End February 2011 London
BLOG 58 Really?
Things at home are improving: I now have time to think about Turkey and am not so caught up in the present that I can’t think about the future. The whole point of buying and building the villa was to fulfill that dream of having a place abroad in the sun where everyday worries float away – a peaceful place away from the constant crush of people, traffic, commitments and heavy skies. That place still exists but I can’t seem to reach it. Now OH is getting better – admittedly slower than I’d hoped – I want us to get there.
The time is fast approaching when I’ll be returning to work. Instead of working full time, I’ll go for two days a week. It will be strange to go back to the different world of boisterous teenage students, hurried tea and chats in the staff room, marking online registers, being a disciplinarian when students are late or misbehaving, being a grown-up friend when they’re upset about something (usually a broken romance with a fellow student), marking portfolios, keeping up with endless emails and demands from management and writing assignments. Very different to the hospital world and that of the home-carer-wife.
We are getting used to our routine and changed circumstances – to living an upstairs/downstairs life as far as sleeping arrangements are concerned. If OH keeps up his progress, it won’t be long before he can move upstairs.
I receive an unexpected email from L and there are attachments! My entreaties/threats have finally had some effect! When I open the attachments I can see that a little progress on the building has taken place. It seems that the company responds to the latest, loudest demand – which tells me that I must keep on demanding. This will be exhausting. I then respond thanking her for the email but demanding faster progress so that our villa catches up to those of our Russian neighbours. I note that the latest photos do not show even a corner of their villas (unsurprisingly!). I remind her that the next tranche of money, according to the revised contract, will only be paid once the grass is planted. My reasoning for this clause at the time I negotiated the revised contract was that grass would only be planted when the building was more or less complete (so that the garden would not be ruined by heavy boots and machinery).
The final £7000 is due right at the end, after “snagging”. Snagging is the correction of all the little things that one can only find by occupying the villa for a couple of weeks. I was thinking that if we holidayed there during July – a few weeks after the deadline for villa completion (when the weekly penalties kick in), that would give us a chance to see outstanding issues for the snagging list and make sure they were corrected. In hindsight, seeing how slowly things are progressing, correcting snagging issues while we are there now seems a forlorn hope. But then, I guess I’m an optimistic person: I live in hope. As for the Tapu, which I’d been told was important to receive, the contract stated that it would be exchanged upon receipt of final payment. At the time of signing this revised contract, all this seemed perfectly reasonable.
The big questions looming are:
Will the villa really be ready by end of June?
Will OH then really be well enough to travel?
Will we really be able to assess the snagging issues in the limited time we’ll be there?
Will Infinity really fix up these issues sufficiently in such a short time or provide evidence for us to part with the remaining money?
Will we then really get our Tapu as promised?
Really?
. . . to be continued . . .usually posted on Thursday