Well, what a busy few weeks this has been, I'm about four weeks behind here. Still coming up with so many parallels to Turkey, especially where bureaucracy in concerned.
House buying day arrives and after a couple of hours in the notars office we emerged with the keys to our house. A little bit of hanging around waiting for contracts to be amended a couple of times but largely we just chatted away to the two sisters who were selling the house on behalf of their elderly mother. Got on well with them and agreed to give them access during the following week to finish clearing the property out. We were just grateful that they were doing such a good job of it - there are a lot of rooms and every single one was full of junk and other crap.
R and D (our lawyer and his wife) had to scoot back to Cadiz straight away so off we toddled, keys in hand to see what we'd actually bought!
It doesnt matter how many times you view a property, you never take it all in. In our case what we hadn't realised was the sheer scale of the place - it's fecking enourmous!
Our bedroom is seven metres long by almost four metres wide. The upstairs kitchen (excluding the pantry) is over five metres by four metres, very unusual in an old Jerezano house. Several other bedrooms are five or six metres long by four metres wide. Thank god they all have tiles, carpeting that lot would be a financial nightmare
The roof terrace is thirteen metres by four, perfect for a kosk, a fidge and party!
Slightly stunned by what weve bought we headed off for lunch and returned about fiveish with pads, tape and laser measures. Spent a few hours getting some basic dimensions and deciding what walls we were going to knock down. All fun stuff.
Left about nine o'clock and headed off for a bite to eat and a well earned beer. One thing led to another and, at one in the morning, we found ourselves drinking extremely large gins in a small place round the corner from our flat.
Fast forward to eleven o'clock the next morning, my OH says "have you seen the bag with the house keys and tape measure etc?". Errr... no, was my reply. Can you believe it, we'd only had the keys for less than twelve hours and managed to lose them, probably due to several large Larios gins
A quick confab and we worked out that we'd definitely had it at the gin place, but the only issue there is that it doesn't open until seven o'clock in the evening. What a pair...
I popped round to see if someone was in, a cleaner or such like but no luck - however, looking through the window I could see our bag sitting on a table just inside the front door.
Huge sighs of relief all round and then at seven the walk of shame to retrieve our stuff...
We laugh about it now but it wasn't terribly funny at the time.
Now the hard work begins.
