House Latest

It's over a month since my last update here because of the difficulties we've had getting an Internet connection. But now we've cleared that hurdle, I can bring things up to date.

The basic situation is that we are still waiting for approval of our plans from the local authority. However, as much of the work we want to do is renovation, this shouldn't necessarily prevent progress. At this stage, though, we are still talking to builders and trying to obtain estimates for the work. We've seen the work of two builders recommended by the architect, and both seem competent. They have done some nice renovations. We are hoping to get quotes this coming week, and are expecting them to be way more than we can afford; the idea is to then cut down the work -- leaving some parts of the house unfinished -- until we reach an affordable price. Builders seem quite open to that kind of negotiation.

At the same time, though, we are hearing of difficulties with builders from people we meet around here. There seem to be problems with cheating (like quoting for fully insulated walls, but then stuffing a little insulation around door and window frames to make it look as if it has been done...), as well as simply with getting the work done at all (delays of years seem common). We are hoping that our architext Paulo has weeded out builders who might operate like that, but we really don't know.

Anyway, we will wait for these quotes. If we are not happy with them, we are thinking of contracting the work in smaller parcels -- perhaps the walls and roof first, windows and doors separately, etc., etc. That way each contracted step is smaller and if the builder just doesn't show up -- or keeps promising to come "next week" -- we can soon find someone else to do the work (or take it over ourselves).

For the moment, though, we are still expecting to get as much work as we can afford done by one builder. We are hoping to start sometime this month, and it seems that a typical project is finished in one work season (ie by the autumn or early winter). Here's hoping....

Meantime, we ARE progressing with the garden. I'll start a separate category for that... Coming soon!