The Loft Conversion has commenced !!!!!!!!!!!!

Now we have completed the floor we live on the time has come to bring new life into the loft and I (Caz) must say that this is one project I was not particularly going to enjoy the challenge of doing - "endure" me thinks is a more appropriate word!!!The entrance to the loft is from the hallway on the main living floor with the staircase already in place we will be creating two bedrooms with a lounge and shower room. The loft has been crying out to be insulated both for keeping the heat out in the summer and the cold out during the winter.

Rob was full of enthusiasm for this project and so we commenced the arduous task about a month ago and, can now say, that at after a month at it, and at this particular moment in time, after a gruelling week for Rob (doing his dreaded "electrical side of things") and now onto some intricate and fiddling ceiling cladding, his sense of humour has now almost diminished and the air is mostly blue and I am just pleased that most of our neighbors do not speak English (although I guess they can imagine just from his tone) that his patience is wearing thin!!!!

Firstly it was a trip into town for certain materials and several deliveries from our local builder's merchant and wood merchant for plasterboard, wood, insulation, etc., etc., Then the fun started to commence and, to be fair, it didn't seem too bad. Just tedious!!!!!! Cutting polystyrene insulation to size and fitting between the beams, sawing wood to fit batons, measuring, cutting plasterboard, passing screws, drilling holes, treating timber, plastering, filling up holes, sweeping up, and sweeping up again and again, and that's just to mention a few of the tedious jobs and then, of course, being up against it as all the original timber beams, walls, floors, etc., are never square or equal !!!!!!!

!!!!!
A couple of pics here showing how the loft looked originally. The previous owners never had it finished off sadly!

A few pics showing the progress :- Bedroom 2 has pine timber cladding to the roof and 2 walls plasterboarded, the other two walls will be rendered and stipled and painted.

Bedroom 1 below has plasterboard cladding with the outer wall being stipled and painted and a new double glazed window will be fitted later :-

Veggie Delights

Really relishing our home-grown veggies at the moment - even though we are novices at veggie growing, I am pleased and proud to say that we haven't done badly at all this year with our produce. We had an abundance of tomatoes from six plants and even after munching our way through fresh ones all summer I have even managed to chop and freeze probably about 15 - 20 kilos for winter curries and chillis, etc. Unfortunately our onion stock is very low now but I have put in about 60 and have room to plant some more and keeping fingers crossed I am as successful with these as the last crop. Red peppers and hot chilli peppers are still coming strong and today we had a chicken dinner with a plateful of roasted parsnips, red peppers, peas and a cauliflower and leek bake with cheese sauce all picked today fresh from the garden (except the peas which had been frozen earlier in the year).

How satisfying to enjoy the real flavours of these home-grown veggies, the taste is way superior to supermarket veggies which have been picked and stored for heaven knows how long - it is so worth the effort to plant, weed and harvest !!!!!!!!

My first ever home-grown cauliflower - well chuffed !!!!!

Butternut squash, chilli peppers, cauliflowers, parsnips, leeks, red peppers, beetroot

And to top it this week we have had some glorious days with full sunshine and temperatures reaching 22 degrees and no wind. Perfect to be weeding and reaping !!!!!!!!!!!

AT LONG LAST - FISHING HEAVEN !!!!!!!!

Hi everyone,

The old saying "good things come to those who wait" - has at long last well and truly come good! It has been a struggle for me to acquire information on local venues for my type of fishing, partly because there doesn't to be many anglers around on a more professional basis but I have now located and have become a member with the fishing club through the internet in Castelo Branco. A couple of the anglers in the Club have put me onto venues which are paying rich dividends. Two venues are within 30 minutes drive from where we live and are absolutely exceptional. They are more like the venues I am used to back in the U.K. i.e. good car access enabling parking behind the pegs and concrete platforms to fish from.

Fishing competitions are held regularly at these two venues which makes me a very happy chappy for the forthcoming season. As I have said before I am only willing to disclose the locations to my personal friends as it has taken a tremendous amount of groundwork to discover these places.

