Surprise! We’re building a beach house in Mexico! (yes, it will be an Airbnb)

This has been in the works since March! We didn’t want to say anything because there are soooo many things that can go wrong with building a house in another country…so we waited until everything was finalized and under way.

And here we are!

Here’s our lot!

Back in March, we looked at a few different communities and fell in love with this one. It’s in master planned community called Islas Del Mar. Our lot is in a custom lot neighborhood in the community called Isla Conchilla. There are about 100 lots that span the beach and lagoon.

Islas Del Mar is on the other side of Cholla Bay in a gated golf community. It’s relatively new (opened in 2017), so there isn’t much there yet except a restaurant, 9 holes of golf, and two half-built condominium complexes. But their master plan includes a beach club with pools, a hotel, and finishing the golf course.

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The building process:

There’s SO much that goes into buying land and building a house from scratch in a foreign country. The community helped us a lot by putting us in touch with an attorney to form a trust (a person can’t own land within 50km of the ocean, but an entity can).

After we formed the trust, we were able to purchase the lot and acquire the deed from the community. Yes, we wired money to Mexico – multiple times. We were kind of freaking out haha.

It’s not a typical master planned community where they are their own builder and offer floorplans to choose from. You have to do everything on your own, including finding architects and builders yourself.

After we got the trust taken care of, we hired an architect (after a failed attempt at working with a different one due to poor communication) and our plans are under way! We went through the first round of them already, and were told the whole process should be done by the end of November.

Once the plans are done, we will start on construction. We are relying heavily on the contractor to guide us through the process with permitting and all that. He came recommended by friends and the development.

The house:

Danny and I spent weeks drawing our “dream” Mexican beach house within the parameters of our lot (and budget!). We showed it to the architect and he was able to come really close to our original drawing. He added a few cool features as well.

Here is the original drawing (excuse the poor handwriting, I will explain all the features when the plans are concrete):

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It will be very Spanish style – I will share the plans and mood boards soon!