All good things come to those who wait...

No moonwalking this time. This visit we marched to the beat of a different drummer, the kind that unlike Michael Jackson has no reverse gear, the kind that knows no fear and moves only forwards, marching into battle ahead of the troops, leading the charge with a swift one-two beat (to no doubt get mown down by machine gun fire in the first moments, but you know what I mean).

In my family, there is a law called the "Dave-minute". This refers to my step-father's required five minutes’ notice for dinner actually translating to him needing nearer forty-five, so dinner minus 45 minutes is when he is told it is ready. We had noticed a similar phenomenon in Montenegro that we shall call Montenegrin Time - to which builders were particularly susceptible. With Zlatko, if we gave him a month as a deadline, it would really take two. If he told us something would require a week to complete, it generally meant a month.

This is not a criticism, by the way. A Bolimir week would last an entire season and anyway, there's an unwritten law of property that states that you can only ever have two of the following three ideals: speed, quality and value for money. We had long since decided to give up on speed in favour of the other two, but even after a couple of years on this project, Montenegrin Time still caught us out on a regular basis. On our last visit, we had been a bit disappointed by the lack of progress and noted that Zlatko's men only really got cracking on our house in the week before our arrival, often leaving them no time to complete certain items before our departure, which would render our entire visit less worthwhile. We couldn't blame them for this - they had many more lucrative parallel jobs - but on this occasion we were desperate to get what we had asked for, when we had asked for it. We had told Zlatko we’d be heading out for July 7th - but then we got delayed by Emma’s work and had to fly out a week later instead.

“This could be a blessing in disguise,” Emma said. “After all, if they only started work a week ago, they’ve got a bonus week to get it finished. If they’re actually done this time, that’ll leave us free to sort out the next stage rather than standing around uselessly waiting for them to finish.”

We had unwittingly “Dave-minuted” Zlatko. Did it work? Did it ever. We should do it more often.

From the outside, the house looked SPECTACULAR. There was a deliciously crafted new gate. The doors and windows had been re-coloured a gorgeous darker hue, and the door and window surrounds had been re-coloured a subtler, lighter shade of ochre. The stonework was complete. The gutters had been transformed with a paint job of their own. The chimney was finished and poked beautifully up above the roof line. It almost made us cry.

Inside, there was extra progress. Every bathroom had been tiled by Goran and his team, exactly to the patterns specified, and every bath was ready and in position. The unappealing stone steps in the konoba had been removed, and although the new spiral stairs were still not in, we knew already that these were going to take a little more time given that Zlatko had rejected the modular unit we had selected from KIPS and had decided to get them made for us himself (a rather slower process).

As our five-day long stay unfolded, the news kept getting better. First of all, our kitchen arrived and was installed the same day thanks to the extremely efficient team from Eurosalon.

Of course, the sink had to be purchased and fitted separately...

Two days later came the moment neither of us thought we'd ever see. Dragan the Plumber (Zlatko apart, our favourite contractor) got our hidrofor working again and plumbed in two of the four bathrooms. We finally had working showers! Working toilets! Working sinks! And at about the same time, thanks to our ever-helpful translator, Sara, we received the best news of all from Dragan the Lawyer - he informed us that we had won our battle with four of the locals over the position of our wall. We had apparently beaten a second knock-down order and he was now in the process of getting the official kataster borders (infamous for being notoriously inaccurate) redrawn in our favour. Come September, we might finally be able to finish our wall...

This all meant that our elected finisher, American Dragan (no, I’m not joking, you can’t have any other name if you wish to work with us) could get cracking inside, something he’d been unable to do until we turned up and removed all the rubbish and left-over materials that Zlatko’s crew had left behind inside the house. He will now work together with Dragan the Plumber (who still has two more bathrooms and the white goods in the kitchen to go) over the next month to properly ensure that the house is ready for habitation by the end of August.

Good God. Surely not? Surely we can’t be nearing the end of a two year mission to restore one of the most beautiful stone houses in Crmnica? What on earth will we do then??

