Topped out, Snowed in

It’s a funny thing, necessity. There’s nothing quite like it for clearing the mind. During the last two months, watching our chances of getting the house ready for May recede exponentially with every passing downpour, we’ve wavered between fruitless optimism and bleak pessimism, but perhaps the worst feeling in the world (other than that we experience every time we speak to Bolimir) was the…uncertainty. You know the feeling, I’m sure. You’ll have had it every time you’re in the mix for a job you really want, hanging by the phone in case that boy/girl does actually remember the number you scrawled on the back of their hand in the club. You’ll have experienced it if you’ve ever had to watch England take part in a penalty shoot-out – it’s the waiting that kills you, the sick fear of possible defeat and the even more frightening prospect of unexpected success. Part of you just wants it to over, one way or another. Then you’ll know, and you can move on from there.

It’s been a bit like that for us here in Monte. Every day we feared the latest setback, agonising over what it might mean to our schedule. That was then. Now is different. Now that we’ve accepted we can’t be ready in time for summer, it’s as if a valve has been opened and the pressure’s suddenly subsided. We’ve been left with no option but to return to the UK, rejoin the working masses and leave the house only semi-finished. And you know what?

It’s not half as appalling a prospect as it once might have been.

Don’t get me wrong. We’re gutted that we can’t be ready for summer 2009. But giving ourselves another year – or maybe two – on the project has, perversely, made life easier. Now that we’re not rushing and stressing about it all, we have the chance to choose quality over speed. We don’t have to settle for the budget options because they’ll be faster – we can choose the quality we want and get the jobs done properly, over a more leisurely period of time. It’s often said that when starting a build, you will only ever get two out of the following three things: quality, value for money, speed. When previously we’d been ignoring the former, now we have at least been forced to forgo the latter, and when you think about it, that’s much the better way round. Yes, the house will only be 75% finished. But the remaining 25% will at least be done properly, mostly because Bolimir will have no hand in them. We've got someone else in mind, more of which next time.

Back in the present, after eight weeks of apparently non-stop rain, a small miracle occurred on 12th February. We got five days of glorious sunshine. Five days in a row for the first time since October. And b****r me if our workers didn’t finally come through for us, knocking up two walls, a hell of a lot of structural reinforcement and – you’ll never believe this – an actual, finished roof! Four months after the start of the build, we finally, finally topped out.

Beers all round as the roof nears completion...

And it was just as well we did. My back had already given out a bit after four days of clearing stone and wood out of the garden, and barely 24 hours after the last tile was laid, Virpazar looked like this:

Then the electricity conked out. And the water pipes froze. Again, and this time for days. We’ve gone all Roald Amundsen* and started boiling snow to make coffee on our camping stove and burning (no pun intended) through the remains of our wood-pile as our wood-burner is currently the only thing keeping us warm. The only thing we have got that those polar explorers of yore did not is our car(s), although with the roads knee deep in snow that the usually reliable

www.vreme.net failed to predict and our 4WD knackered they’re being used less for transportation than as rather expensive semi-mobile generators. In order to maintain our high-tech lifestyle (stop sniggering at the back) we’ve had to plug laptops and phones into the cigarette sockets via our in-car adaptor (a purchase we’d previously had little use for. Hah! Clever us).

That’s during the day, however. We can’t exactly spend our evenings in the car so as I write this, the laptop battery is on its last 5% of power, we’re drinking wine by candlelight and we’ve just run out of pirate DVDs of Prison Break series 3 (this and 24 have been sustaining us via the laptop on such electrically challenged evenings). What will Michael do now that he knows Sarah’s had her head cut off (and is she really dead? I mean, clearly she is if it’s her head, but did Lincoln look closely enough?) Who will visit us and keep us entertained?

We’d had a welcome surprise earlier in the month when an old friend of Emma’s came to stay with us for a few days as an add-on to a business trip to Sweden – a pretty long trip considering that she lives in Melbourne! For once, the weather was reasonably kind to our guest and Suze got to see the lake in all its mountainous and watery beauty, unlike my poor old Dad back in November (where, of course, it rained for all but about 45 minutes of his stay). On one of those days we threw snowballs at each other up in Lovcen National Park in the morning and relaxed in unseasonally warm sunshine down on the beach in Budva Old Town in the afternoon. Montenegro - land of extremes, eh? It was also useful finding out that Podgorica airport – where Suze flew into - was only a 15 minute drive away. We’ll be crossing our fingers that Stelios or Michael Whatsisname add it to their new routes once the recession has stopped taking big, wet bites out of their profits. Still, easyJet will start flights to Dubrovnik from May this year, so at least there’s a budget option within a couple of hours of us. It was also useful to hear Suze’s impartial take on the events of the last month or so. Like most of our friends she had enthused about the initial plan – but she was the first to see the reality after Boli-gate.

“It’ll all work out,” she reckoned. “These things happen for a reason, and you guys will make it work. You’ll just make it work a bit later, that’s all. You’ve got a great place in a great location, and that won’t change.”

We love Suze

So, once we can actually dig out the car and drive back up to the house, we’ll be gearing up for the eight-week push. The plan is this: get the insides gutted, first fix electric and plumbing sorted, the new floors and walls in, the stone cleaned up, the doors and windows installed and the outside finished. If we manage that (and fit in a couple of necessary trips to Vis), given what we’ve been through, it’ll be a small kind of miracle. Then we’ll head back to the UK and hope to find an office life-line for a while to give ourselves enough time and money to give the house the finishing touches (not to mention water and waste connections) it deserves sometime over the next 1-2 years. We might even be able to install some of the renewable energy devices we originally had in mind instead of relying on the rather cruder local methods. The one thing we do have to remember is the outstanding natural beauty we’ve bought into. No amount of crap weather and even crapper builders can change that, at least.

*Roald Amundsen, for those that don't know (ie, the English), was the Norwegian chap who actually reached the South Pole while the less successful (but perversely better remembered) Captain Scott was upholding the eons old British tradition of heroic failure.