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Now we had our tools and the
various bits we’d purchased in the UK, we were able to really get cracking
with renovating the house.
With my lack of
do-it-yourself experience, I was delegated suitable tasks such as mending
wall cracks, none really serious, and the painting. I was impressed with
the “instant dry” paint we had purchased, you could put a second coat on as
soon as you had finished the first. I was slightly worried when I noticed
that the paint wasn’t to be used in temperatures over 30o C, but
as it only just dropped below that at night, there was no chance it would be
below that in the day time. Perhaps that is why it dried so quickly!
The Spanish, contrary to what most Northern Europeans seem to think, work
long hours. The fact that everything closes down for siesta throughout the
year means that they simply suffer four lots of rush hour, instead of only
two. In the burning heat of July and August, if you don’t work in an
air-conditioned building, a siesta is essential to get enough sleep to get
through working late in the cooler evening hours. Attempting to work
through the day in August proved to be impractical: instead of being dead on
our feet in the early evening, by having 2 or 3 hours’ sleep, we could keep
on working until late at night or, as Guest Arrival Day came closer, until 2
am or worse! Our main difficulty was finding somewhere cool enough to sleep
in the heat waves searing temperatures. The caravan, in spite of the
shading we put over it, was desperately hot in the day time and to lie in
bed meant sizzling and melting all at once - sleep for me being out of the
question. Alan seemed to be able to sleep no matter what, he puts this done
to his seafaring days where he got used to anything – except an alarm type
noise ... he could then leap out of bed from a dead sleep and .... bumble
around trying to work out why he was in a vertical position. Very funny to
watch! When we had nearly finished the Cártama room, I had an idea – it was
so cool in there, all I had to do was sweep the floor, put down the airbed
and then we would have a perfect place for siesta! Now, cool: what sort of
temperature would that be, do you think? Wrong! ... 32 degrees centigrade
was the minimum for some time, and routinely hotter. In our inexperience,
we imagined from 2 pm to 4 pm were the requisite hours of siesta, but having
walked outside into blast furnace temperatures, our eyeballs seared from the
scorching wind, we realised that siesta was from 3 pm to 5 pm for us ... and
if we were really tired, another hour on to that. Quite often even at
dusk, it would still be in the high 30’s during those summer months –
luckily we haven’t had a repeat of those summer temperatures since.
The roof terrace needed some of the old grouting cutting out and replaced
with fresh. As the temperature up there rarely dropped much below 50
degrees during the day, it was a chore we thought would have to wait until
the cooler months arrived. One morning I glanced up, aware of something
mysterious was happening in the sky. There was an unfamiliar greyish, white
mass in the sky. I racked my brains – it struck a chord in my memory. Oh
yes, a cloud! No doubt at all, there was a cloud in the sky! Admittedly it
did not have the mass, colour or duration of the UK variety, but it was
dense enough to shield us from the sun for a little. I rushed round to
where Alan was working to tell him the exciting news. Grateful to halt in
his current task of chiselling a large trench in the tiled concrete floor of
the new bathroom (don’t ask!), he came up to the roof terrace and surveyed
the large expanse of ... tiled floor. As this one just needed the mini-disc
cutter, it seemed a doddle after having being wielding much heavier
machinery. However, 4 hours later with the sun only remaining masked for a
very short length of that time, we began to realise this was a much bigger
job than we had first thought. On close examination, the grouting was far
worse than it appeared when standing up and looking down. Kneeling on the
floor with the disc cutter in hand, Alan spotted lots that needed taking
out. In fact, I think we had the equivalent amount of building debris
spread around as did his furrow down below. My attempts to send him back to
his trench, in a half hearted attempt to keep at least some of the grouting
in the tiles, were in vain. He was on a roll ... Eventually he pushed back
the goggles and squinted at them. I became concerned. A nasty thought had
occurred to me, but I couldn’t bear to voice it. “I think,” he announced
finally, “that my goggles need cleaning.” Did that mean he had been merrily
removing cracked grouting that was no more than an optical illusion caused
by safety goggles streaked with dust? It is not a question I want
answered. The upside was, due to the now late hour, it was a lot cooler for
re-grouting. I like to look on the positive side of life.
