immediate area. The primary reason for this is simple...the road system in Costa Rica is a nightmare with virtually no street signs. As such, Jen expects to do very little driving around in the first few months...so we wanted to make sure that they were in an area where they could comfortably leave the gated community and venture out on foot.

The house is fairly nice with no major issues. The first floor has a kitchen, a kitchen nook, a dining room, a living room, a study, a half bath, a laundry room, a maid quarters w/ bath. The second floor has 3 bigger bedrooms, a big TV room, a smaller play area and two full baths. All in all, it is fairly big despite being a 3 bedroom home due to the extra bonus areas. The entire home is tile floor...as are most all homes in Costa Rica. The backyard is currently a little scrubby with weeds and some dead grass...we will fix this quickly to shape up that backyard for the kiddos. There is no front yard...but there is a common area with a pool, baths and cooking area. There is also a little swing set close to the front door which you can see in the pictures. It is also very close to CIMA - which is a private hospital...apparently a sister hospital to Baylor University...but I have not confirmed that one.

Finally, we were able to negotiate with the landlord to include appliances which apparently do not come with rental homes by default. This is huge seeing as how they are all very expensive in Costa Rica since most of them are imported. This should free up some of our furniture budget to actually furnish the home instead of buying appliances. We are taking very little with us from the states. Just cloths, linens/towels, toys, pictures and daily essentials like our beloved anodized Calphalon cookware.

Sorry about the picture quality...but as I stated before, we video taped the entire house and did not take digital pictures. These pictures are all snapshots taken from the actual Canon Elura-100 video stream.