Spanish renovation

[onlyMark]

I've had a bit of a project on as well. I don’t spend all my days hassling the workers. I made the big shoe box to fit in the entrance room by the back door and a little odds and ends box –



Also a built in wardrobe for one of the girls’ rooms. The big doors need more of the decorative wood on at the time of the photo, but it’ll be in a grid pattern like the upper doors –






The bookcase in this photo I made as well. It is a copy of one opposite it that you can’t see that was bought from a local furniture shop. They only had one and we wanted two, so I was given my instructions (in the form of a question, “Do you think you can build……….. etc etc) –




Next year, well, that is a big question. Will it all be finished?
The jobs we wanted doing this year have all been done apart from the major one which is my workshop. It needs the walls covering with plaster and the electrics putting in. Well, it seems the original plasterer was ill, so a standby one was asked but he is busy with work and couldn't come. It will have to be finished whilst I'm not there and in readiness for me returning Easter 2015.

Work will commence again next March(ish) time when we need to pool patios tiling, the courtyard tiling (the pattern has changed yet again), the pool tiling and the plumbing/electrics putting in. We've already selected the tiles for everything.
Virtually the last thing will be rendering the outside of the front wall and the track to the house being concreted/asphalted.
Bye for now.

[bjd]

Wow, a huge amount of progress since you first started. It's lucky you know what you are doing, can read blueprints, etc, so you can see when the work is not done properly.

I can see why you have a wall around the place but, in that climate, I would put a little tiled fountain to give an impression of coolness (like at the Alhambra I guess) because closed courtyards/gardens really keep in the heat.

[onlyMark]

There are no blueprints bjd. Well, there sort of are. They are ones I do myself on Google Sketchup and give them to the builder. Most of it works out ok but there are occasional hiccups.
Funnily enough I've been looking at a water feature for the middle of it though in the height of summer it will be far too hot no matter what is done. It'll be then that the patios around the pool come to the fore. The courtyard will mostly be used on days, of which there are plenty, when the sun is out but there is a little bit of a chill in the air. Spring/Autumn time plus any sunny days in the winter.

[mossie]

Very ambitious Mark. I gather the 2 concreting the wall in your health and safety shot are refugees from the high wire act in the local circus

[onlyMark]

If they weren't, they should have been.

[onlyMark]

Update - I was to fly out to Germany, pick up the car we have there and drive with a load of stuff to Spain, on the 15th March.
Due to a bit of a family semi-emergency I will be leaving on Monday, 2nd March instead and start driving the next day. But, one of my daughters will be with me and though pleasant to have company it means the drive will take a couple of days longer.
When I get to the house I'm a bit of a pessimist and expect over the winter the electric has packed up and the water pipes have frozen and bust. Hopefully nobody has broken in either.
I'll let you know.

[htmb]

Safe travels, Mark.

[Deleted]

And now Mark is on the road, probably going through the dangerous wilds of France.

[onlyMark]

I'm a little bit north of Avignon tonight and I have twice slipped down the wrong road on the way. The reason seems to be (and I'd fogotten this until the second time) the 'Peage' is when you follow a blue sign and the normal road is when you follow a green. In Spain green indicates the Peage.
I've found so far the French to be very polite and willing to indulge my schoolboy attempts to mangle their language. They soon switch to English to appease me.

[Deleted]

Mar 3, 2015 19:27:25 GMT onlyMark said:

I'm a little bit north of Avignon tonight and I have twice slipped down the wrong road on the way. The reason seems to be (and I'd fogotten this until the second time) the 'Peage' is when you follow a blue sign and the normal road is when you follow a green. In Spain green indicates the Peage.
I've found so far the French to be very polite and willing to indulge my schoolboy attempts to mangle their language. They soon switch to English to appease me.

I get caught that way in Switzerland where green is for toll roads and blue is for free ones, too. That is one point where the EU/EEE should get together and unify the colours, but I'm sure that no country wants to change colour -- or pay for changing all of the signs in the country.