 Alan was doing the serious,
manly work. He was keen to get the new French windows installed and with
the aid of a large disc cutter, an SDS hammer drill and a 14 lb sledge
hammer, he removed the first window from the Cartama room. There,
camouflaged amongst the builder’s muck and dust was a fully boiler suited,
masked Alan! He blended in rather well as he was coated in a fine white
powder as was everything else in a radius of 30 feet. This book is not about
the actual renovation of Cencerrita, so I won’t go into lots of details, but
we had a few problems that may be worth mentioning ... the hot and cold
water pipes were built inside the walls which meant, by cutting out a
doorway into the room, he had just severed our water supply to the
bathroom. The other, um, interesting fact it that the house has no
foundations as such, it is built on a concrete raft with a steel ring at the
base of the walls. The raft bit made sense to me – if the ground moved, so
would the raft and hopefully not crack the foundations as it would in the
UK. In fact, all it meant to us in this case, was that the French doors
couldn’t go right to the ground, but there would be a step up on the inside
and a step down on the outside. No problem. The first window took nearly two
weeks, amongst other jobs of course, as we kept having to trail down to the
builders’ merchants for lintels and other non-interesting supplies. Once
Alan knew how the house was constructed, the other windows went a lot
quicker – although each had it own set of surprises. When we did the lounge
windows, we pushed supports under the roof beams which came down nearly to
the window ... we didn’t want the roof falling in on us – where would the
guests sleep then?
Unfortunately I couldn’t
make painting last all the time, so I became the labourer: gathering up the
rubble in the wheelbarrow and trundling it round to a large pile at the spa
side of the house. I simply had no idea how big a mountain of rubble could
be made from four 2m x 1.4m areas of wall! I’m sure there must be a
scientific formula for the exponential increase of materials from flat wall
to mounds. It was incredible – I wondered what on earth we were going to do
with it all. Spanish builders seem to just shovel a bit of soil over their
rubble rather than move it away, but our ingrained upbringing wouldn’t allow
us to do this. Fortunately, over time, the pile was eventually used for all
sorts but it was particularly useful for drainage in various places.
The house originally just
had the one large bathroom with two bedrooms, one small and one huge. We
had decided that, for renting, our “target market” would prefer to have two
ensuite shower rooms and bedrooms of a similar size. With rough sketches on
the non-printed bits of cardboard boxes lying around, I was shown how the
accommodation would be transformed into a dazzling concept of finca living –
I would even have a giant cupboard in which I could keep all the linen and
towels. Not bad.
 While we were actually doing
the building, we had extra ideas which Alan would accommodate where
possible, such as the decent sized shower trays, a built-in shelf at the
back of the new bathroom’s basin – this covered all the pipe works a treat!
We even built a headboard into the stud wall of the twin room, allowing more
storage space on the cupboard side. Unfortunately we did have a major
setback with the bathrooms. It was getting close to Guest-Day and the
frenetic pace we were keeping was beginning to tell. I had just carried a
freshly mixed batch of grout into the Álora bathroom where Alan was tiling,
when he started complaining about the amount I mixed. The “piddley” and
“whoosey” amounts I was making would not keep him occupied for long and I
was slowing him down ... Right, that did it. I went and found the empty 20
litre paint tin and mixed a batch in there - almost to the brim. Meanwhile,
in the shower room, Alan had discovered that due to the extraordinary amount
of heat the building retained, although the air temperature wasn’t too bad,
grouting was proving a nightmare. I staggered into the bathroom and
contemptuously tossed the container down - as well as one can toss a heavy,
full 20 litres. My sarcastic gesture had repercussions which are almost too
painful to remember ... Alan refused to let such a large amount go to waste
and I was delegated to keep it stirred and damp so that it would remain
useable. We were there till the early hours of the morning and grouted, not
only the Álora bathroom, but also the Cártama one. Sadly due to the thick
mix, the joints are not as good as we would have liked, but they do serve as
a standing reminder that it’s no good losing my temper ...
Alan not only seemed to
spend most of our budget in the plumbers, but also gave the impression of
spending a huge amount of time plumbing. In the garden, long lengths of
black pvc pipe in assorted sizes were the order of the day, but house itself
seemed to acquire mile upon mile of copper piping. For example, it wasn’t
good enough to have a boiler for the kitchen water and another one outside
the shower rooms, no. One of them may have a problem and then our guests
would be without hot water – horrors! So Alan, being the engineer he is,
made sure that if one of the systems didn’t work, the other boiler could be
used for both just by tweaking the odd valve or two. Simple enough in
principle, it was just the length of copper piping that it took to install!
You could also bet your bottom euro that one of the joints wept slightly it
was always in the most inaccessible place to redo. I occasionally ventured
to mention the flexible pipes seen in so many of the stores might be
suitable some of the awkward fittings but, other than on the end of a tap,
Alan was not interested in these -untrustworthy, seemingly.
