Moving into our Dream Home in Portugal – We’re in, then we aren’t!

A bed arrives

So, the big news was we returned from our last house sit, not to our friends or another house sit, but to our own home!
Wayne actually returned to the house during the sit, to take delivery of a bed. That bed was for the guest bedroom which was to be our room until the work was finished in our room and we could get the rest of the furniture delivered. The bed duly arrived and Wayne made up a couple of the IKEA chairs to sit on. Such luxury! Once the bed was made up, he also stayed the night as first thing the following morning the electricity supply was being changed out for a permanent one. This was great news as it meant our solar system could finally be connected! The details were sent to our solar system provider and Wayne then headed back to join Netty on the house sit.

So when it was time to make our way to the house, it was a very different feeling. Not that we didn’t enjoy staying with friends, all of whom we are so grateful for supporting us. It’s just that your home is an anchor and it has seemed like we were always drifting between sits and waiting for the build.

We have solar!

The first thing we noted was that the Starlink antenna (dishy McFlatface), had been installed which could only mean one thing! Otovo had been to finish the installation of the solar system. Well almost! It was up and running and everything worked perfectly. They had forgotten to install our backup box. It is to cover the eventuality of a grid outage (loss of mains electricity), which does happen from time to time. They were extremely quick to acknowledge this oversight (because of all the iterations with changes due to a misunderstanding of single or three phase and the build delays), and scheduled engineers to return and fit it promptly.

Furniture and belongings

The next action was to go and organise our furniture delivery, which comprised of our bed, minus a headboard, a sofa bed, and our living room sofa. This was duly done with a visit to our favourite furniture shop on the silver coast Siopa e Baptista. While there we finally chose our headboard that was going to match the bed material, but we have to wait eight weeks before getting that delivered, but no biggie, at least we now have our bed!

Our bedroom furniture will have to be pushed to the side in a few weeks to make way for our closets! We took advantage of the IKEA design center in Leiria and ordered closets for ours and the guest bedroom closets! It’s great because they deliver all the boxes directly to the rooms and then it’s time to build them. That could be a fun episode in the future! We really love IKEA stuff and have put together lots of their furniture in the past, but this is a big undertaking and are looking forward to the challenge!

Eventually, we got down to business of moving. We needed to get all of our belongings (not a great deal in reality), out of our friends houses and into our home. This is where Bruce & Paula, who had housed us recently between sits, stepped up to the plate and really helped out. They have a large trailer which they had used to move over to Portugal from the UK three years ago. This went very smoothly on a damp and misty morning, work was still going on at the house too, but we managed to avoid getting in their way and before we knew it all our stuff was put into our walk-in closet.

Not all plain sailing!

So we were in the house, we had a bed, but…

The sewage system that we were led to believe was connected, wasn’t. Sure the toilets flushed, the cold showers worked and we had water in the kitchen but it all just drained out onto the rocks under the kitchen/living room. That was not great, so for the next week or so we still had to rely on public toilets, and friends for showers etc. They did come to fix the connection which required a concrete box and pipes to get the discharges into our septic tank, but one of the workers used our sink (thinking everything was ok) and washed the concrete away before it had time to set and it took a couple of days to get them back out again, and then two days to wait for all the concrete to go off before we could actually use any water in the house. Effectively two weeks after moving in, we finally had sanitation facilities. The one area where we could make use of the water was to connect our fridge freezer. This was staged ready for the builders to connect, along with all the other appliances, but this couldn’t wait as we had some food that would go off! So we took it on ourselves, connecting the external filter and fitting it so that it could be changed in the future without the need to pull the fridge out of its housing. This also facilitated the production of ice, as it has a plumbed in water/ice dispenser. This was crucial in providing ice for the G&Ts to get us over the waiting!

So what has been achieved?

During this two week period, quite a lot was being done and things were getting checked off the todo list. The furniture finally arrived and was put together. (We have a company coming out to protect the fabric with scotch guard in a few weeks.) The elusive plumbers finally turned up with our hot water tank, heat pump and VMC (mechanical ventilation) unit, and connected the tank up to the water supply and to the electricity. They also delivered the heat pump which is our primary method of heating water, but it couldn’t be connected as the electricity for that system wasn’t complete. So, we at least had hot water, but the only way of heating it was via the electric emergent coil. (not ideal, but the solar system did help). But, right on queue, the electricians arrived the following day to finish off the wiring for the heat pump and VMC. They also fitted the cooker extractor fan behind the induction hob (that created another small issue but will be resolved soon). The solar guys also turned up to fit the backup box and we went through what things were essential to keep running if the grid went down. In the end we basically keep power to; the internet, the kitchen, lights, fridge and some essential sockets that power things like the microwave and coffee machine (most essential!). So, all it needs now is the plumber to return to complete the installation of the heat pump and the VMC! However, this is Portugal, so, as this post goes up we are away on a sit again waiting for news that the plumber is going to finish the job!

Anything else happened?

We had our first foreign visitors too! Our good friends Denis and Danielle from Canada stopped by for a drink or two. They also brought some lovely pastries from their village up the road where they have bought a property to renovate! That reminded us to go and check out our other Canadian buddies place, which is also in our village and being renovated. Manny & Carol are due out soon, and we look forward to exchanging house building/renovating stories!

We also managed a day out in Nazaré. Our friends Bruce & Paula were away in Spain and had a house sitter over, but she didn’t have transport, so we offered to take her to a beach resort to enjoy what Portugal can offer on the silver coast! She chose Nazaré, which suited us, as we love it there and the only down side was we couldn’t call on our friends Vince & Cat, as they both had Covid, but we had a lovely lunch and wander around in the lovely weather.

Whats on the todo list?

So, as we just mentioned we are on another house sit. This is the one at Travanca for our friends Kathryn and Roman, we committed to this sit some time ago (on the promise that Roman divulged his secret recipe for baby back ribs!).

Wayne plans to travel back down to the house to check progress is going as we hope it will. The August break is approaching and there is still a lot of work required to finish the build. The external plumbing needs to be completed. We have exposed pipes and open sewage to deal with. We still have no decking to reach the pool, which also needs finishing and it’s very hot here at the moment! We still have no carport to protect the car from the hot sun, and the list goes on. But it’s not the end of the world and our priorities are to make it comfortable, to get it ready for our visitors who are looking forward to joining us very soon.

We still have some items which are essential like blinds and curtains, some storage solutions for the pantries, getting the dishwasher, washing machine and drier connected and generally adding our mark on the house. Wayne plans to take up his paint brushes once again, Netty will no doubt add her interior design skills to bring texture and personality to the house too. Then there is the issue of the garden boundary wall and some landscaping that needs to be considered, but that’s for another post…

So in short, we moved in, did some stuff, got some more stuff done on the house and then went on another house sit!

If you got this far, thanks for joining us on our amazing journey, we look forward to passing on our experiences and what it’s like to live in a wood frame new build in Portugal with the additions we have planned and added along the way, as well as some more traveling adventures with, no doubt, some more amazing house sits too.

Have you moved home to a foreign country? Have you built or renovated a property abroad? What challenges have you experienced and how did you overcome them?

Why not get in touch and share your thoughts…