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…

Do the Monty Moonwalk

I know what you’re thinking. Moonwalking? Eh? What exactly does a move made famous by the late Wacko Jacko have to do with our ongoing build? Well, how about if I were to use it as a rather loose metaphor for something that appears to be moving forwards but is actually moving in the opposite direction?

After a welter of texts prior to our arrival in Monty, we were, as usual, expecting signs of great progress. This is in itself progress - after all, when Bolimir was in charge of things we knew each visit to the site after a short absence would lead only to shredded vocals cords and a near-death experience of one sort or another - attempted murder, a near-fatal coronary or Boli falling through his own shoddily constructed floor (which actually did happen – Emma nearly gave herself a hernia trying to conceal her laughter). Since Zlatko and his men have taken over the project, however, we have been able to take a rather more positive approach from afar, looking forward to the latest instalment of sensitive restoration and top-notch workmanship.

Nikola, master stonemason

This means that, rather like England at the World Cup, expectation can build to levels that can only, eventually, lead to a disappointment - and this visit was ours.

Chris was bitterly disappointed with Bolimir's plastering

Don't get me wrong - there had been some terrific work preparing the terraces and outside walls and the car port had been more or less finished, but in most other respects we were left - for the first time – underwhelmed.

Nothing at all had been done inside the house since our last visit and the spiral stair design was very different to the look we had commissioned. We were going to have to have words. Now I was not looking forward to having to have words. If there are two things that builders really don't like being told it's a) that they've made a mistake and b) to hurry up. Usually all this achieves is a demand for more money to put things right - Bolimir had to be bollocked on both these points on a regular basis, and his reactions ranged from the belligerent to the beserk. We therefore approached Zlatko and his redoubtable team with some trepidation as we explained that we had expected more to have been done, that we didn’t like the stairs and that we expected tiling inside to be finished, pronto.

Zlatko's response?

"Ok."

And like that, his workers got straight onto the jobs still left undone (outside rendering, more stone work, tiling, bathroom sizing, hidrofor protective hut, guttering, outside lights, etc). Phew.

I give instructions for the car-port and hidrofor shed

From some angles the house even looked finished!

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair...

Why our presence was required for this sudden increase in activity I don't know, but if it takes us turning up once every month or two to crack the whip, well, then journey justified. We left with the promise that all Zlatko's outstanding tasks would be complete in the next month so that our "finisher", American Dragan, could get to work sanding floors, plastering the walls, painting and sorting our light fittings once we’ve bought them (Montenegrin light fittings are like Montenegrin furniture - cheap, nasty and twice the price of UK IKEA). We've hired American Dragan to do our finishing because a) he does good work, speaks English and we can trust him and b) because we know that this job is taking up more of Zlatko's time than was previously thought and although some of that time might have been spent more productively, we're aware that he has pulled his men off far more lucrative jobs in order to help us. He deserves his early release - if by the time we're next out his sheet has every item ticked off.

Of course, there’s one item that might have to wait a little while longer - the wall, or at least the part of it that has been the subject of a formal complaint as detailed in my last blog entry. We've already beaten back one knock-down order for this ten metre headache so apart from giving up the only step left for the objectors might be to let a tribunal decide who is in the right. They reckon that as the road is shown as running along the border of the house on the kadaster map (below), we’ve built the wall on the road itself.

The kadaster map does indeed show that the road borders our property, but that shaded box you can see above is referred to in the paperwork as a house and courtyard, and as it is the courtyard that forms the actual border of our property (blue line), not the walls of the house (dotted line), we’re not sure they have a case. Is it worth fighting and incurring more strife, or should we just knock the offending section down and rebuild it where they say the border is (green line)? Either way, we need a legal ruling on the actual border of our property, so we just have to wait. It’s a real shame the situation can’t be resolved more amicably.

On a more uplifting note, we had a decent beering session with previous owner and friend Slaviša (the Robert de Niro lookalike), and he told us that the objectors numbered only four – not the whole village of Zabes as we were previously told. He also cleared up for us the ongoing mystery as to why we were yet to receive any charges for the electricity we and our builders had been using. Apparently he had forgotten to inform the local provider of the change of ownership and as a result his granny – the on-paper previous owner - was now being chased for a couple of hundred euro’s worth of unpaid electricity bills, bills she was unlikely to be able to cover on account of being seven years deceased (!). We were happy to help him sort it out. Rather more amusing for all those still in the realm of the living, however, was his second exclusive.

