You know you're in trouble when your wife says: "I am sick camping!" She referred to our House unusual toilet regulations. We had settled into a new House, an old apartment in a picturesque village in southern Spain.
It was great. But there one or two were... eh... Disadvantages. How take a trip to the bathroom. It was not an easy thing. From the bedroom you climbed two flights of steps, went to evade staggered on the paving stones on the road, passing goats, then crashed into the former stable.
Saddened by my wife lack of carefree Gypsy temperament, agreed the I in the builders call. And that's when our problems started.
A puzzle, which developed in the course of centuries is our Pueblo. Six other properties abut my home and garden. The neighbor is sleeping on my bathroom and her living room is under my kitchen. So, make structural changes, you need not so much a generator as a diplomat, who is handy with bricks and mortar.
He has the key role of the negotiations with neighbouring countries. Personal relationships are all. It is therefore advisable, employ a local – he knows everyone and their families.
First name will also be he conditions with the people in the Town Hall. So, he will know how far you can extend the building codes.
Meet our crumbling and renewing roofs elected we Pablo, happy, GNOME-like fellow, charged less than the other generators. We found out for good reason - later.
If the building permit by came, I saw that it the extension mentioned a window and little else precious. So I queried Pablo.
"Hombre, you want the town hall with unimportant details to make?" Would you pay ridiculous an architect, which can draw you to the whole place down? No? "So let's get on with the job."
He and his men met the House as a whirlwind bashing from old soils and cover, smashing through walls whitewash sealed, mud and stone. The building was shaking, but I thought Pablo must know what he did. He also was a Albañil (Masons).
Finally, after months of work, done dust and chaos, when the job was neither we nor the builders of the sight of another, could tolerate. We sat back a new era of convenience enjoy.
Then, we noticed that the floors that we asked a few inches to be raised, be they were below more headroom on same old. "Forgotten", explains Pablo.
And then it rained. Water poured all over the place. Pablo turn no hair. All new roofs as they were, he told us. He said all its roofs. It turned out like a sieve, the roof leaked, because he had overlaps the protective strip asphalt the wrong way.
As we pushed to avoid dripping rainwater in a corner, I offered my wife obvious comfort: "It's like camping."
* David Baird, a British journalist who thought he knew something about live abroad - until he moved in his dream home in South Spain. He recorded the tragicomic events, in his book, sunny side up - twenty-first century is a Spanish village (http://santanabooks.com/). David has reported for leading newspapers and magazines all over the world. His other books include travel, guide, history and fiction. His recent publications are miss the Fiesta typhoon season (fiction), do not! (Fiction) and between two fires - guerrilla war in the Spanish Sierras (acclaimed documentary film about a forgotten war). The last three books are published by Maroma press, http://maromapress.wordpress.com/
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