There has been some major progress over the past week as far as the building work goes! We have a little team of four hard working bricklayers, 5500 bricks, about 16 sacks of cement and a heap of sand and rocky sand piled up outside the house. The idea is to get cracking on the remaining walls and also build a small garden wall to mark the front of the garden, the aim being to relocate the public dog loo which has established iself on our grass. So far so good! Pretty much all the walls are up and only one door in the wrong place, which by our track record is pretty good. It has also made things much more private for us as before whenever we stepped out of the house we were standing on the platform in plain view of the neighbours, which seems to tempt them to come down and talk to us while we´re having our late Sunday morning breakfast in the sunshine. Now we are hidden by walls and can eat in our pjs in peace.
With every step forward there is inevitably a step back in this process of building a house but at least this week`s mini disaster wasn´t too serious. We have had our doubts for a while about a few of the installations put in place by our first builder and with the warm wether, a few whiffy smells had started coming from our bathroom plumbing. Tony decided it was time to check on Old Rodrigo´s grease-trap for the showers, kitchen sink and wash-hand basins. As this was an add on to the original designs for the house, we sort of forgot where it was located exactly and so Tony spent the day on saturday like a mole, digging here, there and everywhere trying to find the grease-trap. Eventually he did find it and sure enough it was blocked, over flowing and stinking! After a couple of hours up to his shoulder in it, he decided to forget it altogether and make a new one. By carefully selecting a container, stones, sand, netting and some bits of pipe, he put it all togther just in time for the washing machine to evacuate and slosh the whole lot into one big sandy soup.
Hopefully it didnt do too much damage though and once everything settled it seemed to be working fine, just struggling when over-filled. The washing machine is proving difficult all round. It over fills the grease-trap, it uses an massive amount of water and it´s pretty heavy on the power. The lights flicker and as I learned (on Saturday at 6.30pm once all of the hardware stores were closed for the weekend) it can burn out all the fuses in the invertor if left on at the same time as other heavy appliances, leaving you completely in the dark with a fridge full of warming food. Lucky cars have fuses and we were able to at least get our lights back on!
On a more positive note, I spent the day on Saturday painting what will one day be our guest room and it´s great to now have at least one space pretty much finnished and without mess and clutter. Unfortunately it doesnt have curtains or furniture yet so we haven´t been able to enjoy it so far. Soon though. Our bathroom which we decorated the weekend before is looking very nice and now has all the bits and pieces (and if I´m honest clutter and mess) in there. The solar water heater is working a treat and we met a woman last week who makes natural, eco friendly soaps from olive oils and natural flavours which dont clog up the grease-trap supposedly so we stocked up on a couple of those.
On the Sunday the mission was to finnish the pond but at a scorching and windy 28`C we couldn´t face it! We dug for ten minutes, altered the plan to leave it pretty much the size it was, called it a day and went swimming in the river along from our house. A much better idea! This weekend coming, we wanted to measure the pond and buy the plastic liner so that we can get started filling it and planting stuff in it but it´s now Friday and we still haven´t measured so it´s seeming a bit unlikley. It also still hasn´t rained since my last post so seems a bit pointless to waste our precious water on a pond that we cant drink or wash in at this stage. We´ll have to see, a flash flood could change everything!
So this week, fingers crossed for rain (as a Scot I never thought I´d be heard saying that!) and also for a good bit of building work from our guys! Hopefully by the next post there should be some good photos to show.