“Listen,” he said to us, leaning forward in the way that men do when they want their words to have extra import. “I have to ask...Ben, do you have a restaurant in Subotica?”
Emma and I looked at each other blankly. Subotica was a little town on the border of Serbia and Hungary.
“The only time I’ve been to Subotica was when we drove through it 2 years ago on our way up to Budapest. Why do you ask?”
Slaviša blushed.
“Well, you see, there’s been this story going around. You know this guy, Mirko Vulijević?”
“No...”
“You don’t know him?”
“Slaviša, we’ve never heard of him,” Emma added.
“Well, this guy, he ran up a load of credit, and then skipped town. There were people trying to find him, and eventually we got hold of him and he said he would never come back to Virpazar because he was working in your restaurant in Subotica.”
“Really?” I giggled, staring over at Emma. “I have a restaurant in Subotica?”
“This is what Mirko say,” added Slaviša’s son Miloš in English. Emma started to laugh.
“Do I not have a share?” she asked, somewhat put out.
“Well, no,” Slaviša continued, by now rather embarrassed. “He said that you had split up with Ben and that he had had a baby with you.”
I spluttered my beer out through my nose. Emma’s jaw dropped and she began cackling wildly. We had to get them to repeat this story several more times for clarity before collapsing in fits of laughter.
“So let me get this straight,” I repeated to Slaviša, “Emma and I split up, this Mirko has a baby with her and then I’m such a nice guy I give him a job in my restaurant in Subotica?” I called our friend Sara to check the validity of the rumour - she admitted she had heard all about it already but didn’t think it was worth mentioning to us as it was clearly “bollocks” (we’ve taught her well). Not worth mentioning to us?

I turned to Emma, christening the phantom child “Baby Dragan” (seriously, what other name could he possibly have?) before asking where he was and demanding visitation rights as his “stepfather”. By now, both Slaviša and his two boys (the younger one is called Slobodan, Balkan aficionados) were practically crying with laughter along with us. I’d never been the subject of a rumour before. It was certainly inventive.

It was also a nice little reminder that our friends in Virpazar outnumber our anonymous enemies by about 20 to one. When we’re in town we’re stopped by no end of local people who are delighted to see us and catch up – even more so than when we’re on Vis, in fact. In between unseasonal showers and repair jobs on our house there we did eventually manage a couple of days’ holiday on our (and, it seems, Yahoo’s) favourite Croatian island to round off our time away – but it’s hard to relax when you’re still mulling over what might or might not be happening a few hundred clicks south. This, unfortunately, is how we tend to view setbacks now (no matter how slight) – with a conviction that the pace has slackened for good even if most of the evidence to this point would indicate the opposite. One month, eh? Hmm. We’ll see in mid-June...

Now...where were we...?

It's often been said that the thing to do with blogs is blog short, and blog often. I appear to have swung from blogging often and at length to blogging not at all - that's 9 months back in the UK for you. Oops.

It's not like we've been idle. Since my last post in June last year both Emma and I have somehow scored new jobs with better pay - although I went about it in typically unorthodox fashion by getting sacked by text (!) mere hours before handing in my notice (that first day sitting next to Carolina Kluft in first class turned out to be the literal high point of my employ). We've lived in Islington, Dulwich, Clapham and Wimbledon and are now, finally, settled in Surrey - for the moment at least. We've said hello to a couple of mountain bikes, waved a teary goodbye to our trusty Honda and somehow managed to sell the heap of plastic and digital crap that was our malfunctioning Renault Espace the same day that it was voted the 296th least reliable car in the UK (out of - ahem - 296). Bizarrely, Renault announced this year that they would launch 4 all-electric cars by 2014, which is a bit like Toyota suddenly announcing they're going to make nothing but accelerator pedals...

Hahahahaahaha! Don't be silly.

Of course, our build has also had to change as a result of our enforced absence. Managing a renovation remotely is rather different to living through every stone, beam and plumbing pipe; progress is measured not in daily but monthly intervals. The decisions we make as architects of our own home can no longer grow organically as the build trundles towards completion - with just 20 days holiday a year, our visits are brief. We have to react sharply and decisively and hope to hell we get it right. Umming and ahh-ing is no longer permitted.

It's essential, therefore, to be able to trust your builder to carry out the instructions you've left them and also to get the big calls right when you're not able to view the situation for yourself. That's why we love Zlatko Vujotic.

