Wow! It has been such a busy month! Firstly, we had our first visitors (see last post). Shortly after our guests left, Wayne’s niece Breagh arrived for a whistle stop tour after an adventurous trip over from Canada via the UK. Then no sooner had she departed we had our eldest son Oli, his partner Melanie and our Grandson Jamie over for a week.
One thing that seems to have become a reoccurring theme is that all of our visitors seem to be bringing their crappy weather with them! We hope that trend comes to an end soon!
The visits haven’t stopped with family either, we have had the pleasure of sharing time with our besties V&PT, Manny & Carol, Isabel and her neighbour Tom, as well as meeting some new friends Carolina and her daughter Lauren. All within our small village here. We also had a catch-up over a lovely friend’s over on the coast Doug & Thao and Vince and Cat. We had a lovely lunch in Nazaré whilst Breagh was visiting. Our other Canadian friends Dinis & Danielle have also now moved over to Portugal and are going to refurbish Dinis’s grandfather’s house in a village just over the hill. It was great to catch up with them over dinner in our local restaurant too. And to round off our visitors Kathryn & Roman and the three dogs paid us a visit while giving their new motor home a run before they move to Spain.
it has been fantastic to spend time with family and friends especially as we are now learning to live in our new home.
The house is still not finished, but we are definitely on the home stretch. The builders are due to start on the carport soon, and have already started resolving minor issues on our snagging list.
We are now looking forward to making some inroads into landscaping the building site back into a garden too.
Wayne has taken on Portuguese lessons as well, fitting it in once a week with our Friend Tom. He alternates houses each week where Rote (Ruth) a local language teacher and very talented ceramicist comes round and gives an hour of tuition.
So now the last of the visitors have been we are finding a bit of time to regroup and assessing how we can move forward with the garden and some landscaping.
It can easily get scary and daunting at the amount of planning, work, planting, wall building and earth moving that needs to be done. All this is on top of the normal day to day gardening that’s required this time of year. The rains have arrived, and with that, the crazy amount of growth of grass, weeds, tree shoots, shrubs etc.
One of the biggest tasks is to rebuild the stone walls around the boundary. We have always wanted to undertake this task in the same techniques and style that all the walls in our surrounding area are built. Just another of our aims to help embed the house seamlessly into its surroundings.
So far we have only received positive feedback which we are overwhelmed with. We are so glad it has had such lovely comments from our neighbours too.
Annette has been busy too. Especially as Wayne had come down with a nasty bug and cough which knocked the wind out of his sails for a few days! Some of the snagging list tanks were to replace some cracked tiles. Luckily we kept all the spares. However, they were stored under the house in the crawl space along with a mountain of cardboard and building rubbish. So she removed the OSB covering the entrance and proceeded to clean this area so she could easily access the spare tiles for the builder.
it’s a big enough space to store lots of things, so we hope to have a proper door fitted to it in the future. But until we know what the access will look like after the carport and steps to the back door look like we will hold off.
The front entrance gateway also needs a gate at some point, but with our build funds draining fast, that will have to go lower on the todo list 😒
So, as we close this brief post, the snagging list is rapidly getting shorter.
We are so pleased we chose our builders as they certainly listen to their clients. Sadly we have heard of many that don’t.
One of the upside’s to the bad weather we had was that it did highlight some areas that needed addressing. Some windows need slight adjustment to stop the stronger wind gusts. And we had some rainwater get in under one of our exterior doors. Once we reported these to our builder they were very quick to act and some very nice door seals fitted which will definitely keep any wind or rain out from now on. These and the other resolvable things on the list are improving our quality of life on a daily basis.
We are still getting used to the solar and heating systems, so are looking forward to reporting on life in a house in Portugal through the winter with no wood or pellet burning fires and no gas!
However, even though the heating system seems to be working, it is running quite inefficiently. The heat pump is cycling a lot! Even when the room temperatures are well above the desired temperatures. We keep getting told that the way it is set up is the way they do it here in Portugal, but we have closely followed the latest advances in heat pumps and how they should be set up to run efficiently and it is definitely not the way ours is currently set up. We might bring in some alternative folk to look at the setup and see if it can perform using weather compensation and more effective settings. We have asked, but they don’t seem keen to use those techniques here. It will be quite interesting to compare different approaches, so we are capturing all the data from the installation and need to run it this way over winter to compare with a different set up next year.
So if you are curious to see the latest improvements , new ideas, some gardening and landscaping and the carport being added, tune in to our next post…
Our Portuguese Life 