I for one suspect that our travails will not be so easily over. Come August/September, we’ll have an awful lot of furniture to buy, as well as a hell of a lot of landscaping to try and tame the beast that has become our ever more savage garden. This will mean more trips to KIPS and the like, which is actually what we spend most of our brief visits doing anyway. As mentioned back in the days when we were still living here (Montenegro, a Survival Guide, October 08), shopping can test your patience in Monty. First of all, there are no websites to save you time in selecting where to have a look for stuff. You have to get in the car and traipse round every store until you find what you need. The problem is that Montenegrin stores are the most frustratingly sloppy edifices to enterprise that Europe has yet foisted upon the unwary consumer. There’s the SuperMaxi supermarket that sells tortillas but no salsa. There’s the Technomarkt that sells printers, but no printer cartridges. There’s the otherwise impressive KIPS that for some hugely annoying reason sells all its plumbing odds and sods in one store and all its bathroom supplies in another. There’s the Gorenje showroom on the road to Cetinje that not only won’t sell you the extractor fan on display, but makes you collect it from their warehouse (which of course is on the other side of town), a warehouse that of course does not stock the filter that any normal person would assume comes with the extractor itself. Oh no, for that you have to go to Frigo Electro. But not the main Frigo Electro near the Voli supermarket in Podgorica. No, you have to go to the tiny one near the massive orthodox church…

Ivanka was very displeased at having to buy the left shoe at Delta City and the right shoe at Mercator Mex.

Getting that extractor took us two and a half hours. We still require a nice sofa, four wardrobes, a woodburner, four mirrors, several mattresses, a full set of curtain poles and curtains to go with them, a decent set of patio furniture for 8 and one final ceiling fan (we managed to find three already, itself something of a miracle as almost no-one near us appears to sell them).

Oh, and we have 9 days of holiday left this year. As the Americans are fond of saying: do the math.

Amid all this helter-skelter racing about, I would like to report that we had time to kick back and enjoy some of the beauty of the area, but we didn’t. As usual, it was left to the wonderful Tim and Katie to hand us our one afternoon of relaxation joining them on a sunset cruise on the Monty B down in Kotor, which did just the trick. On board we also met another couple on the renovation trail, David and Michelle, with whom we seemed to have plenty in common - although it’d be fair to say that they were rather nearer the finishing line than us, having just completed their own impressive house in Kotor after a four-year odyssey that might even have ours beat for drama.

That same evening Tim and Katie took us along to what sounded like a very intriguing performance down on the Tivat marina by an arts company based on a touring “theatre boat” from Canada. Emma and I are always game for an evening of weird culture, so we happily tagged along. It did not disappoint. The appropriately titled performance of “Purgatorija” was not, unfortunately, anything to do with Dante but rather a completely original musical set entirely on an impressively decked-out long boat while the audience followed the action sat on the quayside. I say followed the action, but it was hard enough trying to keep up during a 90 minute long extravaganza that made little sense to begin with and still less the longer it went on. Bellowing their way through a collection of atonal musical numbers supported by lyrics that were gibberish whether in their native English or the bafflingly inaccurate Serbo-Croat subtitles that were beamed onto one of the ship’s sails on an average delay of about 20 seconds, it was a little like watching a college am-dram society with an enviably decent budget and a 2:2 in Sociology. In the background under the admittedly impressive set design, meanwhile, a troupe of Cirque du Soleil cast-offs swayed about on sashes, ropes and modest trapezes wearing the sort of lycra costumes seemingly designed principally to expose their genitals while underneath them the lead actress battled her baffling Siamese-twin costume, a failing mike and the incomprehensible narrative by striding around the stage like Bonny Langford in Mungojerry and Rumpleteaser.

After half an hour, my ears had started to hurt. After an hour, numb-bum syndrome had set in with anaesthetic inevitability and just before the final curtain (ok, sail) a dogfight broke out in row K, scattering those stoic souls who had toughed it out to the finish. What the local people made of it all, we could but wonder. Half of them had slunk away around the halfway mark, thus avoiding the second act’s giant talking heads and having to fork out during the whip-round. I fear this sort of thing may not quite catch on in Monty.

So, until the next time. It’s been two years since we first saw this house. If we get it properly finished in another two, we’ll have matched David and Michelle. And given that we’re already thinking log cabins and plunge pools, the story probably has a fair bit left to run…