We love Zlatko. So does Sara

Gone are the days when we'd leave the site for a week and return to find windows had been put in the wrong place or our workers had disappeared. Gone are the days when we'd be presented with a bill for twice the money for half the work. Gone are the days when we'd have a sense of dread every time we spoke to the builder, developing a Pavlovian response that practically left us with a phobia of our own house.

I inspect the renovated konoba in November prior to tiling

Now that's looking better...

The near completed terrace. Rendering has had to wait as we need a run of rain-free weather - hard to come by in winter here!

This is what it looked like back in November. Behind me the landscaped gardens expertly hide the septic tank. The giraffe-style stonework has faded nicely with the weather, I'm pleased to say.

Goran and Bik start our ill-fated wall

The crew tuck into a hearty breakfast!

As you can see, since taking over the project last summer, Zlatko has transformed our house. Thanks to his dedicated team of craftsmen we have a functioning septic system. We have beautiful rendering inside and out, and top notch stone and metalwork covering our terrace and balcony. We have a series of stone steps and walkways on landscaped gardens (the latter done for free because "it makes more beautiful"), a chimney, a tiled ground floor and thanks to our gentle plumber, Dragan, we now have full plumbing in the bathrooms, which are being tiled as I type this. We have a border wall.

Well, at least for the moment. It's never all good news, is it?

It turns out that two of our less helpful neighbours have thrown a potential spanner in the works regarding the wall. Clearly still holding a grudge over our refusal to pay well over the odds for a water connection we didn't need or to let them put an electricity pylon in our garden back in May last year, they're now trying to get this wall knocked down because they claim it's overstepped our land's boundaries by about a metre (despite being built on the exact spot where the Staletovic family's old wire and post fence used to be).

My red pen marks the site of the old fence, on the boundary of our land, just off the edge of the asphalt.

Above, the foundations for the wall clearly on our land...

Emma inspects the wall this February. This is the section under threat.

According to the land registry records it doesn't look like they have a leg to stand on but this is Montenegro, where such paper legalities can prove very succeptible to "persuasive alteration". We might well have to have part of the wall removed and rebuilt just to ensure things don't escalate further. It's sad that some people can be this petty, but in reality it's Zlatko and his team who have been more offended and inconvenienced. He has invested in the local restaurant, Badanj, and even stocks one of the complainants' wine, so wrongly accusing him (and us) of building on supposed "state" land is a pretty poor way to repay him! After all, his team are the poor buggers who will have to do all the work - one metre here or there doesn't make any difference to us. Still, nice to know that we have now ticked off both the immutable pit-falls of building abroad - dodgy builders (the unlamented Bolimir) and nasty neighbours. We've tried to explain our long-term plans to them, and that we are not profiteering Russians but a young couple keen to help develop the local tourist economy, but they just don't care. We didn't let them put their pylon in our garden. We must therefore be punished!

Unedifying as this squabble might be, we're not letting it put us off the area. The vast majority of people in and around Virpazar have been wonderful to us both, especially when we were living there. And it's still spectacularly beautiful, even during a winter that has by all accounts been even colder and wetter than the one we endured (hence further building delays)!

Our next visit at the end of April might be a biggie. First of all, we're hoping to see the completion of all stone work outside (wall excepted) and all bathrooms inside, as well as final plastering work. Second of all, we're hoping to install some fairly major items, such as the kitchen and our spiral stairs. Bizarrely, it's still cheaper to buy these items in the UK, freight them to Monty by truck and pay local PDV and import duties than it is to buy an inferior product just down the road...go figure. Then we have to think about lighting and furniture...and gardening, painting, decorating...

So when do we think we'll be done?

Well, given that we are currently a faintly laughable 10 months behind schedule, it's probably not sensible to answer that one. Let's just say soon. Ish. We hope.

In the meantime, by popular demand, here's Slavisa! He claims he doesn't look like Robert de Niro - but that Robert de Niro just happens to look like him. What do you think?

So, until next time. Remember to have a look at Emma's Flickr albums - click on the slideshow at the top right of this page to see all of these pics and more at a resolution that doesn't require squinting. She updates those with rather better regularity than I manage these days...

Back in the Cooler

Ok, now here's an interesting question; can I strictly speaking get away with continuing a blog called thefullmontenegro when I'm not actually in Montenegro any more?