Here are a few pictures of my last visit where I caught 18 carp, 1 crucian carp and 4 barbel, the carp ran upto 8 kilos (17 lbs) which is great "fun on the pole" and requires a lot of skill to land these naturally bred wild fighting carp!! In total I caught around 60+ kilos (around 130 lbs) of fish.

End of the Saga Bathroom !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Finally the bathroom is finished (although it sounds a bit daft really calling it a bathroom as there is no bath in it!!!), I can't seem to call it the wet or shower room!!!!. We decided to do away with the bath and the bidet to make room for a toilet, (the toilet used to be in a room next to the bathroom with the electric water heater) a sink basin vanity unit and a double shower. The walls are now all fully tiled and, bearing in mind none of the walls are square, it seemed to be a never-ending task. However, Rob's tiling skills have come shining through and he has done us a brilliant job !!! It hasn't been an easy job, as we have told you about some of the grief we have endured in an earlier post, but we are extremely pleased with ourselves with the result.

A photo just to remind you of the old "bathroom" and some of the new bathroom. It's difficult to photograph the room but we have done our best to show you what we have achieved.

Lovely ....................

The fishery

Hi everyone well at last I can now report that the fishery has finally been dug out with the JCB and the help of some of my nearest and dearest neighbours.
It has been a lifetime ambition of mine to own and run my very own fishery, and only by coming to live in Portugal have I been able to achieve this.
It has taken a full week for the digger to complete the task and now we have to await the winter rainy season(hopefully, I may hasten to add,)to see if the fishery will fill up with water naturally, or whether we will need to line or concrete the ground.
It is a bit of an unknown quantity as some locals have said yes no problem it will retain water whilst others have said not,so fingers crossed I won't have to dig into the piggy bank, or worst case scenario - it may cost another couple of thousand to shutter and concrete only time will tell.
Either way and, ever the optimist, I know in my heart it will become a success as having done more research and networking, there are people lining up waiting to fish.
Obviously it will take time for the fishery to settle down and mature,but I am very happy with the layout of deeper contours combined with shallower parts, and two raised islands with trees and one that will become a submerged island for the fish to bask in and of course breed.
Just a few pics for now with progress reports and more pics in the future .....

Motor cyles, motor bikes, vintage motor bikes and quad bikes ...........

We have noticed that there seems to be a passion here for vintage motor-cycles. Rob was invited to go and watch the start of a Motor Bike Rally which was taking place at a nearby village "Atalaias" on the last day of their Festa. However when he got there (on his quad-bike) he was invited to take part in the rally so he decided to tag on and "ride it out", not having a clue what was to happen. For the pleasure of joining you pay 15 euros which enables you to consume copious amounts of refreshments ranging from water, soft drinks to vino and beer, (very thirsty work is riding for fun in the midday heat on a hot summer's day!!!!!) sandwiches and savouries during the journey, a T-Shirt with the name of the event written on it and then lunch which is usually chicken, chips, rice and salad. The Rally takes a route through many towns and villages where the riders stop, pap their hooters for people to admire their bikes!!!!!! He came back 4 hours later (was supposed to be a half-hour run out on the quad-bike) with a huge grin on his face after a fun morning.




Unfortunately Rob forgot to take the camera with him (usually my job) so we are not able to post any pictures from the event !!!!!!!!!!!
FREESTYLE MOTO RALLY - VALE D' URSO


We also went to a Moto Freestyle Rally, again not knowing what to expect but was told we would enjoy it, and we did! There were two professional bike riders performing tricks on motor-cycles and quad-bikes an it was very entertaining, a tad on the dangerous side if you ask me (but I am a girl!!) Rob didn't think so but then he did go on to say he wouldn't like to try any of it!!!!

Too busy to blog !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Firstly we feel we need apologise for the lack of blogs this last couple of months (getting complaints now we are not keeping you up-to-date with our blogs!!!!!) Well, we don't really know where to start this blog as over the summer months so much has happened, its difficult to decide where to start so will just say a bit about what we have been up to.

