Happy chappies in the new kitchen !!!!

Well, at last, one year since arriving here I am now the proud owner of a new sparkling white kitchen. (I am using the term "I am" as it seems to be me who spends the most time in it!!!!!!) Rob's main attraction to this room appears to be the fridge and any cupboard which has finger food in it!!!

Because our kitchen is a relatively small room, we have chosen white to enhance the size and keep it looking light, it is north facing and is shaded from the sun. There is absolutely nothing traditionally "Portuguese" in it except for a few knick-naks and some small traditional vinho glasses (which are essential commodities in any event)!!!!!!

We have to say that the renovation work on this room has to have been a labour of love as we have had some arduous tasks to endure (we are not professionals in any sense of the word) but have managed to achieve most of the work ourselves, albeit a small amount of electrical work which although Rob did some of it the Portuguese wiring system is different to the English method so we thought it best to make sure all was correct with it. The hard work was all the prep work, the actual installation of the units was a joy and we have been pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to fit the Ikea kitchen. So now I am enjoying the benefits of a new working kitchen as I can get on with making my jams, bread, pastries, etc., etc., quite merrily without screaming blue murder as I had nowhere to put anything!!!!

I am posting a few pictures of the "old" kitchen ........




And some of the new ...............






OUR NEXT CHALLENGE .......

The last couple of weeks we have been back out into the garden picking up from where we left off last year. Even though we promised ourselves "time off" after the kitchen, we have been lured into more hard labour again as the weeds and grass are not pleasant sights so its been a case of "getting stuck back in" again. Also as the better weather is approaching (slowly) apparently the rainfall has been the worst this winter for 100 years and as it is time here to start getting planted up in the garden we have put off our "time off" for a few weeks when family start coming out to visit. Then, it is a definite rest period for us and cant wait for the pleasure of having family staying with us.

1st Anniversary of our adventure in Portugal

Hi everyone,


We are almost approaching the first year anniversary of our move to our new life here in Central Portugal and both Rob and myself would like to say a massive "thank-you" to all our blog readers. We decided to write this blog before coming to live here in Central Portugal (as we ourselves are avid readers of other peoples)and had gathered lots of interesting and helpful information from fellow bloggers about their daily lives here in Portugal, so we thought for us it was a nice way to be able to keep our friends and family back in the U.K. up-to-date with our antics in a light-hearted fashion, but we have been astonished at the amount of readers we have attracted over the last year from so many different parts of the world.

So far we have had over 2,600 views, as far away as the Phillipines, Russia, USA, South America, Canada, Northern Europe and Asia, We are able to see from the blogger dashboard how many viewers we have had each day and where our audience are viewing from. We would like to remind you all that you can become a member of our blog and leave us comments (hahahaha) so please if, you wish to give us any advice or help, or want any from us, (lol) please feel free to post us any comments you might like to make!!!

We are posting a few of our favourite photos of us taking some "time out" and hope you enjoy looking at them !!!!!

Fun on the quadbike



Out and about

Third Bedroom Photos

As promised in an earlier post we can now show you some photos of the third bedroom. Our other two bedrooms have been decorated in a modern style so we decided to use pedra which is traditional Portuguese stone on two walls and stiple painted the other two walls in magnolia to give it a bit of a "rustic look". We have laid the floor in ceramic tiles and added a couple of rugs. This bedroom is the coolest in the summer and the warmest in the winter so I'm thinking this may well be our main bedroom!

Before ........

After ...............

I am also very excited to be able to tell you that our first kitchen shopping trip to Ikea has been accomplished and we are now in possession of the wall cabinets and one base unit and even more pleased to be able to say the first units are already installed!!!! So watch this space for news on our long awaited kitchen!!!!!!!!

SLOW PROGESS .............................

Well we don't seem to have much to report to you on the progress being made at "Casa Oasis" this month !!!! January has been a very difficult month for us as the weather has been unkind (I know we should not be complaining as rain is better than snow and ice!) but it has held up the progress and my new kitchen still seems a million miles away! The rain has been (or seems to have been) incessant with only a few bright sunny days in between and a few weeks ago we had the most horrendous storms, which saw us having winds of up to 110 kilometres an hour (that is in Central Portugal and I believe it was much worse on the coast) and lasting for nearly 2 days which caused an enormous amount of devastation all over Portugal. We were quite fortunate as we had little damage, a few branches breaking off some trees, a few broken pots but nothing structurally was damaged. The gales were so severe many trees were felled causing electric pylons to crash down resulting in lengthy power cuts all over the country. We had a 25 hour power cut but some places in Portugal had 3 days with no power or phone lines so we were relatively lucky. I have now discovered that watching a log fire burning in the dark (with just some candles for ambience!) can be more entertaining that most TV channels on a Saturday evening!!!

The downstairs bedroom was put on hold whilst we began work demolishing the kitchen. As mentioned in our previous post the chiselling off of the kitchen tiles was a complete and utter nightmare. Our poor hands have been battered and bruised to bits but I am now pleased to say all the tile debris and concrete pillars in the kitchen have been dismantled and have now been carted off to the local tip in their bucketfuls and good riddance to them!!!!!! Oh and the wooden kitchen units have come in very useful - they have given us hours of heat burning away on the fire so at least we had a result there!

The only remaining fittings in the kitchen now are the taps which are built into the wall. The plumbing aspect will be a challenge so not looking forward to that one!

All being well we shall be off to Ikea next week to pick up some units ready for installation. Out shopping tomorrow for sink unit and appliances so that will prove interesting!!!! Also have the wall tiles to pick up so it now feels we are making some gradual progress.

We are well and truly glad to see the back of this month but are pleased to say that today, Thursday the 31st January, we have had a beautiful hot sunny day which has certainly given us "the feel-good factor" and has given us a great boost!