I reckon I can, if only because for once - and it might seem difficult to believe - things are continuing to happen on our project even if we're no longer there to supervise. Plus, we've had a pretty eventful last month or so. And lastly, it's always nice to get a little bit of "what-happened-next" text at the end of a film based on a true story.

Returning back to the life we had intended to leave behind has left us hopelessly out of touch. Who knew that shiny leggings were back in fashion along with 80s comb-overs? What’s happened to New Labour? Can I really drive my scooter in bus lanes now? What on earth is all the fuss about Susan Boyle? And do I really have go back to office work?? We’ve also missed out on a lot of things we’d gotten used to taking for granted. People! Electricity that works! TV! Drizzle!

Who the hell are you and what are you doing on my telly?

Even in the midst of a global depression, London life doesn’t seem to have changed very much. It’s still the same sort of thing we were trying to get away from and every bit as consumer orientated as ever. Financial Crisis? What financial crisis? Fifteen years ago, Montenegrins were queuing around the block just to be able to buy flour as the old dinar got struck by hyper-inflation and the economy properly collapsed - and this was just after the end of the bloodiest conflict Europe had seen since WW2. That’s a financial crisis. Granted, Woolies may have gone bust and lots of people may have lost their jobs recently, but it in no way compares to the kind of economic disaster that saw the German people burning banknotes in the early 30s or modern day Zimbabweans dealing with an inflation rate of 230 million percent. In fact, the only visible differences in UK’s capital city have been people keeping the same address for more than two years as property prices return to normal levels and an increase in supermarket profits as the middle classes react to recession by staying in every other Saturday night and panic-buying breadmakers. Some – gasp! - have even decided to start growing their own fruit and veg, something that Montenegrins have been doing as a matter of course for decades. Whatever the media says, it just isn’t as bad as has been painted. Prosperity is all relative. While your average Virpazar resident tootles around in a rusty Yugo or a 20 year old VW Golf, yesterday I counted Porsches on my commute into work. In a 40 minute journey, I passed thirty four of them. Very nearly one a minute. Perhaps all the gloomy city analysts might like to take a statistic like that into account before they use words like “full-blown recession” to describe the state of Britain’s economy...

Is Britain in the grip of a financial crisis? Hint - if you're still seeing plenty of these on the roads, the answer is no

Anyway, those of you not distracted by my little “get-a-grip” rant will have already clocked the true news concealed within that last paragraph. Commuting? Work?

Yep, you read that last bit right. I’m commuting again – which means that, yes, I have managed to find myself a job, even in these supposedly difficult times. After a long drive back that saw us leave our Renault Espace on Vis in favour of coaxing our newly repaired Honda back to the UK we arrived back on the Thursday, I had an interview on the Friday morning, got hired 90 minutes later and courtesy of a very fluky upgrade was sitting next to Carolina Kluft (the Olympic and World Heptathlete champion) in Club Class on my way to New York the following Wednesday for the annual American Bookfair. My life has become utterly surreal.

"You'll never believe this, but I flew to New York and ended up sitting alongside Ben Heywood..."

There I was, thinking I’d have to sign on or work in a pub for a few months. Instead, I spent most of my first couple of weeks out of Monte in the US! My crowing didn’t last long, however. Not to be outdone, Emma also segued smoothly back into city life, proudly trumping me by scoring a job without even having to go through an interview at all. Now there’s only two conclusions I can draw from this; either we are somehow supremely employable and hugely well respected despite torpedoing our stagnant careers a year ago, or getting a job’s still not that hard if you’re reasonably qualified, give a good interview and aren’t massively bothered about earning a high salary.

So, we may well have fallen on our feet, but the one thing we don’t quite have yet is a place of our own. With our London flat let out long-term, we’ve had to get creative, Emma wangling us a succession of flat/house/cat sitting gigs that might just take us all the way up to the end of August before we have to find somewhere to rent full-time. Our friends have of course rallied round us and declared that they’re delighted to have us back, but I can’t help feeling a little like Steve McQueen. (in that we made a brave bid for freedom from the UK rat race, got a long way towards escaping for good but ultimately couldn’t quite jump that barbed wire fence). Instead, we’ve had to settle for returning home for another spell in the cooler, reunited with our friends/fellow prisoners, but still ruefully wondering what it might have been like to see them all again having made it over the border. A brave but heroic failure is how some might choose to see it, and they’d be half right. I console myself with the thought that at the end of The Great Escape you just know that it won’t be the last time Virgil Hilts tries to break out of the POW camp. He just has to spend a little more time bouncing baseballs against the wall first...

