Wouldn't it be luvverly...?

It's been hinted at in blogs past. It’s been avoided for years. It’s been difficult to find. But now, finally, after an exhaustive search (and only slightly less exhausting process) we have finally found somewhere to live in Virpazar

“Eh?” I hear you saying (well, not saying, but you know what I mean). Haven’t you lot been in that neck of the woods for 5 years now? Built a house or something? What about that little place?

Well, here’s the rub: we do indeed have a lovely restored stone villa at Lake Skadar. We also have a lovely restored stone house on Vis Island, Croatia. We even have a not quite so lovely unrestored house in Norwich, UK  – and we can’t live in any of them.

Norwich is obviously rented out long term, and serves as our insurance policy should we ever royally bugger this up and have to return to Blighty. Vis is rented out very successfully during the summer, but we are naturally precluded from living at either of these properties simply because they are not where our business is. Unfortunately, the house we built at Lake Skadar only has four bedrooms, and because we’re filling these bedrooms with guests for most of the year, that means we always have to find somewhere else to live during the summer.

Here’s where we lived for a three weeks in summer 2011 before we grabbed a granny with a slightly nicer flat just down the road...

 

We nicknamed it the bunker, and that’s more or less all it was, a near bombed out concrete block with one bedroom, one bathroom and one living room/kitchen, down in the valley overlooked by the villa. Yikes.

Summer 2012 was spent in a half finished – but spacious and well-equipped – flat in a local village 5 minutes drive from Virpazar, situated next to a pig shed and with no railings on its main balcony. Still, it did at least have a grassy yard for our paddling pool, and Freddy enjoyed running our holiday business for us inside....

 



This last place was kindly rented to us at the last minute by a friend who moved out to accommodate us, so it was a one-summer only deal. For this summer, we knew we would have to find a more permanent alternative. Our criteria were simple: clean, 2 bedrooms, within 5 minutes of Virpazar, not stupidly expensive (for here). The problem was and is that options in Virpazar are pretty thin on the ground even if you remove all of these stipulations. We saw shitholes of all sizes, in all conditions, at all prices, from €200/month for a dilapidated house 10 minutes away to €600/m (!) for a tiny flat in the centre of the village.

Half decent is the best we were likely to do here, and the only way to keep the extortionate rents down (on the coast you’ll likely be paying half what we have to, such does supply outstrip demand) was to go for something long-term. This actually suits us for reasons I’ll explain shortly - so what we’ve managed to secure for 24 months is this:





Yep, that little cottage right on the waterfront. Two bedrooms, nice and spacious, in need of a bit (ok, a lot) of TLC, outside space, parking for both cars, right in the centre of Virpazar and with the best views, bar none, of any place in town.



We're paying too much for it, but actually, the thought of moving out of the villa and into here is quite appealing to us. We have had broadband installed. We won’t need to jump in the car every time we forget to buy bread. We’ll have space to store all our kayaks and business paraphernalia. Freddy can have his own room - for a few months or so anyway. From this time next year, he might already be having to share, because in true Heywood fashion, we’ve gone and set ourselves a whole new challenge just when we appeared to have settled into the small matter of running a successful business somewhere most people have never heard of.

Freddy’s getting not ONE, but TWO siblings.

The science of twins is somewhat debated – apparently, contrary to popular belief, it’s actually only unidentical twins that get passed on on a genetic level from generation to generation. Identical twins, according to those clever people with medical degrees and long white coats, is pure chance, the result of a sperm fertilising one egg that splits in two rather than the result of two eggs being produced at the same time. Identical twins are flukes, then. Nothing you can do about it, that’s just the way fate goes.

Tim and Jonny Heywood, b 2/12/1948 – my father and uncle.

 

Jessica and Joanna Heywood, b 14/06/1988 – my sisters.

 

Doctors talk a right load of bollocks, don’t they?

Just as well we’ve signed up to the cottage for 2 years, because it’s now going to take a little longer to save up for our new dwelling on account of it now needing to be somewhat larger than anticipated. We’ve been sketch-upping (can I do that, use it as a verb?) lots to try and figure out the most cost-effective way to enlarge what was originally supposed to be a subtle second building on our land, as well as trying to forecast when exactly we might be able to pay for it all. The answer is…not quite as quickly as we’d previously thought!

So we’re almost ready for the season. The villa is prepped and ready, and thanks to some awesome friends a couple of weeks ago, the garden is even looking tamed, mostly because we removed around seven cubic metres of junk from the grounds. We’ve got cherry blossom already and we even got the hot tub working, finally…

 

Well, sort of working. Marko and I were the only ones prepared to give it a go at around 11pm, five hours after we started heating it. It was…lukewarm. Alarmed at this less than Germanic efficiency, I emailed the guys I bought it from in Kettenacker and asked if they had any tips. Had I covered the tub, they asked.

Ah. Ahem. Er…

I’ve since had a good many people remind me that a saucepan of water boils much faster if you pop a lid on it, and that, evidently, the same principle applies to hot-tubs. Yeah, thanks people, I get it now. We’ve got a 200cm diameter cover on order as we speak.

It’s a familiar result: Science 1 (Physics, 2min), Ben 0. Next time, we cover (hoho) Chemistry. If you don’t want to know the score, please look away now…