Six Months an Immigrant

Here I sit, on a lazy Sunday morning in late October, at the oak dining table I sat at as a child, with the sun streaming in through the open french windows, my piripiri plants sizzling in the scorching sun on the terrace, and Fat Babs snoring on the chair beside me. If it weren't for the snoring it would be perfect.

It's six months since we left the UK, three months since we bought our new home and precisely one day since we finished decorating/arranging/unpacking in the main (now) open-plan living area.  Life is very good indeed. I'm obsequiously grateful and I'm so, so sorry for sounding smug.

If it's any consolation, it's not all been plain sailing. Problems have arisen as regularly as the tides, but fortunately, so far, so have solutions.

The house we bought is on the outskirts of a little village on a hill above the beautiful medieval town of Òbidos. The views are fantastic and on a dewy morning Òbidos castle stands proud above a sea of mist and reminds us of St Mary's church spire on the drive down through Lydart into Monmouth.

The house itself consisted of a very large roughly hexagonal living area with an adjacent tiny little useless pokey corridor for a kitchen. The house was designed by the previous owner - an elderly wealthy Lisbon couple who used it as a holiday home.  I can only assume he designed it and she did the cooking. 

There are three bedrooms and two bathrooms on the ground floor and a small single bedroom/office in the converted loft-space.  

Outside there is a deep wrap-around verandah, a very large garden (I shall write a separate blog about the garden for my mother-in-law and other gardeners), and a pool (which we didn't really want but are quite enjoying).  The garden has a timed irrigation system consisting of fifty squirters that emerge sequentially from under the ground like something from a James Bond movie. And electric gates. Everyone has electric gates in this country, it's a bit weird.

One of the major selling points, apart from the view, were the low running costs. The property isn't connected to mains water (which can be expensive, particularly if you have a garden to irrigate) but has its own borehole and pump. Hot water is provided by a solar tank on the roof, and there are also photovolteic panels on the roof supplying electricity.

So, we moved in and gave the nod to Pickfords to send our furniture over.  Fortunately the previous owners left one double bed, and the Youngs, who had tumbled in, sleep deprived and covered in dust after a week at Boom festival, had their vans to sleep in, because the furniture took ten days to arrive. We made use of that time by getting the Youngs to build a shed and painting all the walls white.

Next job was to get the kitchen walls knocked down to create a large open plan kitchen/living/dining area.  We'd heard bad things about Portuguese builders' time-keeping but we found them incredible efficient. Toothless Sr Baltazar gave a quote on Friday, started on Monday and finished by Wednesday. We then had a hiatus of a month whilst we waited for the tiles we'd ordered to arrive, the day after which Sr Baltazar turned up at 8 am to do all the tiling. Then Sr Botelho and his team arrived and fitted the kitchen, which took two days.  Terribly efficient, particularly considering that neither of them spoke a word of English. I've been studying Portuguese very hard and through a combination of my poorly pronounced Portuguese, and, annoyingly, Richard's universal Man Speak (consisting of much gesturing, back slapping and laughing) we managed to make ourselves understood and now have a fabulous kitchen. Having been without a decent functional kitchen for six months this makes me disproportionately happy. I keep stroking it and polishing it like one of those crazy clean-freak people.

            

There have been hiccoughs though.  For example, it turned out that the solar hot water system was old and leaky and rubbish, and we had to replace the whole thing. 

Then we had torrential rain which somehow got into the defunct outside lighting system and kept tripping all the electrics. There was one memorable week when the electrics kept tripping, resulting somehow in the irrigation system activating itself at 5 am and refusing to switch off, the electric gates jamming shut, effectively imprisoning us, and the burglar alarm (which wasn't even switched on) going off repeatedly throughout the night - a week which culminated in me climbing under the duvet having a nervous breakdown.  

Oh and the leaky toilet cistern saga which resulted in Richard almost giving me a heart attack and me almost giving him a divorce at 4 am one morning.

Then the pool went green. It's a salt water pool which has a filtration system that has an electronic cell which dissociates the salt (sodium chloride) into sodium and free chlorine, on a loop (clever, huh?). Turned out that the electronic cell was all furred up with calcium.  Nothing that an hour soaking in a bucket of acid couldn't cure.  

Then there was the time Rich, whilst messing about with his chainsaw, felled a pine tree and simultaneously split the only mature plum tree in the garden in half. (Nothing that an hour soaking in a bucket of acid couldn't cure.)

And the haunted baby crying in the garden in the dead of night (turned out to be a mongoose).

And the time Rich managed to smash the Landrover windscreen from the inside with a larch pole (turns out I'm married to Frank Spencer).

And the time Holly and Angus managed to hit one of the electricity cables when digging a hole for the pergola....

Ah well.  I'm not going to list all the fabulous moments and special times - and there have been many - because that might just be a bit bloody annoying for those of you who are still shackled by your mortgages and shitty jobs. But it seems to me, as I sit here on this glorious morning, that we finally got to where we were headed, and, amazingly, it's as good as we'd hoped it would be.  

Actually it's better. (Soz.)