The happy news is that at least we will not want for motivation. Zlatko Vujotic’s team have been as good as their word – on 5th June they got in touch to say that the plastering, rendering and stonework on our house was all complete. Two days later they sent pictures to prove it.

That, Bolimir, is how the real pros roll.

Now we just have to pool our salaries over the next few months so we can get Zlatko’s team started on phase 2 in September (or thereabouts): cladding the terrace, adding balcony and terrace barriers and coming up with some solutions for garden steps, perimeter walls and that troublesome, continually postponed septic tank. Once that little lot’s been sorted, we’ve got the minor matters of finishing the second phase electrics and plumbing, a lot of tiling and painting...the list remains a lengthy one! Fortunately, we do at least know now that we’ll have the wherewithal to do it – at least until we suffer the next inevitable setback.

For now, though, we’re relaxed, relieved and sitting pretty. Much like the Sir William Hoste Kriket Klub from Vis, in fact. I turned out for the island side just prior to heading to NY as they were in Cambridge for their first ever UK “tour”, and I’m delighted to report that after a breath-taking comeback against Split CC the previous weekend, Vis CC won both their matches in style. Check out www.viscricket.com for brief match reports and pictures from Jesus College!

Full Circle

Michael Palin has nothing on us. Just under a year ago, Emma and I came to Montenegro for the first time. It’s probably fair to say that neither of us could have imagined everything that has happened in the 12 months since – back then the idea of buying a place at Lake Skadar was a daydream based on nothing more than a bit of internet research and some bravado following our successful renovation in Croatia. Had we any idea that buying and restoring a crumbling ruin perched on the side of a hill would be so fraught with difficulty, would we have made the same decisions? Would we have bought the house in the first place? Would we have made the design choices we did? Would we have worked with Bolimir? Would we have learned how to swear fluently in S/HR/CG/MJ?

Well, “probably not” to all of the above, but even if we’ve made mistakes, it’s been a hell of a year. Granted, we had hoped to be finished by this point rather than heading back to the UK, but as anyone who has watched Grand Designs or No Going Back will know, a project of this size is never going to run smoothly. Until, that is, you start working with Zlatko Vujitić.
Back in May last year, we drove down to Monte from Dubrovnik. On the way, we stopped off at the charming village of Perast near the Boka Kotorska, where we noticed the Hotel Conte, a charmingly restored pension that made full use of natural stone and wood.
“That’s the style we’re after,” we thought.
Later on, in Virpazar, we saw two more buildings that had been constructed with every bit as much sensitivity, a konoba in town and another on a semi-private freshwater beach.
“Those have been done beautifully, too,” we said to each other.

Later that same week, in Podgorica, we were taken by the good Doctor Dean to Calabria pizzeria and the Long Road Café (where we also met Zelkjo, the chap with all those classic cars). They were both gorgeously restored and decorated, and we expressed our admiration for whoever had been responsible. It was then that we found out that all these places had one man in common – Zlatko Vujitić. Stupidly, we assumed that he owned all of them, but a couple of months ago we were informed somewhat belatedly that only the café and the pizzeria actually belonged to him – all the others were the work of his building firm.

“Wow – what if we could get him to take over from Bolimir?” we pondered aloud. Two or three phone calls and a couple of meetings later, and we had the news we never thought we’d hear; Zlatko agreed to try and salvage our project for us. If you have a spare minutes or two, go check out his website on

www.zvdesign.info. If you can make it past the charmingly dodgy English, you’ll understand why we are now very, very happy indeed.

For the last week and a half, Zlatko’s guys have set about rescuing our build. Working ten hour days, his five-strong team have fixed most of Bolimir’s blunders, plastered our konoba wall, expertly begun cleaning our stonework and have generally done more work – to an exquisite standard – in a week than Boli managed in a month. And yes, they’re costing a fair bit more, but quality always does.

And Bolimir himself?


Yep. And it felt pretty damn good.

Additionally, we’ve had Ilja and his 75 year-old dad methodically putting up partition walls and we even welcomed back Dragan Plumber, who helped us finally connect the water supply, albeit to a temporary outside tap fed by 10,000 litres of lorry-delivered water. The real plumbing will have to wait until later – it’s a bit of a saga all of it’s own, actually, and a bit too tortuous to detail here.

