We are really pleased with our little two bedroom bungalow, but we knew when we bought it that we would have to spend some money on it. The previous owners had owned it for a very long time but had never really spent any money on maintenance so everything is held together with blutack and sellotape!
On our exiting first visit after the sale, I quickly removed all the horrid ornaments and rugs, and set about cleaning the place from top to bottom and adding some bits and pieces of our own. It looked a little better, but we soon discovered that we didn't have the proper tools to do any serious work on the place, so we just sat back and enjoyed it.
It didn't matter, we had our own private detached house with a real pool, and it was warm and sunny, what else could we want? As we soon discovered, new drains would have been nice.
Without going into too much detail, we were forced to call out a drains expert to remove a blockage, which had been caused mainly by tree roots compromising the old drains. The expert manged to clear the blockage, but explained that we would have to build completely new drains very soon.
Oh well!
The pool is fabulous, a good size and there's a dolphin motif at the bottom and at first glace looks lovely and blue. However, there was a fine layer of dust, presumably from the roadworks which however much we tried to clean and filter out stubbornly refused to budge. We called in another expert, he did something or other and it improved slightly until the gardener tried to move a lever on the mechanism only for it to come off in his hands!
Oh well!
So far, so pretty much as expected, so we shrugged our shoulders, tried not to count how little money we had left and flew back to England in a good frame of mind, but aware that we would have to buckle down to get some cash for proper maintenance.
We both popped out for a couple of long weekends, but it wasn't until we went in January that the main event occurred. My Husband went out the day before me because I will NOT get up in the middle of the night to catch a plane, I feel ill all day, so I will only get on an afternoon or evening flight, and nothing will persuade me otherwise.
I did the right thing. As he walked down the steps to the front door, he looked through the kitchen window, and fancied he saw a shimmer on the terracotta tiles, which seemed not quite right. As he opened the door he was presented with an inch of water all over the main living area. Wading through, the entered the bedroom to find that although no longer under water that too had been soaked, including our lovely new mattress which had been lain on the floor because we hadn't yet bought the bed base.
Luckily it was lovely and sunny, so he opened all the doors and windows, dragged the rugs and mattress outside and set about restoring some kind or normality before I arrived the following evening.
On investigation he discovered that we had had two floods!! The water softener on the dishwasher had broken and the living room had been flooded with clean mains water for weeks, and the terrible rains had entered the bedroom which had virtually no guttering, and is built into the hillside at the back. It took a lot of work to get the place habitable again, and it still smells a bit musty, but hopefully after the summer sun it will be okay. The terracotta tiles are covered in salt stain, the bedroom has brown watermarks on the walls, and we have a new bill to re-build the drains and install new guttering, and repairing the front tiled area of over 6,000 Euros.
We STILL love it!