Bedrock

How time flies – it seems like no time since we returned to rainy old England (mainly because I’ve never stopped working on a very LARGE website) and here we are off on another trip to the mountains of Andalucia. Our first stop having flown into Malagar was a trip to Carrefour for some shopping and lunch – we did this on Saturday morning and the weather was superb!! We arrived up in Galera at around 8pm to a load of dust from the builder’s operations. Nothing like spending your first night armed with a broom!

The building work is now complete (note the new fireplace in thick stone) – which merely leaves me to purchase half a ton of white paint and re-do much of the outside. Builders have been in putting in crazy paving and done a nice job. Saturday night we went off to the village – almost everywhere was closed as apparently there was a wedding on in Huescar but we did meet up with a couple we met last time and spent the evening with them in the pub.

Sunday the weather was not good – I managed to get the morning in painting and then by afternoon it started to rain – mind you nothing compared to the lake district back home. I took the opportunity to get some work done on the web and we made our first fire. Met some potential neighbours who came with other English locals – very pleasant people who we invited in for the guided tour. No doubt we’ll see them in the pub later this week (Saturday night is reserved for “the curry cave”).

Monday we’re off to Huescar for more paint and a couple of large brushes. I’m sitting here preparing emails for work and the sun is out – beautiful sky. Assuming the weather keeps up, between the two of us we should be able to finish off the outside painting this afternoon and Maureen is planning a little staining. I’ll be back at the computer as this is going to be a working holiday, though we are planning at least one trip this week to the nearest large city as we need more materials from Carrefour.  Hot tub has packed in – heater appears to be on the blink as the water has stabilised at 19 degrees and won’t go up or down! Oh, dear!!

As the weather was quite cool yesterday we got our first chance to test the theory that caves stay a constant temperature – well of course that’s not QUITE true but the variation is minimal – despite the size of our place which is quite large if you include upstairs and below-ground-level areas, it didn’t take long for the one fire in the living area to bring the place to comfortable levels. We are however suffering the aftermath of the building work and there’s a certain level of humudity we need to address. The plan is to buy a small dehumidifier as soon as we can find a DIY large enough to stock them. Over in the UK we’ve used these for years, would not be without one and they are cheap as chips at B&Q – whether the same applies over here remains to be seen!

Brought more solar lamps to light the place up at night so I’m looking forward to a sunny day to give them a good charge. And with that, we’re off to get some white paint. As an aside the bank over here considers when giving you life insurance various disabilities – including “being left-handed”…  I must admit I’d never thought of being left-handed as a disability!!

This blog is put together by Peter Scargill and Maureen Scargill of Wark, Northumberland in England to help others who might be considering buying a holiday property in Spain.