After all the build up to buying our place in Rincon, Puerto Rico, it felt a little like the day after Christmas or your birthday…all this anticipation left us thinking “Now what?!” We decided pretty early on in the trip that we would consciously NOT do any major changes to the property…this trip was for celebrating our accomplishment of our major goal!

However, now that we are back, all I can do is start thinking about what we can do to make it a dream house. We’ve pretty much determined that the main wood house will be coming down at some point in the future, although we’re not going to do that too soon.Whenever I start dreaming of how the property will look, I like to draw rudimentary floor plans and exterior drawings.

So since I think our first focus will be on the studio concrete cabana, I figured we’d start there to make it nice and livable. Currently, it looks like this:

A good starting place!

And when I get done with it, hopefully it will look like this, or it might have a front porch as well:

Future of cabana?

As for the main house, here are a few BEFORE pictures…which won’t matter too much if we plan on taking it down, but for posterity here you go:

Wooden house from top of cabana

This is the house from another neighborhood

Upper bedroom

The small structure to the left is the outdoor shower and only bathroom on the main floor

Britton looking out to the deck next to the scary hammock

While I kind of like the Hawaii-esque culture style of the house, wood just isn’t very practical. We saw this first hand with the bees. The bee guys also said there are bats living in the bee room. The deck is rotting out and the roof is rusting away. But all of that could be rectified if we felt it was floor plan or house worth saving…which I’m leaning towards no because it only has 2 bedrooms, and only one shower that happens to be on the deck!!

So instead, I am thinking of a Spanish mission style theme to the house with an open breeze way through the whole house:

Spanish mission-style villa with lower-level mother-in-law apt and large deck

We’d also like to build a couple more cabanas like the concrete one that we could rent out to tourists or locals who live in Rincon. We might even want a pool…

So, I think this answers the What Now? question…Now, we go on to step 2…and that is to save up for our dream house. Of course all of this is going to take money which means more work and saving. Which we are ok with…but it would be nice to be able to get there a little sooner. So even though I really don’t like gambling except as an occasional form of entertainment, Britton bought a powerball ticket just in case…lol.

And if not…there’s always Las Vegas Letsgo2.com. But more realistically Step 2 probably just means hard work and saving. That seems to be the winning plan for us so far 🙂 At least, as Britton says, this should occupy my mind for a while…until the next “What now?”