So, in a week’s time we’ll have left Monte (for the time being at least). The house isn’t finished, of course (and nor will it be for another year or so, there’s still loads to do), but for the first time in six months Emma and I have been able to leave the site knowing that the build is in the hands of a bunch of consummate professionals. When Goran, Zlatko’s head majstor, asked me if we had any plastic sheeting to protect the wooden beams, I almost cried. When Dejan, his brother, asked us in advance where they should put any rubble and rubbish, we were so overcome by such thoughtfulness that we felt like bowing down before him in gratitude. And when we saw the first results of their labours...for the very first time we could see what an amazing place this house was going to become...one day.


Yes, yes, such behaviour should be normal or nothing worth blubbing about, but believe me, it’s highly unusual here. Even our excellent carpenter, Dragan Doors, thought nothing of chucking his left-over plastic bags into our garden, so to have conscientious AND skilled tradesmen turning our rubble strewn konoba into a beautifully restored living space...well, it was almost too much for us to take in.

This wonderful week came on the back of a great weekend “hosting” – in our half-finished abode – our friends from Tivat/Kotor, Tim, Katie, Laura and Tony. Although they all live out here in Montenegro too, none of them were very familiar with the “Deliverance zone” so we were quite nervous about what they might think of our chosen spot.

We reckon they were pleasantly surprised. Not half as surprised as Tuzi the cat, however. Tony, Laura, we owe you several large ones for agreeing to give the little bugger a home. We had thought we were going to have to abandon him in Virpazar, you see. When told the news, Tuzi began licking his balls in contentment. Enjoy it while you can, Tooz. They’ll be coming off pretty soon.

So we’re currently back where we started our Montenegrin odyssey, staying in Doctor Dean’s cave for our final week while the plaster-dust flows up at the house. When will we be back? Hard to say. There’ll be a couple of flying visits later this year, but thereafter the more pressing question is how quickly we can find employment back in Blighty so we can pay for Zlatko and his team to properly finish the house. They’re on phase one of three at the moment, but you know what these things are like…the phases just keep on coming. We’ve got garden walls to repair, a roadside wall to build, rain-water collection to finalise, compost toilets to consider, and a very grumpy electrician to deal with…

But one day, hopefully sooner rather than later, we might have something that looks a little like this:

VILLA ZABES (2010/11?)

In the meantime, if you're still hungry for more photos, have a look at Emma's photostream on flickr.com - http://www.flickr.com/photos/virpazaz/sets/72157617746331254/ - to see our house taking shape in all its gory glory...

"And if he comes back again, I'll knife him."

Bye Bye Bolimir?

Motoring interlude apart, it’s been a while since my last update. This is usually an indication that either something has gone spectacularly, catastrophically wrong and that we’ve been spending the last two weeks desperately trying to fix it or that we’ve had some progress and have been too busy to send in a report.

Typically, this time, it’s been a bit of both.

13th April marked something of watershed moment for us; 6 months and 3 days after beginning work, two notable things happened. First of all, we finally got our exterior doors and windows in, which meant that our Plan B of returning to the UK leaving the house incomplete but watertight has at least been managed. This manoeuvre was not without its complications, of course; Dragan Doors discovered on his arrival that Bolimir’s merry band of bodgers had bollocksed up both the extension bathroom door cavities (too narrow) as well as those infamous konoba doors, which turned out to be very, very far from vertically straight, Bolimir’s myopic workers having followed the old walls of the house rather than using a spirit level. Still, these things can be tricky on the eye. Dragan Doors’ mate Beli swung too far in the other direction and over-relied on his plumb line to the point that the windows he was fitting looked wonky even if they actually weren’t. In an old house with very few right angles, sometimes you have to compromise and use what looks right. Dragan returned a few days later to fit our shutters – and for once we can say hand on heart that our chosen tradesman did an excellent job.

The second major landmark was that once Bolimir’s latest crew had cut the circular hole in our floor for our future spiral stairs, we could finally get shot of the guy. That’s not to say that his work was done – far from it, as there was still a lengthy list of unfinished or poorly finished items and even though we’d cancelled a third of his original workload he had somehow turned a 60 day build time into six months and counting. It was time to get Alan Sugar on his arse, so in anticipation of an unpleasant final conversation with him we decided, as succinctly as possible, to catalogue all our complaints over his work, organisation and arithmetic in written form – and get it translated so he could understand why we would not be paying him as much as he might be expecting. It ran to 12 pages.

