Thursday 1-3-2007 Friday 2-3-2007
Internet problems, sorry.
March at last.
I am still writing the blog each day despite not being able to get on line properly for the last three days. It’s very vexing but the signal is just not strong enough to maintain a contact. Being a bank holiday, one is unable to find out if it is everyone or just me. I strongly suspect that everyone feeding from that aerial will be suffering the same frustration.
After a late boozy night dancing, last night, we were once again woken from our slumbers by Dario knocking on the caravan door at eight o’clock this morning. He is only here for a short while in a morning, dropping the building team off and then he goes back to another site, one presumes. He occasionally picks the team up at half past six but quite often it is Jose who collects them. Therefore Dario only gets one chance in a day to sit down with us to solve issues and problems. If he came every morning I would set the alarm and be up and ready for him. As it is, he must think that we look like he sees us early morning, all day. I don’t think that I have talked to him with my hair combed yet, let alone with my teeth brushed and having had a shave.
Anyway, today one builder is up on the roof rendering the ceramic bricks above the tiles, as a prelude to putting down black polythene, laying another layer of cement and then finally we get some roof floor tiles down. The other two guys are preparing the shuttering with which to make the stairs up to the solarium. It’s all very crude but it works in the end, we hope.
BTW the diesel genny is running fine, just in case you were wondering. It is a little smelly to fill because I have to siphon the diesel from a twenty five litre container into the genny’s tank. This, as you will guess, involves sucking the diesel up the siphon tube and invariably ends up with me having the stuff and/or the fumes in my mouth. I then spend all day smelling like the local BP petrol station.
Friday 2-3-2007
Where do I start about today?
We were not rudely awakened this morning for a change, but I was awake in anticipation anyway, just in case.
When we emerged we noted that something unusual was about. We have had three builders on site now for four or five weeks but today I see hats popping up and down all over the place, in a very perplexing manner. Firstly I checked on what we drank last night and then I carefully studied these heads and hats and in the end concluded that today, the second day of March, we have no less than five builders on site. Not long after this had sunk in, we had a further shock and saw two plumbers arrive on site, with rolls and rolls of flexible heavy duty plastic water piping. Not very long after their arrival, I was summonsed up on to site to debate the orientation of the bath and shower for the second bathroom. Apparently when we had changed the position of the bath and the WC, I had not re-drawn the plan in scale. They pointed out that if we put the WC and the bath where we had marked on the plan, we would have to climb with one leg over the edge of the bath just to sit down on the WC. Clearly we had to make changes, which we did. Our guests now can recline in the bath and breath in the clean pure air of the campo coming in from the window directly above the bath. I promise that only me and the goat man from the next farm are the only ones ever to be walking past the bathroom window, so our guests can bathe in peace.
Also because of the sixty percent increase in the production rate today, we are now the proud owners of a chimney, up on top of the solarium. We now have to wait to see if our pictures of our ideal chimney top, given to Jose a while ago with the words ’similar’, turn out to be similar at all. Our choice of chimney top is very Moorish Moroccan in style.
The chappy doing the stair case is pouring wheel barrows full of cement onto the stairway shuttering and another, new, little chappy is galloping around the recently cemented/rendered walls covering them in white Yeso. Yeso is the waterproof cement covering on the outside walls which in the fullness of time will be painted to our off white choice of colour.
We are really looking forward to them all going home, so that we can go and see what they have all done today.