Creating environmentally designed habitats for sustainable living in Costa Rica and beyond…
We became friends with Marilyn when she came down for a Surf with Amigas retreat a couple years ago and Kim agreed to design and build a small simple 1 bedroom casita on Marilyn's sea view lot at Seascape Terrace. After many iterations of design and trying to fit it to a tight budget, we …
Continue reading "The Butterfly House – A One Bedroom Casita on a Budget"
This post is a long time coming, but in case you wondering, yes we did finally finish our house. It was mostly complete in time for Luna to be born back in September of 2014. Since then it's been a work in progress, adding little details along the way. There are still some details we'd …
After the seeing the successful outcome and great feel of our L-shaped hacienda home Kim has agreed to build a slightly customized version for a Canadian couple planning to retire in Nicaragua in the next few years. Here, Holly and baby Luna give a tour of the project.
It's been about 3 months and we're loving our new home at Brisas Del Alma. We're still very busy settling in, putting finishing touches on the house (building shelves to store all our stuff mostly), and embracing our new lifestyle. It feels so good! Here are a few quick pics I snapped the other day to …
The house is now mostly finished, and we have an 11 week old baby girl named Luna. Little Luna has occupied most of our time lately, so I'm way behind on blog posts. Eventually I'll get a chance to take some photos of the finished house (which still does need a lot of detail work …
I can hardly believe it, but the house is nearly complete. Way back in February our contractor promised to have it finished by the end of July, but as anyone who has ever built in Nicaragua (or anywhere else in the world) knows, a better estimate is to take whatever they say and add at …
In Part 2 of our Nesting in Nicaragua series, Holly is one week shy of being six months pregnant and the house has been under construction for five months. The roof is mostly on and you can start to get a feel for what the house will look like. Take a tour of the interior …
Kim Obermeyer of hipEhabitat.com talks about his design for a cool roof - a double layer roof that will prevent heat from the sun from radiating into the living space. The roofing system features pre-painted structural zinc roof panels with 2"x2" spacers and Plycem cement board bottom layer.
It was a long time coming (8 months to be exact), but the beach house is finally finished! Ok, so it's not totally finished. There are still plenty of details to be addressed. We've got trim to put up, painting to do, furniture to make, etc. but the basics are complete. We've got walls, a …
We started building the beach house way back in March - or was it February 2013? The point is, it's been so long that it's hard to remember. The main delay has been caused by an irresponsible carpenter with a lot of excuses (mostly lies) and a weak work ethic. We had been waiting for …
Continue reading "Beach House Progress – Plycem Walls and Bamboo Siding"
Ok, I know you can barely see the house in this picture, but it's just such a classic shot of me telling the dogs that they cannot eat our caretaker's pet squirrel "Simon" (named for one of the chipmunks). You can see a tiny bit of the house that our caretaker will move into once …
The whole process has been really slow, but at least it's been steady. We bought a beachfront concession lot back in April of 2012. It wasn't easy and you can read the full story here. Since then we've been working to improve the lot little by little. We hired a caretaker. We dug a well …
We're in the process of installing infrastructure for a small 16 lot housing development in northern nicaragua called Tierra Del Sueno. In order to provide water for the development we decided to drill a community well at the top of the hill. Unfortunately even at 300' deep we did not find enough water for all …
OK, here’s the brew I’ve been waiting for, wanting to try for months, yearning for - a home-brewed Belgian IPA made right here in Nicaragua. I’m thinking of throwing a packet of dried Belgian yeast into our palm-thatch roof so it can just be there, growing, hanging out, ready to bring yeasty goodness to any …
We have begun building up on the ridge! First project - a place to store our tools, saddles, surfboards, wheelbarrow, and the building supplies that we'll need to collect when we're ready to start building the actual house. The name for this sort of building is a bodega. We wanted it to be as cheap …
We bought an awesome lot in the new eco-friendly community in Northern Nicaragua called Tierra Del Sueno and are starting to make some improvements. The first step was installing a fence around the perimeter so we can more clearly see the lot the boundaries and also keep the horses and cows from munching on whatever …
Continue reading "The New Living Fence on our Lot in Tierra Del Sueno"
It's been a year or more in the planning stages but we have finally broken ground on the new roads that will service lots in Tierra Del Sueno. We had been waiting to finalize the lot lines before figuring out how to create the roads that would service them. All that is finished finally, so …
We love passion fruit! Called calala or maracuya in Nicaragua, delicious passion fruit is awesome mixed with plain yogurt, granola, and a drizzle of honey. We buy them a dozen at a time and have been eagerly awaiting for the flowering of our passion fruit vine. We planted it last August and have watched it …
Continue reading "How to Make a Stubborn Passionfruit Vine Flower – Nicaraguan Folk Wisdom"
Kim spent 8 years living in Thailand and learned some great recipes for delicious and healthy Thai food. One of my favorites is the Green Papaya salad. It's super easy to make, fresh and healthy, looks awesome with all the colors, and tastes so good! Ingredients for the salad grated green papaya - It might …
The third, and possibly the best batch, in tropical home brewing adventures, almost met its end in the moldy rainy season condition of June. The rainy season brings clouds of mold that drift invisibly through the air landing on everything. When I checked the carboy on the last day of the 15-day fermentation, I …