[onlyMark]

A bit of an update.
As usual the workers have left a mess that I have to clean up at some stage. That’s why these next few photos show things to be somewhat dirty and unfinished. I’ve had a busy time sorting out other stuff, for example I found last night the water had been cut off. That took me all today to sort out and get it re-connected. A lot of my time seems to be catching up on stuff due to the house being left empty over the winter.

Firstly, one of our nice trees in blossom before the uglier stuff –



This is a storage area, it’s where the pool sunbeds will be kept out of season –



We’ve used some excess tiles just to do the first part of the floor. These are from the entrance room and corridor to the kitchen inside –



At the other end is a toilet, the one to be used near the pool instead of having to go inside the house –



The courtyard has started being prepared to get the tiles, which should be here in the next day or two (crossed fingers). You can see near to the house the steel things that I’ve fixed down into which I will build a ‘gazebo’(?), a wooden structure across the front of the house that will eventually have plants growing up it. That’ll be after the tiles have been laid





The pool is looking a bit sad –



But some of the land at the back has had fresh good earth laid down. Mrs M will be in charge of this bit –

[onlyMark]

Something about our electrics and other stuff. You can skip this if not interested.
When we bought the place the advert said it had mains electrics. It didn’t. The estate agent offered to put in a generator system at their expense. We didn’t want one. We did some research and found a local company, actually in our nearby village, which would do us a solar system. We got a quote, which was more than the generator, and because business was slow with the estate agent we negotiated strongly to our satisfaction.

The house is wired up just like a normal one, with lights and power points and a fuse box inside. From that fuse box things get a bit different.
It starts with the solar panels –



You can see eight of them and at the side are the two hot water panels. These are just up the hill from the house, about 30 metres or so. Cables and pipes for the water run around the back and side of the house to an outside brick building. The roof of this forms part of our pool patios. The electric panels are rated at, I think, 220 Watts in ideal sunshine.
Inside the shed is the brains of it.
The control box and fuse boxes….



The two small black boxes each monitor a bank of batteries. The large box is the brains. The right hand fuse box has the power from the panels coming in and off to the batteries. It also has the main fuses for the house. This trips out if you try and use something rated above 2500W, so big hair dryers, heaters, air con etc are not allowed. We do have things like a toaster and sandwich maker though. Plus it easily enough runs a washing machine but if we heat the water in the machine we have to make sure not much else is on in the house. By the way, we don’t have proper drains either, we have a proper septic tank but we don’t allow toilet paper to be flushed, it goes in a bin and I dispose of it periodically.
The left hand fuse box is for the outbuildings like my workshop.
The control box sorts everything out and converts the power in the batteries, which is 24V, to mains voltage at 220 to 240V.

The batteries. There are 12 of them at 2V each and they weigh each just about as much as I can lift. They are serious stuff. There is supposed to be enough storage to run the house for three days of seriously cloudy weather. On the left side are the bottles, numerous of, of distilled water that I need -



Washing machine further left from the batteries, the most ‘green’ rated we could find A+++…



The pump and associated electrics for the pool won’t run from this system. We’ll have another one purely for that. But, whereas the house is a normal AC system (Alternating Current), the pool one will be DC (Direct Current) and won’t have batteries, it is far simpler with a couple of panels near the pool wired to the pump. It’ll work when the sun is shining but won’t have a storage capacity to run particularly fast otherwise. As we get a lot of sun it’ll be fine as off season when it is cloudy it’ll just tick over and probably be too cold for much swimming anyway.

Just as an added thing, the solar water. We have had a pipe laid from the village for mains water, again at the estate agent’s expense, as the original advert for the house also said there was mains water, which there wasn’t. The pressure is fine enough but dips sharply when more than one tap is put on. Here is the hot water tank –



And the control box. You can see the screen. It tells me that ‘T2’, the temperature in the tank, is at 22 degrees C and the 0.0L/min means the pump isn’t on at the moment to move things around to heat the water –



There isn’t water that goes to the solar water panels. There are pipes that carry an anti-freeze type fluid. The system is sealed and as the sun heats the fluid in the panels the pumps circulates it through the tank which contains the water. The water heats by coming into contact with the hot anti-freeze pipes, not the fluid itself. As the fluid transfers its heat it gets pumped back to the panels to go around again.

