Sunday, Monday 10th & 11th June
It was Ivan’s tenth birthday yesterday (Sunday) HBTY. HBTY. HBD.D Ivan. HBTY. We had a good long chat on the phone to him and the family. Ivan’s special pressie was a telescope so we might be able to wave to him from up on the solarium.
We did a lot of pottering about yesterday, without leaving here. Elayne did bits and bats of things in the caravan and I dug a trench in the concrete for the new water pipes to pass round to the back of the house after emerging from a manhole and underground pipe from the back of the casita.
Today, Monday, after we had had an early morning dip, ensuring of course that we were not going to have an audience (nobody at all on site today) we did some shopping in Albox, then we came back and moved the 5Kv genny up to the back of the casita, its new home from now on. We have left one of the original little 2.7Kv genny’s down at the van. We managed to chain the genny to the back of the car and tow it slowly up the hill and down the drive. Getting it around the back of the casita and then levelling it up was a bit heavy going but we got there in the end.
We clearly now just have to wait on the mysterious Carlos to get a grip of our kitchen units, the central heating and the rest of the plumbing and the electrics, and we’ll be nearly there.
In fact we are now thinking of cancelling any possible move into the house, ready or not, until after Wimbledon, we don’t want to miss any of the tennis due to furniture arriving and bothersome things like that.
Tuesday 12th June
Our group of friends here have started to meet on a Monday evening for a game of cards down at Lentisco’s. This is because dancing lessons have finished. Last night there were ten of us around two tables playing the simplest of card games, ‘chase the ace’. It was a real hoot. We must have played for two hours, with shrieks of laughter, much to the bemusement of the card playing Spanish folk.
Today we have Carlos on site fitting the kitchen work surfaces, heavens above. It is now 16-30hrs and Jose has just arrived to start removing building materials and equipment from site.
We are having a meeting on Wednesday with Dario to go through our ‘snags list’. He may as well start to do these jobs whilst Carlos is still doing the kitchen, thus, we hope, bringing nearer the move in date a little. Well we can only hope. There must come a stage when Dario wants his final payment from us and therefore one would think that he would want the project finished as soon as he can. Clearly he’s not hungry enough for it to hurt.
Wednesday 13th June
Sorry still no internet access. I have talked to Madrid and although they record the calls, pass the complaint to the technical department, refund the monthly fees for down time and sympathise with the situation, until the technical problem is permanently overcome there is little that can be done.
Busy day on site. We had a snags meeting this morning with Bob and Dario. We wrote out a list of snags and tried to put them into some sort of sequence of order, good old MS Word. Whilst we were going through the list poor old Dario had the look of a small boy being told off for bad work at school. We did finish by telling him that we were in general very pleased with the work that everyone has done and that by and large the standard of work has not been too bad. Dario estimated that he would be finished in two weeks, but we are not going to get excited just yet. A team (whatever that means) of cleaners will be coming up this week to do the floors and windows etc. We don’t expect all of the snags to be corrected all at once but now that we have a list on the computer we can check it all off as we go.
Also on site today is the central heating engineers/plumbers. The oil tank for the C/H is going behind the casita and the boiler itself is going inside the casita and then the pipes will go under the drive for the hot water to get to the house. We’re not sure how long all of this will take.
The temperature outside the caravan window where I am typing this is 33 degrees, inside is 35 degrees. We have all the fans on and we are going to watch the tennis from Queens in a minute (we might have a little siesta if the games become boring).
Thursday 14th June
It’s hot, hot again today nearly thirty degrees in the shade. We do seem to be acclimatising to the heat but we are careful to not get over done whilst working outside.
We were dancing in the street, in Taberno, last night. The day and evening were so warm that we had our Wednesday dance at Lentisco’s al fresco on the patio and spilling into the street. Elayne and I danced twice out on the road, because it was nearer to our table than the dance area on the patio, all the time keeping a sharp look out for cars and scooters of course. We did think about dancing on the zebra crossing but it wouldn’t get much sympathy over here, whilst you were in hospital. A round of drinks for ten of us came to €14 and included the entertainment and a supper of paella, chips with aioli, bread and ending up with popcorn. Paco brings the plates of food out to the tables and we all tuck in.
The plumber has been here most of the day, finishing installing the central heating boiler. We also had ten tonnes of gravel delivered. Fortunately we had just arrived back from shopping so that we were able to tell the lorry driver exactly where to tip it. Goodness knows where he would have put it using his own initiative.
I’m sorry to our regular blog readers but we are still off line. I rang through a complaint again but the organisation AVI is so big that it doesn’t seem to do much good. We are not the only ones suffering and it seems to be a problem with the mast down near Albox. It is said that they will be putting a new mast up, but we don’t know when that will be. As we all seem to talk to one another in the area and each time we are off line we seek compensation, then AVI must in the end take note or lose customers, should an alternative become available. It’s frustrating.