5 trips in a Transit!

It’s amazing how much you can get in a Transit van when you try. After 5 van loads, 10 hours of driving, 3 days and a lot of hard work, we were in.

The first thing I made sure of, was that the bed was made because I knew by the end of the day we would both be totally worn out – seems the boys were too, they went to bed much earlier than Neil and I.

The first night in the house didn’t feel strange, although I thought it would. Maybe we have been spending so much time up there that it feels like home already.

I went out with the pups at about 11pm expecting it to be pitch black because there are no street lamps, other houses etc – but it was actually fairly bright because of the full moon and the clear sky. I could make out the trees and the hills and could still see the pups as they wandered around.

Monday saw a massive effort to get furniture in place and boxes unpacked and before long we had a lounge where we could sit and a table we could eat at. But that didn’t last for long.

On Monday afternoon, while I was through cleaning the villa, we had a call to say that the rest of the kitchen had come in. As tired as we were and as much as we would have loved to have sat down for half an hour in front of the TV, we knew it made sense to go and collect the rest of the kitchen units while we had the van, and so off we set for yet another 2 hours driving. Since then we have been steadily building and now we have a kitchen that almost looks finished.

Unfortunately, they only sent 8 doors, not 8 pairs of doors – so we are waiting for the rest to arrive – but at least we have cupboards to put things away in and we can use the tops of the base units as a work surface until that arrives on Monday, along with the washing machine. I calculate our underwear drawers will be fairly empty by the time the washing machine arrives so I hope it isn’t delayed!

I’ve been doing well with my phone calls this week because we also had a call to say that the cooker that was to be 3 weeks, is actually in stock and we can go and collect that, hopefully, tomorrow.

This morning the man from Repsol, (Spain’s equivalent of Calor) came out to tell us what we need for the heating system so we can be getting on with that and may even have some heat soon.

And, finally – the heating system is arriving this afternoon. I am just about to go and sit by KM 1 in the main road to meet the delivery man.

So, you may think, reading this, that everything is going smoothly – but we have had our panics. Firstly, when we were working on the house but still living in the villa we got into the habit of turning the electric off each night. Needless to say, on the day we brought our big fridge/freezer over, having borrowed cooler boxes to keep our food frozen, we stocked the freezer and then left the house, but not before turning off the electric – as normal. Ooops! What a lot of meat to throw away!

Then today, we set about putting in the shower cubicle. All the cables and pipes have all been put under the floors so it never occurred to us that they would have done something different in the bathroom, but yes – we managed to drill a hole through a water pipe behind the tiles, so while Neil was chiselling out the damaged pipe work I got into the car to drive to the end of the lane and phone the plumber! He saw the funny side of it and within half an hour we were patched up and had water again.

And I don’t suppose that will be the end of the problems before we are finished, but nothing insurmountable and all things we can laugh about over a drink in the evening.

Last night ended with a mass of colour in the night sky as the sun went down, sunsets here can be rather spectacular.

Well, time to load up the car with all the rubbish and flattened cardboard boxes and drive the 8 km to our rubbish bin so I can dump everything and also get a signal to upload this.

More in a few days! And I do have loads of photos but the connection is too slow to upload them now, my battery would go flat before they uploaded - so, they're for another time, sorry!