We have taken time out this summer with a visit back to the U.K. for lots of reasons. We have had two lovely celebrations in the family, one being the birth of my great nephew Max, so adorable and cute I just want to cuddle him all day, and the other the marriage of my lovely neice to her fiance which was a wonderful occasion and so enjoyable to be with all the family and have a great day catching up, eating and drinking plenty and having fun!! What a fabulous day we all had!!!!!!!!

Being in the U.K. also gave us a chance to do some shopping, for lots of lovely, lovely goodies which we cannot attain in Portugal easily (only at an extremely high premium price!!!!!), which is mainly sauces, certain foods, t-bags and cooking ingredients, which although we can adapt to living without, after a lifetime of using these products one tends to crave these things and this was a perfect opportunity to stock up on them!!!!!

Back here in Portugal we are seeing the onset of Autumn. We had our first taste of wet weather after months of glorious back to back sunshine and boy did it rain!!! Almost a full week of incessant rain which has totally transformed the look of our surroundings. In just over a week the terrain has changed from dry, burnt out grasses, to a beautiful carpet of lush green grass with the vines and tree leaves turning beautifully from green to a variety of autumn colours. I am pleased to say now though that the sunshine is back and we are basking in temps of 25/26 degrees and we are loving it. Sadly though the nights are drawing in quickly and it starts to make you thing of the winter months ahead. We should really be making the most of this sunshine instead of grabbing an odd hour pinched whenever possible as no doubt the heat in the sun will soon be fading away. The locals have been busy reaping their harvest of grapes, brewing up gallons and gallons of the red wine and Jeropiga, which is a desert (sweet) liquor made with Aguadente (a national drink - otherwise known as Portuguese fire-water!) and partially fermented red wine and is very nice in small doses (for me anyway!).

The bathroom saga continues!!

Hi all, well we are now into our 7th week of working on our new bathroom and before you all fall about laughing and exclaim seven weeks let me explain the reasons why.
This is the way things have panned out, and anyone living in portugal will have a little sympathy and understanding of how frustrating it can be at times.
D,ont get me wrong this was a big project to start with and things d,ont always go to plan.
first off out came the sink bidet and cast iron bath, which looking back was quite comical as i had to drag the bath through the house on a blanket bloody heavy they are on your own and then i had to slide it along the verandah and down the exterior stairs( i hope no one was secretly watching and laughing at me, only the goats eh!!.).
Anyway old suite out and two walls to knock down which resulted in around fifty buckets of rubble being disposed of down my kind neighbours outside well.
I then re concreted the floor where the bath had been sunk and left a space for two new pipes to come through for the plumbing.i made a lovely job of screeding the floor ready for re tiling and then call the plumber to fit new pipes.
Now to the fun and games part, said plumber arrives refuses to solder two new pipes saying original pipes are wrong size, (What i say flabbergasted) but oh no we have to then have three quarters of the concrete floor ripped out for two said pipes and a new soil pipe, more mess more rubble and of course i had to re concrete the floor afterwards.
On the work side everything else has been relatively easy i rebuilt a new wall for the double shower and proceeded to re tile the walls.
So to recap on the timing issues materials here are sometimes extremely difficult to resource and have involved roughly seven to ten outings into the main city, about ten trips to the builders yard and even a nine hour round trip to lisbon thrown in.
We have used 30 metres of polished stone tiles on the walls all eight walls i may add here, 200 kilos of adhesive,15 metres of stainless steel tile trims and two different types of tiles on the floors.The toilet, shower and vanity units have all had to be bought at separate places to achieve the look we wanted.
We are now onto our fourth newly purchased (specialised) drill bits as drilling the said polished stone tiles is an absolute mare, even the plumber failed an attempt with his top of the range pnuematic all singing all dancing mega expensive drill, more fun and games.
So whilst the sun has had its hat on averaging around 40 degrees,we have,nt seen it suntans have all but disappeared,but he ho we nearly have a bathroom, i reckon about another full week will see it off,so eight weeks in total of hard graft and frustrations, cant wait to finally end standing on the kitchen sink for my strip wash and showing my bits off to all and sundry and take a lovely relaxing shower and return to normality.
Luvly jubly...... pics to follow soon (the new bathroom that is) not me and my bits!!!!!!!!.