That’s about it. If I missed anything, let me know.

[bixaorellana]

The views! The views!

I'm pretty jealous of that gorgeous dirt all ready for planting.

The electrical details are fascinating & answered some questions I had. You hardly ever see solar panels here, although it's a perfect place for them.

Re: water pressure -- you were recently in a discussion about roof cisterns. Would a ground cistern system w/pump + a roof cistern(s) be practical for over the bathroom?

Are you all going to get some kind of pool cover? They're supposed to save a great deal on evaporation.

[breeze]

What a view! And what a pool. And all that lovely dirt for Mrs OnlyMark to play with.

You did well out of your real estate agency. They were a little casual about their advertising, apparently.

[htmb]

That's a pretty high tech system for a little house in the country.

I appreciated the explanation and continue to be fascinated by your building project.

Yes, I agree, the views are fantastic.

[onlyMark]

The little hill you see half of on the pool photo is the caldera of an extinct volcano. The views from those patios are pretty good and that's why the idea of the quiet and enclosed courtyard sits well with us as a contrast.
Pool cover - certainly, when I can find one here big enough. Last summer we filled up the unfinished concrete to swim in and I made one cheaply from bubble wrap. It was very effective.
We will at some stage investigate the solution for the water pressure more thoroughly, but I know from Egypt and Jordan that it only needs a relatively small pump to be effective. Whether we need a tank as well I'm not sure. I think at first we'd just insert a pressure sensitive pump in the pipe just outside the house and see what happens.
Solar power - it is a bit disappointing that fewer countries exploit it. I think it is because the initial cost of a system is off-putting.

As regards the estate agency, they didn't check the property before advertising. They lost money on our deal, especially since he house was also advertised as 'detached' when officially there is a property, though a ruined shed, attached on one side that belongs to someone else. They went purely by the word of the seller which, I have found out from gossip in the village, is worth nothing.
Even after all these errors we also caught them forging the signature of the seller, all be it on a minor bit of paperwork, and the legal eagle in the pocket of the agent over-stated his qualifications, which we discovered through our solicitor who is reputable.
Hence, when presented with all this over a short period of time I think they thought they wanted to get rid of us before we caused trouble, thus dramatically reducing the price of the house/ruin originally.

The icing in the cake though is the paperwork registering the property boundary. It seems only us and our builder have spotted a large tract of land (an acre or more that contains a water spring and a storage building) that is supposed to be still owned by the seller bordering our property, but in fact is part of our plot now on the paperwork and is officially registered as so. It seems the seller and the agency failed to notice this when submitting the boundary map to the land registration authority.

[bjd]

Interesting update. You would think that countries with a lot of sunshine would do more to promote solar power. A few houses around here have solar panels on the roof but mostly for heating water in the summer. I should think you have a lot more sun in southern Spain than we do here in winter.

[breeze]

It's good to have your own spring.

We only became aware of the preciousness of water when we moved here, an area that used to be mined. It's hard to sink a well and find good water. Sometimes you hit sulphur water. Other times the well-driller hits an old mine and gets nothing. Most people in this area get their drinking water from a nearby spring. They haul it home in gallon jugs or by the tank.

Our house was sited where it is because of a never-failing spring, but when the hill above us was strip-mined before we bought the place, a lot of the water went the other way and now the spring only flows for a few weeks.

[onlyMark]

We are originally entitled to have half of the water from the spring anyway, though how you measure that I've no idea. It does run all year round which is a bonus. At the moment we let the person (the original seller) use it all as he wishes for his land/olive trees.

We had some tiles delivered for the courtyard today, so work starts on that tomorrow, at last. Unfortunately it seems a load of ones were left on the delivery truck and it will come back tomorrow or Monday.

Edited to add - I've now managed to get a proper connection from a gas boiler to the butane bottles and we don't need to rely on the sun for hot water any more. Especially good considering the last week or so has been bad weather and we've struggled to get water above 30 degrees.

