Two Steps Forwards, One Step Back - September 2008

First, a quick update on the house here at Skadar, where we’ve checked out the planning consent situation, got all of our cash transferred over to Monte ready to go, found a structural engineer to give us the all clear that our house wasn’t about to slide off the side of the hill given the building work we were planning – oh, and of course found a good builder.

Knowing that our time frame would in all likelihood be too short to hire a certified structural engineer, we did the next best thing; we borrowed one. Just around the corner from our house, a very rich Serb we shall call Novak was building a castle (complete with turrets and everything) on a sloping site much like ours. Novak was involved in a rather complicated relationship with Dubravka, our lawyer (that Montenegrin three degrees of separation again), but he was also good friends with a chap called Dušan, who was not only overseeing the construction of the castle for him but was also the engineer responsible for the pioneering techniques used to restore the walls of the old town in Budva on the coast. Dušan was also kind enough to give us a few minutes of his time. Naturally, this would have been quite a difficult conversation to have in Serbian, so it was just as well that Dušan spoke very good French.

If it's good enough for Budva, it's good enought for us...

“You’ll need a statičar to submit a proper report so the builder has the correct guidelines to follow,” he said as we showed him the points we felt were structurally suspect. “But as long as you and the builder follow these instructions, there’s nothing here that should cause you any bother. On a site like this you have a maximum tolerance of 20 tonnes per cubic metre, and you’ll be more likely working on a tenth of that amount.”

Deciding that we might as well press ahead with our enquiries while we got the money and the paperwork together, we set about finding a reputable plumber and builder. Our first building contact came through Dean’s daughter, Sara. Her best friend Natasha had already helped us speak to Janko, the geometar, and it was to her impressive English we turned again in order to discuss our plans with Spiros, her father, who also happened to be a builder. Unprompted, he impressively made the same observations as had Dušan, and took us through all the steps he considered necessary in order to protect the structural integrity of the original house. Then only thing that made us nervous was the prospect of parting with another few hundred Euros for the services of a statičar. With the pound continuing to lose 0.01 of its value every other day against the Euro, every penny counted.

“The best idea,” Spiros suggested, “would be if I give you a quotation only for the extension foundations, the terrace, the septic and water tanks, the structural support work and your car port (under which we planned to site our reservoir, five metres or so to the right of the planned extension). Then we have a safe site, plenty of water, and these are the first things we need to progress to phase two.”

We nodded in agreement, and made copies of the painstaking architectural plans I had been working on for the last few weeks and Emma’s very decent artist’s impression – in colour – of what the completed project should look like. These proved invaluable as we talked through our plans with Spiros and Natasha.

Spiros’s idea for the first phase was to build both water and septic tanks out of concrete and stone in the local style. This would not only save us money but would enable both to be positioned in places where a pre-fabricated counterpart might have proven impossible to install given the steep gradient of our land. In this way we would be able to site our “natural” septic tank at the bottom of the garden and any additional outbuildings we had in mind could quite simply “plug” into these works at a later date. They would draw water from the reservoir at the top of the site and drain their waste away down to the septic soakway below; gravity would do all the hard work for us. Ivica, a local electrician/plumber, had already told us that we had a natural reservoir full of fresh mountain spring water lying beyond the bottom-most tier of our garden and that a 6 Bar pump would be sufficient to force it up the hill and into our tank.

“Reservar je puno non-stop!” he told us – we could draw from this water all year round. The only down side was that we would have to suspend our water pipes from the tree tops, but only, Ivica assured us, for the duration of the build. After this, he sensibly pointed out, during the winter we could draw our water from the adjacent stream and by the next summer the kanalazacija (the mains supply) was due to be connected. All we had to do was ensure that we had the appropriate connections in place in advance.

Spiros’s eventual quote for the ground-works was pretty reasonable. However, we were now under a few extra budgetary constraints. Cutting a very long story short, we discovered that as foreigners we might not be able to rent out our house on Vis next summer, denying us a crucial portion of our expected income.

Vis - not for rent until further notice...?

We dealt with this body blow the way Englishmen all over the world react to potential crises – we got drunk. When we sobered up the next day, despondency turned to defiance. If the first three rules of property were location, location and location, then we were still sitting pretty – we would just have to scale down our plans and decide what parts of our project we could we afford to leave for later. The plans endured an awful lot of scribbling amid the potential alterations.

Fortunately, our minds were taken off this potential problem by something rather more fun – our first Montenegrin wedding! The lucky couple were Una (Doctor Dean’s elder daughter) and Oliver, her half-Montenegrin half-English fiancé. Despite having lived in the Jovičević family’s cave for the best part of the month, we were still surprised, delighted and honoured to be invited to their wedding on the picturesque old bridge at Rijeka Crnojevica a few miles down the road from Virpazar. As at all weddings, there was a cake, plentiful food, drink and great company – and the bride looked beautiful. There the similarities with a UK do ended. An energetic double act bellowed out local folk songs to an accordion and clarinet accompaniment. There was dancing. There were bongos. There was an awful lot of rakija. There were speeches from the various kumi i kume. The phrase kum/kuma most directly translates as “godfather/mother” but has a rather different meaning in these parts, signifying less a Marlon Brando-style role than a best-man/best-friend/best family friend composite that more or less ensured that the only people at the wedding – of any age - who were not kumi ili kume were Emma and I.
It was great fun. It also threw up plenty of useful new contacts, most of them introduced to us by the redoubtable Dean, wo had clearly adopted us as his project for the summer! Unlike in Croatia, where even the Vis islanders had warned us of the difficulties involved in setting up there (we knew of at least two foreign owned enterprises that had been effectively forced out of business), everyone at the wedding – like everyone else we’d met, actually - seemed very interested in what we were doing and what we had planned, most of them going out of their way to assist us in any way they could. Two young girls promised to meet up with us every weekend in Bar so we could practice our Serbo-Croat. The groom’s father, Gojko (an Anglophile with a Land-Rover addiction), even offered to help us fix our Honda’s broken rear differential.

So we’re still on track, just. Cross your fingers for us…

Gojko and I with the world's least-glamorous wedding car!