Not enough hours in the day !!!!!!!!!!!!!

We can't believe we are almost at the end of August and are sat here wondering why we haven't had the time to get out much and see and enjoy what this country has to offer us. I can't believe we have a beautiful river beach 5 minutes away and several more locally and we just don't have enough spare time to get out and enjoy them !!!

Longing now for the days when most of the renovation jobs are complete so we can take time out to do other stuff. Whilst its immensely satisfying and lovely when another room is "finished" I can't help but feel a bit niggled because there isn't enough time for pleasure. I can think of a at least a dozen places or things we were hoping to do this summer and haven't got round to doing them but, hey ho we will get there at some point in the future! Having just said that, we have spent the last two weeks partying at the festas in our local villages and having a blast, so I'm thinking now a holiday to recoup from that would be a jolly good idea!

The garden has been quite easy to keep on top of, and we have had good results and disappointments! The good results have been the peppers, leeks, onions and tomatoes - ooooooooooh so pleased, plentiful and delicious. I have peeled and chopped lots of tomatoes and frozen them ready for the winter months. Peas, courgettes and beetroot have done well, parsnips now (I think) are ready to be pulled.
My biggest failure has been the runner beans. They were growing at an amazing speed, well leafy and lots of flowers but no beans!!!!!!I am a novice at growing runner beans (I can remember my Dad having lots of success) but here in Portugal I now realise that beans and peas, although they like the sun, they have difficulty tolerating the immense heat and need gallons of water to keep them going. I would appreciate any advice on growing this veg if anyone has any! We need to read up on the planting times in Portugal as they differ from the UK to tolerate the weather. I have noticed in other gardens too that the sun has burnt the runner bean plants but have also spotted a lovely row with lots of beans but this plant has white flowers so maybe its the variety of bean I need to be looking at. I have now planted butternut squash, cauliflowers and cabbage for the winter and they are doing well so far.

The fruit trees have been pathetic this year owing to the amount of rain we had but the one that has come out tops (in our garden) are the pear trees. Although we only have two small ones they have been loaded down with fruit.

I took a trip back to the UK in July and whilst away Rob (never one to sit idle!!!) got stuck into "ripping out the bathroom suite". How nice was it for me to miss out on that fun!!!! Thankfully the loo is in an adjacent room and the shower is usable until we reach the point of refitting a new one, so being without a bath, bidet and sink basin is do-able whilst the work is in progress. We are tiling the whole of the room and have built a wall to turn the shower area into a double shower space. We decided to go with a double shower and do away with the bath and the bidet. A new toilet is to be fitted inside the bathroom and a vanity unit with basin is to be fitted.

We have completed the wall and floor tiling of half the bathroom and (all being well) will see the toilet fitted by the local plumber and the vanity unit and sink purchased this week and, dare I say, "fitted" but we shall have to see how well we achieve buying the vanity unit etc we want. A trip into Lisbon we think will sort that one out.
A couple of pics of the original bathroom:-

Thw picture below shows where the vanity unit and basin will sit, on the right-hand side of it is the next area to be tiled, and will become the shower area. The existing shower area is inset and now the separating wall is built it will give us double shower space. Opposite the vanity unit will sit the toilet.

lets get this party......STARTED!!!!!!!!!