[bixaorellana]

Nice windfall of property, Mark! If the olive tree owner didn't have that spring water, where would he get water? If there are springs, it must mean wells are a viable option, right? Considering the beauty loaned to your site by the vista of olive trees, perhaps you don't mind sharing the water.

[onlyMark]

I don't mind sharing the water at all. He only actually uses very little of it anyway to water his olive trees and the rest just trickles away.
Reply 13 on page 1 shows what was left of a water course dug, I believe, by the Moors. This was at one time fed by the same spring but had been blocked off. Digging a well could be done but the ground is very rocky. There is one but dug down just actually to the same spring run off further back up the hill a little. This is where he originally obtained water until he cleared out a channel which takes the water down to a couple of open concrete storage tanks on his land across from us.
The man is quite a character, refuses to wear his hearing aid, talks a mile a minute and can never hear your replies. He is also very nosy and I have caught him peering through our windows before we secured the house a bit better. But.... catch him just right and he is a font of information about the area.

[onlyMark]

Bit more progress - the gas boiler fitted so we now have hot water 'on tap'.......




The first part of the courtyard being laid out for the first tiles -






A few rows have now been fitted. I like the traditional type of colour. It looks different depending on if it is in the sun or not.



But... the whole courtyard isn't being done in all the same tile. This has caused quite a bit of discussion today as these are 33cm square and some others are 24cm square, plus a third type somehow are 24.2cm square. This makes lining up all the edges quite a task to adjust the gaps and plan so that when laid, they don't look like a dogs dinner. Hopefully all will be clear in a few days. The workers though, quite selfishly, are just here two days next week as it is Easter. They get Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off. So it won't be finished for when Mrs M (El Jefe) comes in a week, but they won't be swayed by my tears and hair tearing out.

In the very middle(ish, because nothing is square) of the yard will be a marble star shaped thing. This is it laid out in the room the workers are using downstairs for storage. Tip to tip it is 2.40m long -

[htmb]

That is going to look very nice, Mark. I bet it will tie in nicely with the rest of the house.

[mossie]

That is quite some project you have taken on there. The courtyard tiling sounds fun, a considerable amount of tile cutting seems likely.

[bixaorellana]

Frivolous Spring-breaking workmen!

Incidentally, it's la jefa for the boss lady. It's also okay to simply address her as Jefa. It wasn't okay the first time someone addressed me as Jefa, though (as market vendors are wont to do). That's because I'm a simple girl from the southern US & that's how we pronounce heifer.

Is it too obvious to ask if the star thing will point north?

Congratulations on the hot showers, the value of which is never sufficiently appreciated until you can't have one.

[Deleted]

Did you ever look into a wind turbine for the electricity? Maybe you are in an area with not enough wind, but just about every rural house in France that has one makes a profit off the initial investment (after a number of years) because all of the excess electricity is automatically sold to the national power grid.

[onlyMark]

I thank you for the correction bixa, my Spanish is virtually non existent anyway. Yes, one of the points of the star will point north. The workers, to much amusement, have been trying to get a compass to find out exactly which direction that is. One them decided to get a compass app for his phone which solved the problem. But, I'd already marked a point on a wall after looking quite a few times at the north star. They had to check for themselves though.

k2, I don't think we get enough wind but it has crossed my mind. One reason for buying the place was that it seemed to be on the lee side of a hill. We did think seriously about it and I did quite a bit of research which confirmed what you say. But looking at our own experience here and weather data means it'd spend most of its time idle. Good idea though.

[onlyMark]

So, it seems the workers are now off until next Monday. At least thy managed to lay the first 'carpet'. we've still been having long conversations about the tiles. In total there will be seven different types and though most of them are the same size, they still vary a bit from make to make. I've been most of the weekend laying them out and getting the gaps right so they line up as best as possible. We'll see how we go.

[Deleted]

Those tiles look quite nice so far -- and very "Spanish patio." Aren't you supposed to have a little tinkling fountain in the middle, though?

[bixaorellana]

I'm guessing that the tile layout, with the lovely "carpets" is to keep away from the rigid look of the patio with a definite middle.