Kim was in Oregon for an early spring trip and on a hike along the Columbia River found a grove of young cottonwood trees in full bud. Cottonwood is in the same family as willow, the tree from which aspirin comes, and also has pain relieving and antibiotic qualities. This is really good stuff for …
Continue reading "Make Your Own Cottonwood Balm For Muscle Pain and Wound Healing"
We started planting the garden in late October, 2011- lots of chillies (habanero, jalapeno, arbol, New Mex, serrano and others), various greens, tomatoes, Thai basil, lemongrass, dill, tea tree, sunflowers and a bunch of randoms like purslane and indigo. Some things never sprouted at all, some sprouted and died soon after, and some flourished. Holly's …
We were headed down to Southern Nicaragua to check out Rancho Santana and talk about possibly using it as a location for an upcoming women's surf and yoga retreat. The drive usually takes about 6 hours but we wanted to be adventurous and see how long we could stay on dirt roads. We saw some …
Continue reading "Extreme Driving to Extreme Luxury in Southern Nicaragua"
I'll admit that I was a doubter. After participating in numerous homebrewing efforts over the years I learned that it isn't easy, there's a lot that can go wrong, and especially considering our lack of refined equipment I thought our first effort might not be that awesome. I was wrong. So very wrong... To read …
We are all about the homemade - home-brewed IPAs, home-fermented honey wine, and now hand-rolled cacao balls! Our buddy who lives in Costa Rica brought up a big box full of rich gooey chocolate liquor which he is importing into the US to be made into fancy desserts by the artsy, sustainable San Fran restaurant …
We moved into our new cabana about a month prior and had yet to take full advantage of the loft because we didn’t have any stairs. We had considered several funky stair designs with notched logs and spiral things, but in the end just wanted to have nice wooden stairs finished in a reasonable amount …
While trying to install our signal booster antennae on our new house, we heard a buzzing and came across a buzzing mess lurking under the palm fronds. Kim grabbed a plastic bag and I got in place with the camera. With a quick grab he was able to safely contain the stinging creatures within the …
The walls are up, the siding is on, and our cute little 18'sq cabana is nearly finished! We had to leave Nicaragua at this point and are very excited to get back down there and put in the details like counter tops, stairs, etc.
A friend of a friend's place in NY, also has old tire terraced gardens, crushed rubber paths and an awesome 40'+ foot inside climbing rope!! Click the link to watch the video: http://www.sciencefriday.com/embed/video/10407.swf
Designing the window placement was a fun experience that involved measuring, re-measuring, and measuring again, then erasing, measuring, and changing the dimensions multiple times. Our friendly red-headed framer was smilingly patient as we changed our minds back and forth. Right now there are windows on three sides with the North-Western wall window-free since it gets …
Building in Nicaragua is both much easier and much more difficult than it would be in the States. This project in particular is easier than most since we're building on Coco Loco property with full access to power (except when it goes out) and water, and we don't have to worry about any sort of …
Continue reading "Building in Nicaragua – Concrete Floor, Tile, and Wood Dilemmas"
Using the Barefoot Architect by Johan van Lengen to get a few ideas during the design process.
Accessing the palm fronds for the thatch roof turned out to be one of the easiest things we’ve had to do so far. There’s a property nearby owned by a friend full of the right kinds of palms, so we simply had to have a chat with the caretaker there and negotiate a fair price …
Continue reading "Building in Nicaragua – Palm Fronds for the Thatch Roof"
Mangle, mangle, mangle! We were told we needed to get some varilla to support the palma (palm thatch leaves used for our roof). So we said “OK, where do we get that”? We could either buy it from a local guy or at the market for 30 Cordobas (cords; exchange rate = 22 cords/US$) per …
Continue reading "Building in Nicaragua – Is Cutting Mangroves ever Sustainable?"
The video footage of the Eucalyptus plantation experience and the start of the roof assembly.
The house progresses rapidly. It’s amazing how quickly the eucalyptus posts can be assembled into home shape. Our nine supporting pillars were bought, cut, delivered, and cemented into place within four days. For the rest of the roof structure we needed thinner diameter eucalyptus and drove a few Kms down the main highway towards Chinandega …
Continue reading "Building in Nicaragua – Eucalyptus Plantation Politics"
A video summary of shopping for the eucalyptus posts that will become the pillars for our cabana in Nicaragua.
Lately our home base has been a thatched roof cabana at El Coco Loco, the Eco-hotel where we run our women’s surf and yoga retreats. Since the guys at Coco Loco have been letting us crash there in between retreats, whenever their 5 cabanas are full with paying guests we get relocated to a tent, …
Continue reading "Building a Cabana in Nicaragua – Eucalyptus posts"
Esterilla is essentially flattened bamboo and can be used as flooring, wall paneling, and anything else where you need a strong flat material. In Ecuador we saw it used as walls in many local homes. We happened to come across a few guys actually making the Esterilla and stopped to check it out. Click play …
The search for a sustainably built home has led us all over the place in the past months. We’ve been learning a lot about various green building methods and materials, from hay bales, to clay, earth ships and bamboo. We want to build a home-base in Nicaragua and decided that the giant grass, …
Hiking through permaculture farms and admiring bamboo structures makes one quite thirsty. Usually, quality hoppy libations are inaccessible in Latin America, which is why we were so ecstatic to happen upon Cafe Flor and Roche's Brewery in Canoa, Ecuador. We'd heard rumors of locally brewed IPAs on tap served with burritos. It was just what …
Eco:Design:Life 