Hi everyone well for those perhaps not in the know with august fast approaching its festa time again, when for the whole of portugal that means party on night after night in pretty much every village.
It,s a time when many lisbonites come back home for their hols to see their families and immerse themselves wholeheartedly in endless nights of celebration.
we kick our village activities off this week with the opening of bar tropical our local cocktail bar opening for more or less around the clock followed by the allnite dance party in conquieros complete with international dj,s and travellers from all over europe, which incidentally just this week i have seen people at our river beach and bar at froia, from france, switzerland,sweden,italy,germany, and brits who i have,nt met before.
The hardest part now is adjusting to setting off out when we would normally be coming back in!!!!.
I think it,s really nice when everyone in their villages arranges their festas to follow on one after another so you get chance to visit all of them, meet new people and make new friends.
With the long hot summer now approaching its peak, unfortunately we are now getting the usual forest fires of which we had one on monday which took all day to get under control with the water planes continually flying over for almost ten hours, and huge black smoke plumes coming into the garden not a nice thing to see quite frightening really if i,m being honest.
This was immediately followed by power cuts probably due to electric cables getting burnt.
With the temperatures reaching silly highs work has been slow progress,the new bathroom is currently underway but it is probably down to about four hours work per day as the heat does take it out of you.
P.s i will post some pics over the coming weeks of the old/new bathroom and of course the festas which should be great fun again i hope!!!.

The Heat Is On ..............

After experiencing one of the worst winter's in over 100 years in Portugal (a quote I have heard before in other countries when on holiday either be it for the summer or the winter!) with the contintous downpours and cloudy days, we are now well and truly into the "hot, hot summer months", well into the mid 30's and rising !!

We decided to try out our first full winter here managing with just the open log fire to see how we coped and which way forward we should go with the heating aspect. Well, I can tell you it was absolutely bloody freezing at times in the house!!!!! Never lived anywhere where it can be warmer outside than inside during the winter months!!!! How I wished so many times for the "flick of a switch" to turn on the gas central heating. Anyway it is not an option to have gas central heating as mains gas in not available here in this part of Portugal. We have looked into the other various methods of central heating, mainly using log burners with boilers run either on oil or logs and the one we would have chosen for its potential and economy unfortunately is not achievable for us to fit, due to the location of our fire place as we have a staircase running behind the fire wall down to the cellar so a back boiler cannot be fitted. We have fitted 2 low cost electric panel heaters, one in the bedroom and kitchen and have a portable oil-filled radiator. We have had several double glazed windows and doors fitted to stop the draught and are, this week, having two more double glazed windows with mosquito blinds fitted in the lounge and the french door is to be fitted soon after.

After a lot of thought we have decided to go down the "air conditioning route". We were thinking of having a log burner fitted into the fire place but since the hot weather has kicked in we decided that air con would solve both our heating issues - the cold and the heat !!!! The hot continuous days during the summer means the house heats up unbearably and is so intense that even opening windows has very little effect on cooling down the rooms so this week we have had an inverted air conditioning unit fitted in the lounge and our initial opinion is that it "is bliss" to sit in cool comfort. As the air con provides instant heat we are definitely having a unit fitted in the bedroom which will also cure the damp issues which we have found occurs during the winter months with the extreme difference in daily/nightly temperatures. Our house is of the more modern build and is not built out of stone with 2 feet thick walls which work both as heat insulators during the winter and in the summer keeping the house cool. Also our roof needs insulating as in the summer the heat comes through and in the winter we lose the heat. That job is on our "to do list" but it will be later on as it will be a large project for us to renovate the loft into living accommodation.

Moving on to our current project - the fish pond and renovation of the "shed". The pond, however cannot be finished until we have brought over the pond filters and airiarators from the UK which will be later in the summer. However, we have almost finished cladding the shed in stone, the rendering and painting, and the stone cladding to the pond walls where possible before fixing the pond liner and it is beginning to look quite pretty.
The pictures show the original concrete shed and caging which we assume was used either as a chicken run or aviary and our new "mini casa" and pond to be which we have named "Anglers Inn". I have a sneaky feeling Rob is thinking of turning the garden shed into his adega (wine cellar) hence the name of the shed !!!!! Can't wait to start digging the pond out in this heat !!! Not!!!!

We have a family of black redstarts nesting in the shed wall so we have had to work round them and leave their "hole in the wall" nest as they have 3 hungry chicks and don't seem at all to mind us being there as they continue to fly in and out taking food for their little ones.