Winters are cold in Zabes.
Obviously, winters are cold everywhere, but here on the hillside overlooking
Virpazar winters are genuinely colder than elsewhere for one very good reason –
between the middle of November and the beginning of February, our plot of land
gets no sun on it whatsoever, and that means that if it’s 15C on the coast, it’s
10C in Virpazar and maybe as low as 5C at Villa Miela. When temperatures get
down to freezing on the coast, therefore...you get the idea.
We’re now in mid-February, and the
reason for my blogging silence has been because we’ve been massively busy.
First of all, with temperatures down to -15C (!!!) on New Years Eve, our pipes
froze and for a week we had no water. Mercifully this coincided with our
builders’ 2-week Xmas break, but it meant that I had to lag all our exposed
pipes in freezing temperatures and a building delay as we waited for the ground
to thaw out again (digging, concreting and much else being impossible). It was
our first weather-related delay – but did it make us nervous like back in 2009?
Did it balls.
The second the sun came back out,
things got busier than ever (until the ridiculous downpours of late January
anyway). After breaking away 5 inches of solid ice from the exposed beams and
boards of the 1st floor, our crack building team got to work on the
1st floor walls and the roof.
Brrrr...
Our foreman, hard at work
Work begins on the roof
Meanwhile, our Villa Miela team had
grown by another two members. Canadian violinist Davey and his Hungarian
girlfriend Szuszi found us via HelpX, a recruitment site for people offering to
work as volunteers all over Europe. Due to some Schengen issues, Davey was
being forced to spend 3 months outside of the EU before being allowed back in
again, so he and Szuszi were looking for a nice place to base themselves
volunteering before heading to Greece. Within a month they had carried on where
the lovely Gabriel and Solene left off last winter, and had pruned trees, cleared
paths and rebuilt messed up terraces, work we could not have hoped to manage by
ourselves. Things went so well, we decided to keep them on for the full 3
months! Full of great ideas, they soon got to work repurposing old ammo boxes,
ancient wheelbarrows, railways sleepers and various old bits of stone, as well
as babysitting now and again. We love these guys almost as much as our building
team!
Davey hard at work trying to repair this badly messed up terrace
Emma and I weren’t idle ourselves,
of course. Obviously we had to negotiate most of January without home help and
without vrtic taking Freddy off each morning thanks to Serbian orthodox holidays,
which was tricky enough in itself. What made time management especially rushed,
though, was the sudden explosion in bookings. January 2014 had been our
previous busiest month for reservations, so we were prepared, but safe to say
we were not expecting January 2015 to beat that mark by a further 50%. It was
genuinely nuts, with booking pouring in at the rate of 2 or 3 a day. The upshot
of all of this activity inside and outside was twofold – first of all, building
and landscaping progress was remarkably swift on all fronts, unhelpful weather
notwithstanding. Second of all, we now knew that we had enough money in place
to – gulp – move in before the start of our season on 19th April. Finances
were no longer the major issue. Now we were back to fighting time, and that’s
another battle entirely.
Up yours, rain!
Topped out, bellies full
We topped out on 2nd
February, and celebrated by subjecting our team to a bowl full of English stew
and dumplings, with gungy chocolate pudding for dessert (and beer, of course),
and were delighted to see clean plates all round. Take that, Euro-snobs!
Traditional British food can still knock one out of the park occasionally.
The last two weeks have seen various
tasks begun – stud work has gone up on the 1st floor, and the lengthy
process of rough plastering has likewise started. Electrical cables hang all over
the place waiting for plasterboard walls to contain them and Zare, our chilled
out plumber, has finished 2nd fix piping and connection to our
hidrofor (waste piping out of the house and septic connection are still to
come). We’ve had a lorry-load of stone delivered and 3 excellent Albanian chaps
have started work facading first our supporting wall and soon, the house
itself.
More stone gets delivered
...and put to very good use!
Whilst all of this has been going on,
Davey, Szuszi, Emma and I have been hard at work staining and varnishing our
first delivery of doors and windows so that they are ready for installation the
moment they are required. Getting the exact shade we wanted has been a little
difficult, mostly because we’re trying to match the old house and that colour
came about in a very indirect way (sometimes with woodstain being applied after the varnish) and it’s been only
marginally less agonising than the process of choosing our flooring – it took
weeks to decide upon the combination of tiles and floorboards from the limited
selection available. It’s something you really want to get right in this
country, because once you’ve bought a load of tiles and boards the last thing
you want to do is have to go back to KIPS to exchange anything. Their returns
procedure has already been covered by previous posts in wall-headbanging detail
so I’ll spare you all a repeat for now. Suffice to say that KIPS really need to
rethink their entire protocol in favour of the English method – return your
unused goods, get a refund, buy new goods. It doesn’t have to be any more
complicated than that, guys!
Miela beach gets some modern art
Getting closer...
So what’s next? Well, hopefully the
completion of rough plastering, completion of flooring and plasterboarding,
door and window installation, septic and electrical connections, a helluva lot
more woodstaining and varnishing, kitchen, bathrooms, stone facading and
rendering, garden wall construction (which is also already underway), and
around 30m of custom-made iron fencing. Then smooth plastering, skirting
boards, plugs, sockets, painting, landscaping and an awful lot of furniture
purchasing.
And we’ve got 2 months, starting
NOW. I know. Plan B is fully prepped and
ready to go...
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