All day painting

Friday 16^th March

A major painting day, with me concentrating on the second and third coats of the main front doors, scraping off the paint from the Agua (water) box, with J scraping down and painting the window door and shutter..(pic attempts to show design for those who don’t know house). The paint was like treacle, so a long laborious job.

Attempted to find shower tiles in a Picinia (swimming pool shop) in Coin without success, but managed to order an outside blind for the second bedroom. Collected the ottoman from Beltran….just the flat-pack bits but no dowels or screw holes, so will be tricky to build…….hopefully not to difficult for kitchen builders with recent experience …

Thursday 15^th March

I painted the second coat of the front doors, running out of paint about 11 am and had to go out to buy another tin via the Correos (Post Office) to post L’s birthday card and a walk round the market. J cleaned the kitchen patio door frames and painted the patio garden bricks white. I also took 2 links out of the front room light and rewired, ensuring the earth was correctly wired….…did I do that ??... !! (Very few plugs in Spain are properly earthed !!)

After lunch on the porch, we measured up the wall for the cupboard and I drilled the holes and fitted it …..excellent job if I say so myself…..it is level horizontally, but tilts forwards by about 10° , but that’s because the wall is crooked !! We will decide whether to leave or rectify.

I got a call from the PC Doctor to say my laptop was cured, so we drove down to Fuengirola via AKI to pick up a new patio lantern, an under-cupboard light and a gardening trowel for J. Collected laptop from the PC Doctor….the diagnosis was a conflict between my wanadoo modem proxy server and the wifi setup…..anyway sorted ! Drove back into Fuengirola to the wifi café to renew my Norton anti virus subscription…..very important for the Old Blogger !!

Mother of the Bride's big shop

Wednesday 14^th March

We visited the second hand store who were holding a half price sale and bought 2 sofas for the front room @ 100€ each. The car’s persistent slow puncture got fast, so an urgent trip to the local tyre garage…8€ to mend puncture.

Drove to La Cañada in Marbella to shop for J’s “Mother of the Bride” wedding jacket….went to several boutique stores with nothing, and then Zara had loads of suitable jackets…..J chose a nice one, but it was slightly marked in her size…only one, so she asked if they had another one…….that was marked as well, so left it. Went to another shop with a good selection….J and L had visited there a few weeks ago….and found the perfect jacket…. more expensive than Zara , but well worth it.

Drove to Fuengirola to post blog and seek out a “PC Doctor” to sort out an IT problem, and left patient (laptop) there.

Testing, Testing, Testing....

Tuesday 13^th March

Weather still cold in the mornings, and I started painting the front doors…..little did we know it was a job that would last all week ! J did practical essentials such as scraping cement off dining room/front room floors …a thankless task, and scraping and painting the legs of the porch marble table. She also emptied the big under stair cupboard and cauchoed it, allowing all the excess building materials, tools and spare tiles to be stored in it.

We conducted a drain test in the afternoon…..2 large bowls similar to the five containers that were filling up every few minutes during the heavy floods last year……results not great, and the system still has deficiencies we think. The only positive was that the house did’nt flood !!

Less to read

Blog Editorial Policy Change

Hi to all regular blog readers. I have no idea how many there of you……probably just family and a few friends. Anyway, now that the house is nearly complete, and it feels like a real home, I am going cut out the day to day minutae and limit the posts to the key issues each day, keeping the pictures for those of you who don’t read it anyway……lol.

Monday 12^th March

Today consisted mainly of several trips to Beltran to order the ottoman J designed, and get missing bits of the wall cupboard doors, and a trip to the ferreteria for a multi-purpose sink waste-pipe kit (5€) and a watering can (4€) for the gardens !!

Put the wall cupboard together in the afternoon but did,nt fit it, as still undecided which wall to fit it on to. We will give it a few more days to test the ergonomics of the kitchen.