Renovating the wine cellar (Adega) in Portuguese

After Christmas Rob decided as an "inbetween" job to start work on the Adega. As you will see from the pictures it looks like another daunting task and not for the faint-hearted (me) so I let Rob decide on how he wants to turn this old wine cellar into "our" indoor drinking den!!!!

Last year we took out the old wine making barrels as they were full of woodworm and disposed of them.
We are going to name our new Adega, Charlie's Bar, in honour of Rob's father, who is sadly no longer with us, we also have a second name to be known more Portuguese name for our locals!!!!!!, so one name will be done in spray paint and stencil and the other probably out of small letter tiles.
Again this has proved to be a tough job, we have had to kango out the floor to make more room height and to get it level and all the mortar for block laying and rendering has yet again been mixed by hand in a bucket, due to a lack of "battinera" cement mixer, knew i should have bought one three years ago!!!!!, anyway it keeps you out of mischief and works the beers off.
There will probably be around another full months work before it is completed, but at least it will be ready for the spring/summer shenanigans, so a couple of pics of current progress with the rest of pics when finished.

Bring on 2015 !!!!!!!!!!!!

Firstly Rob and myself would like to wish all our viewers and happy and healthy 2015!

This year our Christmas plans had to be changed as sadly we couldn't share it with our friends here owing to illness so it was just me and him and eat and drink! Traditionally the locals celebrate their Christmas on Christmas Eve with dinner at 8 pm opening xmas presents, followed by lighting bonfires in different locations around the village, midnight mass, then celebrating with copious amounts of vino and food, being consumed late through the night outside at the bonfires! However, we managed to fall asleep (the telly was boring!) before the late celebrations began to take place and unfortunately for the New Year's Eve celebrations as I was unwell so missed out on that too!!!
However, celebrating on your own means you don't have to go to too much trouble so we enjoyed a morning full of skypes and telephone calls with family and friends, ate a scrummy christmas dinner and then toddled off to the cafe for more alcohol. We have had a beautiful December mainly full sun and clear blue skies and Christmas was no exception. A few frosty nights have been endured but it does repay you with temperatures sometimes reaching 16/17 degrees where you can sit outside and enjoy the sunny rays.
I am posting a few pics of our christmas day to share with you !!!

Winter fish pond with lazy fish

Update on the loft conversion

Progress on the loft conversion has slowed down over the last month with the intervention of the Christmas and New Year celebrations and we have also been hindered by a late delivery of plumbing materials and fitting. However, we are still pleased with the way it is coming together and once the plumber has finished his side of things we can move on to the final works and closure on this job - (thankfully) is the first word that comes into my head!!! It has been a hard project with so much work to do as we started with bare brick and wood, but we are confident the result will be well worth it and hopefully friends and family will enjoy a stay with us and we may consider lettings.

Since our last blog we have completed the laminated flooring and most of the floor tiling, apart from a few tiles which need to finish off when the shower and the vanity unit are fully fitted. The plumbing for the pipework which has had to be piped downstairs to the water tank is almost complete and all that's left is fitting the toilet and sink basin and finishing off the electrics for the shower. The tiling and stonework on the stairs have been finished and once all the dust (which is always endless) begins to disappear the final sealing all the stonework can be done. A final coat of paint is needed and a few other little odds and sods need addressing and we are well close to completion. We have sited some furniture and fittings but until all the work and mess in out of the way this will have be finished off once we are are that stage.

Views outside from the velux window

Veranda has been tiled

We have been wanting to do this job for ages, mainly for our benefit to make the veranda look nicer and another to stop rain penetrating through to the cellar walls underneath during the winter. So this year we decided it would be a "nice job" to do through the summer at a steady pace, and can almost say we enjoyed it until the tediousness of the grouting (my job) kicked in and with a fractured bone in my foot, gradually turned a nice job into grit my teeth and get on with it!
Well we are very pleased with the result it felt quite strange walking on them, almost like a cushion floor rather than concrete. We got the tiles through our local builder's merchant at a good price and we think it works well with Rob's idea to do the insteps in pedra (local stone) to compliment the pedra on the base walls to the house and patio.

And work on the loft conversion goes on and on !!!!!

It's been a while since we updated our blog telling you how we are getting on with our loft conversion. Having looked back through our blog I have just realized that we have only put on one post about the conversion and that was when we had finished bedroom 1 which was back in April! Since then we have finished bedroom 2 and are currently working on the middle room which will be a living room with an "en suite shower". We wanted this conversion to be a self-contained apartment, separate from our living space, so to make what we think is the best use of the 3 rooms up there, we decided on 2 bedrooms and a living room with a shower room. We decided 2 bedrooms would be better than having one bedroom and a kitchen as when family stay they will have the pleasure of the chef downstairs (me) cooking for them! When this room is finished the stairs leading from the loft will be tiled and at the bottom of the stairs we are taking out a small window and knocking out for a door to be fitted which will give outside entrance into the loft conversion and make it private from our living space. Outside steps will be fitted to the back of the house as the entrance to the stairs is on the first level of the house.

Earlier on in the summer we had a velux window fitted and unfortunately the supplier sent us a smaller one than we had originally asked for and the mistake wasn't noticed until the window was being fitted and by then it was too late to change! So we have just had to grit our teeth and get over it!!! It does still gives us a lovely view over the village though and gives more natural light into the lounge.

So now we are making progress with the shower room, firstly building the stud walls, then comes the plasterboard and then the plastering. We are using a waterproof plasterboard which you can tile straight onto for the shower and sink area.
Stud work

Plasterboard

Plastering

Good day's fishing on Halloween

Hi everyone, apologies yet again for neglecting our blog, it has been hectic as usual with ongoing work projects, family visits and holidays! We are currently working on four rooms so we will publish photos when things look more finished, which hopefully, won't be too far away. We are hoping to have the whole house completed by around mid March, apart from the Adega (wine cellar) that is, which is next Winter, project!!!!
So back to the fishing today it is my first outing since mid June and I thought I maybe a little rusty so to speak, but no it turned out to be excellent!!! Our Fishing Club has a competition on the 9th of November so I fished for three and a half hours today in practice for the following weekend's event.
I caught around fifty pounds of fish today, 9 carp, the biggest being around 8lbs, 11 crucians, a barbel and a fish I haven't caught here before. It was either a perch or an achega (river bass) not sure yet, which i will have to check it out on the web, it had some pretty meaty teeth on it anyway!
It was nice not to catch any catfish today as normally you have to wade through them and feed off them to get to the better quality fish, the only time I fish for them is on a very hard day when winning weights are going to be unusually low.
So, just a few photos from today and Happy Halloween everyone!!!!