Arriving in Spain in the middle of August is a little bit like turning up to a party two hours early - nobody's about but they will be later.
Almost everyone we know in this area headed off to cooler climes at the beginning of August for a month, and watching the thermometer climb into the high thirties by lunchtime, then nudging into the low forties by mid afternoon who can blame them. Its been an exceptionally hot summer in the south of Spain this year and until you acclimatise, its pretty uncomfortable. Our apartment is a new build so has the ducted style of air con, aesthetically pleasing but nowhere near as efficient of controllable as nice big Samsung 24,000btu sitting on the wall. Used it for a couple of days at the beginning, but fortunately we've been back and forth enough times that we got used to the heat fairly quickly.
The 15th August is a public holiday - they seem to have a lot of them in Spain. Any holy day in the Catholic calender seems to warrant the downing of tools and partying. Our estate agent informed us the day before we arrived that they were on holiday that day but the owner of the flat would meet us there at 6:00pm.
She seemed a bit odd and talked at us in such rapid Spanish we hadn't a clue what she was saying. Couple of signatures on the rental agreement and off she toddled. Ten minutes later off we toddled in search of food and alcohol. Got back a few hours later and went to take a shower - waited for the water to heat up... and waited... and waited. Ok, there's obviously some switch needing switched or tap needing turned. Five minutes later we were cursing our new landlady - the water heater runs off bottled gas and both fecking bottles were empty. Cow.
Its an easy fix, but not at 11pm on the evening of a public holiday when you'd both had a drink so couldn't just jump in the car and get one from a 24hr petrol station. Welcome to Spain, the land of cold showers.
Day one as a Jerezano. Quickest shower ever and a trip to the local garage, €21.75 for a 12.5kg tub of butano. It got us discussing how so few places have solar here, madness when you consider the climate - we already knew the answer though, taxation is the issue. More about this later.
Next stop the bank. Our Spanish is OK, but not yet good enough for dealing with the level of complexity involved getting our cards and asking the questions that need to be asked. Result - our account manager used to work for Barclays in London. After a shaky start we got on well with him and he went above and beyond to sort a few things out.
On to the Orange shop. No point in putting fibre into a rental apartment so the Orange 4G is our best option. After a marathon Google translate session with a very pleasant young lady we exit 40mins later with a couple of new SIM's and an Orange MIFI router. Not cheap and a limit of 50Gb a month, so we'll need to be careful with streaming. Mobile contracts fairly expensive compared to the UK, not sure about compared to Turkey as Ive had a contract phone there.
There's not a great deal we can do now until we complete the purchase of the house, so we decide to go into holiday mode for a couple weeks!
After a week or so our lawyer gets in touch to say sorry, the notar is on holiday so we cant complete on the 31st August, earliest date is the following Wednesday. This was a real bummer as we'd been looking forward to getting started on the house. Getting a bit bored with holiday mode now.
Until now we'd been under the impression that our house had been constructed sometime during the middle of last century, 1940/1950's or thereabouts. There are some very old buildings in our street, but we were under the impression that our end was far more recent (no idea where this came from!). While arranging building insurance to kick in on the 6th I was asked if I had an exact construction date - 1940's I said but I will try and confirm the exact date. No point asking lawyer as he's on holiday in Canada, no point in asking estate agents are they're simply clueless about everything, so on to the internet to do my first bit of research wholly in Spanish.
First thing I found was an old estate agents ad from last year which stated that the property had been constructed in 1850. It must be an error I thought, so next step is to find some old maps and see what I can get from them. Net result is that it looks like our property was built sometime around 1829, with the possibility it could be as early as 1775. Wow!
Fortunately, the insurance company are ok with this and actually made some amendments to the policy to give us a higher level of cover while carrying out the refurbishment... or is now a restoration? Bottom line was €276 for building cover and they removed any clauses about reduced cover due to unoccupancy. Thanks guys.
Still bored though, so we decided to start sourcing materials. One of the major jobs is replacing the horrible green tiles that surround the central patio. They'd have to be replaced anyway as the render behind them is bossed due to damp (house been unoccupied for eight years).
We've used a lot of Spanish tiles on projects over the years, but they were always expensive - this'll be interesting to see what sort of price good quality tiles are when buying direct from the source. Armed with our sat nav and a list of tile companies we headed out to the industrial estates. We had a rough idea of what we were looking for, either a Moorish influenced tile or a Sevillana style. This is what we came up with;
These are the real deal - hand finished and with a beautiful texture. Truth be told, we doubted if we could afford to run these all the way round the patio, but I asked the bloke for a price anyway. Couldn't belive it... €24.75 per linear metre
what a result! Ok, it means somewhere in the region of €1,500 worth of tiles, plus the labour to fit them, but it does mean we can have something that closely resembles what would have been there in the first place.
More later...
JF
