Tips from Raymond Cruz on Siding Replacement

If you happen to be one of the few homeowners in Costa Rica that has vinyl sidings, this home improvement article is probably for you. This is especially for people that have an Ocean View home in the Carara Mountains of Costa Rica.

For example, my home is in the Carara Mountains in a resort community that gets a lot of humidity. Furthermore, vinyl sidings are not often seeing on a normal home in Costa Rica.  When I say a normal home, I mean a home that is not a luxury home located in the luxurious areas of Costa Rica like Escazu, La Sabana and Santa Ana.  For anyone who has ever come to Costa Rica and visited the normal Tico neighborhood, most homes have walls made out of concrete, wood panels or tin sheets.

My guest house is a combination of American style housing and Tico ingenuity.  In short, it’s a concrete block house with wood panels.  The wood panels when in dire need of replacement.  They were dry, rotting and basically falling off the building.

Even though Douglas the caretaker is very good at keeping everything clean, he cannot beat time.  It is a Grosse understatement to say that siding do need to be replaced on a regular basis.

James helping me change my sidings

So I decided to have the replace with vinyl sidings and thought it would be a cinch because while I had my house in Atlanta, I had replaced my own sidings before and I know the price contractors charge for that kind of work.  On top of that, one of my friends from Marietta, GA was visiting and he happens to be a home improvement expert and he often does siding replacement in Atlanta as part of the services he offers.

However, since he was here on vacation we decided to look for a contractor or a company to do it and after a long and hard search, I was not able to find any reputable person or company that could do it.  I even had placed an ad on Craigslist and all I got out of it was a couple of handyman without any siding job references.

In the end, we decided to do the job ourselves…

The first thing we had to do was find a supplier of vinyl sidings.  After a 2 day search we ended up finding two companies that supplied sidings and out of those, only one had a small variety of sidings.

The sidings job took us about two weeks to do even though it should have only taken a few days.  The toughest part was finding the proper materials like zip tools, brackets and such as well as having to put on our Tico ingenuity hat.

So if you decided to add vinyl sidings to your home in Costa Rica, I would strongly suggest that you hire a contractor from abroad to do it.