Owning a Vacation Home in Caribbean

Actually no drum roll necessary, right?  I already told you that this all works out in the end.  I personally HATE suspense, sorry. Our future view through neighbor's construction mess So, during my second evening of conferences. I was reading through the final version of the sales contract when I discovered that one of the lots depicted in the document was NOT one of the lots we had proposed to purchase. Upon further inspection, I discovered that Sebastian had sent the wrong mortgage survey to the lawyer.  It took some screen shots and quickly sent them to our lawyer and Sebastian and Thomas. Needless to say, the closing did not take place at 5 PM as planned.  And Thomas ran out of data on his prepaid sim card the next day - his departure day- before I could inform him that everything worked out in the end.  We had the right lots described and the owners had agreed to one last stipulation in the contract. Side note (should I call these something?  Like DR Factoids? The pu

Whatever CAN happen WILL happen- Some Guy Named Murphy Or is it -   Anything that CAN go wrong WILL go wrong ? Whichever it is I kind of felt like I was in a Murphy's Law Unluck-Loop.  So after the car accident and the hours sitting in the rain waiting for a police officer and then a tow truck.  (Total side-note: a Volt is a very cool car, but it doesn't always know what's going on...two miles after the fender bender it just stopped working...as if it was clueless that it had been in an accident until 5 minutes after leaving the scene of said accident...)  I made it to school for second hour which was good because I had been planning for weeks to pair my German class with a colleague's graphics class to do some cross-curricular lessons, blah blah...BUT, after having to take a half day to deal with car issues and arriving technically only an hour late to meet my students in the graphics lab the whole school lost power. LOL! Wednesday was a blur of Uber-rides and hi

Phew!  After weeks and weeks of e-mailing with our DR lawyer and haggling with getting our down payment funds liquid. our signing happens today! Yay!  I'm starting with this fact because as I give you the "Play by Play" I want you to know it all works out in the end.  Sorry, for those Schadenfreudians out there! So here's what the house actually looks like.  But, if you remember from previous (photoshopped) pictures there is now a small 200 square foot addition. casa de los sueños! This home was originally built as the first in a 10 house vacation home development in the hills overlooking Cabrera. The other homes were never built. The lots are small and originally had wooden fences running on top of the short coral rock walls you see here. For reasons unknown...but probably due to the Great Recession...the other homes were not built and the lots have since been sold in pairs. One family bought the two lots adjacent to our three and have since begun building a