Check.

As impossible as it seems, the house is officially done. Between all of the other craziness inside and outside of Las Lomitas, the 500 sq ft. concrete palace is finished (for now :).

As you can see, the car has also changed. We'll talk about that later.

The end product is a 25' x 20' house designed for good ventilation, decent light (without electricity), self-sustaining water (rainwater catchment), and 40 years of wastewater management. It has two bedrooms, a sala (kitchen/dining room/living room), a porch, a shed, and a bathroom. Running water is provided by a rainwater catchment cistern pumped (by hand) up to a plastic tank which is fed to the house by gravity. The floors and walls are concrete, with an aluminum roof.

Bathroom.

Mud room.

Guest Room.

Our room.

Sala.

On paper, 500 sq ft. sounds really small, and we were designing the house to be fairly small. However, in practice here, 500 sq ft are actually fairly big. It's not the biggest house in the community by any means, but it's very comfortable, and designed for hosting visitors and future family growth (nothing in the oven right now, settle down mom).

All-in-all, it's been an awesome learning process and has already seen so many things pass, late-night talks, learning masonry, toucans dying in the shed, bucket showers, amazing cooking, 8 kinds of bananas, butchered armadillo, butchered Spanish, and bloodied fingers (stupid machetes, nothing serious, again, settle down mom).

Damos gracias a Dios por: el bendicion de nuestra primera casa en nuestra propia tierra. (We give thanks to God for the blessing of our first house on our own land.)