Festivities over ........ Back at work !!!!!!!!

Hi everyone, both myself and Rob would like to wish all our readers "A Happy and Healthy New Year". This has been our first Christmas in Portugal so was a little unsure how the Portuguese celebrate the festive season. The build-up was very low-key, Shopping Centres were nicely decorated but there didn't appear to be any of the "shopping madness" that everyone suffers with (and endures) like back in the U.K.!!!

Here Christmas Eve is celebrated more than Christmas Day. The day begins with the men out on their tractors gathering tree stumps to make bonfires which they light about 9pm in the evening. In our village we had 3 bonfires in various places and it is usual for people to walk round to each other's bonfires and have a celebratory drink or some food cooked on the bonfire. Dinner is mostly eaten (about 8 o'clock) and usually the meal will traditionally be bacalhau (the cod fish meal) with potatoes and cabbage. We walked down to our local bar and ended up going into the Church as the bar was empty and the Church was full to watch the service. It was very different to a typical Church of England service with Carols, etc., (the Portuguese are mainly Catholic) members of the local community took part in the service, remembering their loved ones who are no longer with them. After the service it was straight into the bar and people gathered around the bonfires. We then went on to the bonfire at the bottom of our lane and was immediately invited to various wine cellars!

Chocolates and nibbles were being handed out and then food was being cooked on the fire! We gave up about 3 am and went to bed and left them to their cooking!!!!

Christmas Day was spent with our lovely friends Luisa and John, Andrea (Luisa's daughter) and Julie and Barry (not forgetting the lovely woof woof Lucy). Luisa cooked us a lovely dinner followed by 6 different deserts!!!! Home-made Christmas Pudding and mince pies with custard and I was "in pudding heaven", not to mention her famous cheesecakes and how lucky was I to be loaded up with lots of cake and puddings to go home with!!!!!

For the New Year's Eve celebrations we were invited to our Poruguese friends' house where we were treated to a feast of king prawns,dressed crab and lots of other party food and plenty of vinho!!!! We counted down the minutes to the New Year with our friends and later on went to the all night Dance Party in the village community centre, organised and run by the young people of the village, and then staggered back home at 4.30 am !!!!!! Needless to say New Year's Day was spent on the couch feeling pretty dam rough!!!!!!!

Joal, Mum, Filipa, Pedro, Carol

Sarah and Bruno, Carol

So Back to Work ................

Just before Christmas we began working in the downstairs bedroom which we shall use in the summer as it will be cooler in there but mainly it will be used for guests. After painting the ceiling and texturing two walls Rob is busy covering two walls with stone and tiling the floor. Our weather has been a mixture of nice sunny days and cloudy and rainy days which has made the job seem more drawn out as we have had to use a heater to dry out the adhesive used on the stone and floor tiles so it has been a slow and drawn out task! However, most of the floor tiles are laid and the majority of stone has been fixed to the wall.

Tomorrow morning will be spent tracking down the guy who sells us the stone (mostly to be found in his local cafe bar) and once we have bought our next load of stone we are devoting the rest of the day to chiselling off the wall tiles in the kitchen. I started doing it yesterday and thought we had "got lucky" as the first few came off easy and then they wouldn't and are now coming off in minute pieces instead of whole tiles which means it is going to be a tedious, frustrating and long drawn-out job!!!!!!!!!!!!

On our next post we shall print photos of the bedroom and update you on our next challenge - the long awaited for kitchen !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hallway finished at last !!!!!

This job initially looked fairly easy and straight-forward but as usual, we were wrong, it never seems to happen the easy way for us!

After finishing off filling in around the window and door, woodwork and completing the paintwork etc we thought the floor tiling would be a doddle!!! When we have done any kind of tiling previously we have always used a flexible adhesive which is the best kind to use for the extreme temperature changes. What we didn't realise was that it would take about 3 days for the adhesive to dry out. The weather has been a mixture of sunny and rainy days so when it is damp and cold it takes forever for the adhesive to dry. Because the hallway leads to all the rooms Rob had to lay them in a way so as we could have access to all rooms without standing on any of the tiles waiting to dry out.
After a fair amount of stressing out it was decided to go out and purchase some rapid set adhesive to get the job finished before we both "lost the will to live". This speeded up the process and it was then my turn to get down on all fours to do a bit of "grouting". That wasn't easy either but hey ho the job is completed and we can stop walking around like demented crabs!!!!

All we need to do now is to go out shopping to buy some pictures and some new rugs to give the hallway some colour and warmth!!

Harvesting the olives ......

November and December is the main harvest time when everyone is out in their gardens or fields getting stuck in, helping each other to pick their olives. The quality of the olives will depend on what sort of weather the country has had, but as we are novices all we can say is that we have had plenty and have reaped a good return.

As we are "olive picking virgins" we were shown how to strip the branches simply by running your hand (or you can use a tool) down the branch for the olives to fall off onto large sheeting placed under the tree which also catches any that fall off anyway. They are then packed into large plastic sacks and tied up until its time to go the press.

We asked our good friend Jose to help us with this procedure as he is in a Farming Association. We have in our village a building called the Cooperativa Agricola where the olives are pressed. The procedure begins with the olives being put into a machine to strip off all the stems, leaves etc and washes them.

The next stage is the olive are pressing where the oil is filtered and strained off into huge tanks and is then ready to be poured off. Your olives are weighed and recorded into a logbook and you are then given back in pure virgin olive oil the amount the weight produced. We collected 70 kilos of olives which produced 9 litres of oil which we were well happy with. Unfortunately we still have lots more but at the moment cannot spare the time to pick them.

I was so proud to see my name in the log-book along with all our locals, I am showing you a picture!!!!

And the final result :- 9 litres of pure virgin olive oil !!!