Since I last posted, the house has pretty much been finished structurally. We found a reliable a builder as builders go and pushed forward with the roof, the plastering and the floors throughout the remaining part of the house. Our carpenter slowly but surely put together our windows and doors just in time for Christmas and we got our land closed in with some wire fencing after an unfortunate incident involving our rabbits, a few chickens and a couple of the neighbour´s dogs. The exterior walls are all now painted with lime and look really good and although we haven´t started any gardening yet, the rains came and have left everything nice and lush and green again. We also bought some turf for around the front of the house and that´s made a big difference.
Tony has tweaked the water harvesting system to handle the sometime torrential rains we get to allow us to make the most of the wet seasons (having learned from the last dry one!) and it seems to be working really well seeing as in a fairly minor rain a couple of days ago we collected easily a 1000 litres. That´s with only half of the guttering on too.
We´re also having the chance to really test the house´s coping ability at the moment, as well as our friendships! We have had a few visitors over Christmas and New Year and the poor guys have all had to spend their holidays on the building site with us. The hot water system which is perfect for two of us, struggles a little bit with 6 people and showers have to be staggered and although we have plenty of water at the moment, we would have to be careful having guests at dry times of year. It also doesn´t help that one of our solar panels seems to be malfunctioning and may have a problem with a diode or something meaning we dont have as much electricity as we should and having upgraded the inversor, we are now finding that we dont really have enough power sometimes. All said though, the house is holding up very nicely and it´s fantastic to have our own space to spend our free time with friends.
So, what next? The kitchen! We are still using our make-shift kitchen at the moment and have bought a fairly cheap, standard kitchen kit to install in our beautiful, spacious, one day, kitchen/diner. Having made a frustrating and almost relationship destroying bathroom cabinet of a similar style a few weeks back, we decided that the builder might have to take charge of this one! Unfortunately he discovered that the wall wasn´t perfectly square and so out comes the cement again. Every time we feel like we´re getting close, there´s always a step backwards just around the corner but we are definitely getting closer now. The floors are looking great and just need to be sealed to stop them getting marked or stained and there´s a lot of painting, gardening and furniture buying still to do but we´re nearly there! At this point it´s tempting to just kick the builders out and say it´ll do! but we´re going to persevere and hopefully in a month I´ll be able to write on here about trivial things like planting herbs or shades for curtains rather than how to have a bath in a teacup of water, squeezing more power out of dead batteries at 10 o´clock at night or tricks to make crooked walls square up to a pre-fab kitchen unit!
In the meantime, a happy and green new year to everyone. I have a feeling 2013 is going to be a really good one!
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