This article is one of a series on life in the campo, or country living in Costa Rica, as my wife and I* experienced it on our visits and after moving to Costa Rica. Each is a sort of time capsule, the stories evolving with us as we have lived more experiences and delved deeper into the culture.

You don’t figure that when you go into reforesting, one of the things you’ll have to do is go into remodeling houses in a big way. After all, we grow trees – why in the world would we need houses?

Sigh, how little we knew. Because growing trees is so labor intensive, you need a manager on each place. But that’s okay, our tico partner says, each finca generally has a house. Yes, normally there is a house – but nothing that would survive a strong wind. (Thankfully, Costa Rica is near to the equator so it doesn’t get strong winds, or most of the houses out in the campo would probably fall down.)

When we purchase a finca, our partner says, “The house (see photos top left) needs to be fixed up a little – a little zinc (tin roofing), a few boards, and it will do just fine.” The third photos shows the end result of this facelift, but we have learned that it rarely stops there.

The first phase is a true evaluation. Someone opens up the electrical wiring and discovers that their local cousin has been learning his trade – and he should stick to milking cows. Usually the wiring is done with the idea that the more electrical tape you use, the better. Okay – having a real electrician come and rewire really isn’t very expensive. To wire a whole house is about 200 dollars plus materials. But, unfortunately, you have to get into the ceiling to do the wiring, and that’s when you make the next discovery.

You discover that they used the cheapest wood possible for the beams in the roof and they might make it through the next rainy season – thank goodness it doesn’t snow here. Since you’re putting in new wiring, you don’t want the water to drip on it, and really, a new tin roof just isn’t all that expensive. The most expensive thing is the support beams, but we have the equipment to cut them ourselves from logs right in the field.

Well, if we are going to rip off the roof anyway, why not make a real porch, and the kitchen is usually really small, so perhaps we should enlarge it a bit. After all, preparing good food is REALLY important, right? Okay, so we bust out the front and back of the house, make the living room a little larger, create a new porch and, what the heck, a carport while we’re at it, and a new kitchen. This too isn’t that expensive – until you discover that the bottom half of the walls are pretty rotted, and you also discover why the floor was a little spongy….

Costa Ricans are not that big, and most of these homes have wooden floors. These floors support the ticos okay – especially since they know where the soft spots are – but I usually try to figure out how to levitate when I want to cross them. I swear the ticos are watching to see if I can get from one side to the other without falling through. I guess entertainment is at a premium in the campo.

Often when people built the houses, they sealed up the bottom. In the tropics, this is a recipe for rot. Well, there is a solution: We cut the walls in two, save the top, and replace the entire bottom half of the walls with concrete blocks reinforced with rebar, pouring a new concrete floor and putting a wood half wall on top of the new concrete. Sometimes the half wall is new, too, because the old walls were bad all the way up. And of course, concrete floors look so much nicer with tile, which we might as well buy in quantity to put in the porch and garage and up the bathroom walls. Did you say bathroom? That old plumbing has to go!…and we need a new shower door, fixtures, water-heating shower head, and…

The end result, usually for under $5,000, is a home that is very cute, will last for many years, and the only thing really left of the original is the slab foundation – although it’s been expanded quite a bit.

Now that the farm managers and our partner’s family are settled, they’re pressuring us to think about a house for ourselves. But we’ll probably go cheap – that is, we’ll probably build from the ground up!

*We are Fred and Amy Morgan, originally from the US. We bought a dairy farm in Costa Rica to plant trees in its pastures, then later caught a dream of turning all the land we can to permanently protected, sustainably maintained forest once the plantation trees have been harvested for profit. We make most of the wood from the plantations into furniture, flooring, and other wood products.

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