Emma gave my document the once over with her old press-officer’s hat on.
“It used to be my job to summarise things, edit them and simplify them without losing meaning,” she explained. “We need it to be simple for him to understand and a little cheaper for us to pay to have translated. We have to make it shorter.”
“Can’t be done,” I replied adamantly.
Emma told me not to underestimate her abilities, read through the list and then admitted in dismay that not only was it already about as concise as it could be, but that there were several things I had actually missed. The doc got a 13th page.

13 pages.

A week or so still in advance of B-Day (no toilet jokes please), we have a fair idea of Bolimir’s potential reaction on reading the bad financial news. He turned up unannounced two days ago, where after surveying our stoney-faced response to his appearance he guessed, correctly, that there was going to be some adjustment to his fee. We refused to comment further until he had received our translated document and sent him away until we had an interpreter with us (it’s not a fair fight when one party gets increasingly impatient that the other cannot speak his language fluently yet is somehow also convinced that they are lying about their linguistic abilities). Forewarned he might be, but possible reactions will still include shouty, very shouty and thermonuclear meltdown. He already knows how angry we are with him, but just in case, I’ve prepared a couple of choice S/HR/MJ/CG phrases in advance and which I plan to drop into the conversation at an appropriate point (which will no doubt further confuse the issue of my fluency or lack of it). I confess that I am just dying to give him a variation of that Alec Baldwin speech from Glengarry Glen Ross, mixed in with some American Beauty-era Kevin Spacey, but that’s one hurdle that the language barrier will eventually deny me. How do you translate “F*** you – that’s my name”?

By the way - if I may appear to derive some black humour out of our dealings with Bolimir, please believe me when I say that this is only when I sit down and type. When these meetings happen, they are about as funny as Sgt Major Dickerson from Good Morning Vietnam. When I think of those 13 pages instead of writing about them, I don’t crack a wry smile or offer witty or slightly pointless cinematic references as observations. Black clouds roll in. Thunder claps inside my inner demon. It might be funny later (ok, it might even be funny now), but it actually makes me furious that the (in)actions of this one man have scuppered our plans, plans that seem even more convincing to us than ever now that the sun has returned and we can kayak across the lake or drink a cold beer enjoying the awesome view from our terrace.

It’s just amazing here in Spring. As I write this, we have a garden full of cherry blossom, our tortoises have reawakened and we even spotted our first eagle swooping down over our valley as the lake waters recede. We finally got the chance to use our new inflatable kayak, paddling over current-free, glass-like waters to Grmožur, Lake Skadar’s Alcatraz. I finally got to wear shorts again, and noticed with horror that I’m even whiter than I thought I was. 13th April, you see, is not just the full swing of spring. It’s not just the date we finally got our doors in or finally saw the last of Bolimir’s workers. It was also due to be the date we moved into our newly restored house…

So, you’ve been turfed out of your rented flat and your house has no water connection, furniture, bathrooms, walls or proper electricity yet. What to do? Rent a local room? Head over to Vis for some TLC?

Nah.

We’re British. If we’ve planned a barbecue and it rains, we barbecue in the rain. And if we’ve planned to move into a house and it ain’t finished…well, why the hell not? After all, thousands of Montenegrins move into their houses before they’ve got half as far as we have.

So we’re camping. And it’s quite good fun. Sort of. I don’t think I’ll ever fully adjust to the idea of the semi-permanent long-drop, but making do with what we’ve got is quite interesting considering our rather more comfortable existence back in London. We’ve got an ancient electric stove that still has two working rings despite having been rained on for two months, we have one working lightbulb, we’ve got our spring at the bottom of the garden, we’ve got our electricity-free fridge*. We’re going to enjoy the stay of execution we’ve given ourselves because we have to wait to select our new builder, sign a contract with them and then co-ordinate the first week or so of work. We’ve already spoken to two excellent people, either of whom we wish we’d have been able to hire in the first place. The contrast with Bolimir could not be greater. Maybe it’s true what they say about experience – you have to get it wrong several times before you learn to get it right…

*yes, you read right. It’s dead clever.

"It's all about evaporation..."

And finally…we received some great news regarding our house on Vis – we are now legally registered to rent, and have even been granted a three-star licence! Now, if we can just get our water connected before we leave Montenegro…