The Cage.

You may be excused for thinking this has something to do with the dogs but you couldn’t be more wrong. It’s to cage in an inanimate object.

Living in the middle of the campo we are lucky to have both mains water and mains electric but we don’t have gas. Out here it’s all bottled or tanked. We had thought that we would be using the large gas bottles from Repsol to run the heating system but during one of our trips to the Poligono we came across another system from Cespa where they do a mini-tank which holds enough gas to do us for about 8 months – much better than having to keep changing bottles every month. So, we asked what was needed and it turns out there were 2 criteria – 1, that the delivery wagon can get to the house to deliver the tank and top it up and 2, that we build a large cage to stop people accessing the tank.

The following day the tecnico came out to assess the access and told us we were fine for the tank. All we needed was a concrete pad 1.5m by 2m enclosed by a cage with an access door. He told us where we could get this from on the Poligono and that was our next job. Once all the licences are submitted it takes about 20 days for the tank to be delivered so that was our timescale for sorting out the cage.

Neil had previously convinced me that we needed to buy a cement mixer as we have lots of building work to do. He got his first chance to use it last week when my washing machine arrived (such a luxury, to have a washing machine again) as we needed a concrete pad in the garage for it to stand on. That was about 1m square so now, we needed a pad about twice the size. So, over the last 3 days we have taken delivery of all the posts, the gate and wire fencing we needed and laid the concrete pad with the posts in place. It has to be said, there is a certain satisfaction in seeing something come together like this – it grows very quickly.

The biggest problem we had was keeping the dogs from leaving their paw prints everywhere!

So, cage in place, radiators in place – bring on the gas!