One of my favourite plumbing
jobs, which I regularly like to remind Alan about, was one of the pipes that
had been cut when making a new doorway. As the original builders hid the
pipes in the brickwork, it wasn’t always obvious where the pipes would be,
although with experience, we could probably make a fairly shrewd guess: they
would be where you least expect them to be! This pipe in question, at about
waist height going through the new door opening to the Álora room’s ensuite,
was severed in such a way that it was impossible for Alan to seal off
properly without knocking more wall down – which would destroy the matching
tiles – something I didn’t encourage him to do. We couldn’t turn the water
off that pipe as it was the one that led to the toilet and shower we were
using. In desperation we had a “session” with this pipe, trying to cap in
off in any way possible. It makes me start to giggle just thinking of it
... Alan was so grim about it: he tried scrunching the pipe up with a bit
inside before using an entire reel of solder in his endeavour to seal the
thing. I was laughing so hard I could barely hold the solder steady for
him. The wall below became dotted with pretty silver splodges as the
resolute Alan kept the blow torch going. Apparently I didn’t understand
about this particular bit of soldering – if I were a plumber, I might just
have understood ... However, I found it an interesting water feature in
the bathroom – rather artistically quirky – but Alan said we couldn’t keep
it. I think that was only because it served as a reminder of a soldering job
that he would prefer to forget. It is for this reason, I feel obliged to
record the incident in this book.
I had been an office manager
before we left the UK, and was used to being in charge and solving everyone
else’s problems. Now I was just Alan’s engineering cadet, as he kept
calling me, the very lowest of the low. Every now and then – okay, fairly
frequently, I would get something I had been set to do, totally wrong. “So
fire me!” I would yell, gleefully thinking of the hours of leisure while I
put my feet up and watched him working. If he wouldn’t fire me, could I
resign? However, Alan was experienced at handling rebellious cadets and
simply threatened me with “corrective training”. The first time I just
grinned and asked which one of us got to dress in the PVC and wield the
whip, but no, it turned out that it just meant doing more of the same thing
till I got it right. He used to offer me the supposed carrot of promotion
to junior engineer, but I soon worked out that it would be a long time
before I would make chief, the only rank I was interested in. I decided
early on to form my own sales and marketing department of which I could be
top dog – it was also the area of companies that Alan least liked - even the
accountant department. I warmed to my theme – I could say and do anything
and then blame the technical department – it was sheer joy. The culmination
of my enterprises was much later, in 2006, when I advertised the cabin as
having a plunge pool and started receiving the bookings which had been so
lacking for this delightful accommodation. The technical department had to
build a plunge pool PDQ! Revenge at last!
Generally we were in good
humour undertaking this mammoth renovation task, but there were occasions
when one or the other of us would feel down. I can remember once painting
the back wall of the house with tears running down my face and couldn’t work
out why – nothing was wrong: we had a wonderful piece of land – I was
enjoying it and had never been happier. Looking back I guess it was sheer
exhaustion. Alan’s woes tended to be more physical: brandishing the sledge
hammer with an aching shoulder, he dropped the 14 lb tool on his foot and
leapt backwards in agony only to fall over the boat trailer and take a chunk
out of his shin. His comment? “At least I had my steel top caps on!” For
censorship reasons, I have left out the first, very short, sentence
announcing his pain – not everything is for publication.
One “down” day, I sat and
compiled two lists, headed Bad Things and Good Things:
The Bad
The Good
Burrs The view
Dust The sky at night
Ants in milk etc
Little rain
Using water to keep cool
The breeze
Wasps Ice cold drinks (in town)
Showering in the
dark Working for yourself
Sense of achievement
Being with Alan
Yep, as I thought, the good
outweighed the bad! Most of the bad things, I thought, would be eliminated
when we had our own place, instead of the caravan. I wasn’t too far wrong,
but we do still spend a lot of time picking burrs out of our socks, the dust
is endless and the ants will get in the milk or whatever else we might leave
where they can get. I remember the desolation I felt one day when I needed
a small piece of medicinal chocolate from my hidden stash – tucked away out
of sight and mind, in my undies. The tiny ants had climbed into one of the
top lockers in the caravan, sniffed out my chocolate and eaten it through
the metallic wrapping. There was nothing left other than wispy nets of
foil. That was a bad day! Another time I was so desperate for a little
taste of something sweet, I rummaged around in the old fridge we were using
for storage, and triumphantly brought out a nearly empty container of
drinking chocolate. My elation was short lived. I had inadvertently lifted
it by the lid, which of course popped off, spilling the powder on the ground
and all over the inside of the fridge – which I then had to clean.
Only one year have the wasps
been a bit of a problem, so we simply screened all the windows and made a
screened pergola too. They’re a different variety from the ones we were
used to in the UK. These ones are simply not interested in sugary
foodstuffs. They like succulent, juicy meat, a drink of milk and maybe some
pool water to wash it all down. They are gregarious: when mixing cement a
few will zoom up to you and dance around your hands – the same when Alan’s
using power tools – they seem to like the noise. It’s a little
disconcerting, but they make no attempt to sting. The only time we have
been stung is when they’ve crawled between our toes and shoes or when we’ve
inadvertently disturbed a nest.
Using water to keep cool is
definitely a bad thing. At first it feels refreshing and nice. Then slowly
you start to realise your skin has gone soggy and your clothes are now
chaffing, giving you big red, sore patches which last for days. The moral
of the story being, if you want to get wet, take your clothes off! |
