Holiday over, back to work!

I cannot believe we have been back from our trip to the UK for a week already. Since getting back Spring really seems to have arrived and we have had some lovely warm days although the nights are still quite chilly outside. The house, though, does seem to be taking the warmth from the day and hanging onto it as, for the last couple of nights we have not had to turn up the heating from its daily setting of 16c.

I know to some of you 16c will seem a low temperature to have the heating set at, but as we spend most of our days outside with the door open for the dogs to come and go as they please, there is little point having the heating set higher as all we would be doing is trying to heat the rest of Spain, and believe me, the rest of Spain can pay their own heating bills.

Neil finally got the tiling on the patio area outside the utility room finished last week. This has seemed a long job since we first put the shuttering up for the concrete pad, but the weather had really not been good for working outside since Christmas. We’ve been able to snatch the odd day but nothing more, and you cannot work with concrete and tile cement if the weather is too cold. This patio area is for storage and for drying the washing. It is a good corner that gets a lot of the wind so hopefully the towels and bedding will dry much quicker than they do at the moment. The front of the house is so well sheltered from the wind, which normally blows from some northerly direction, that unless the sun is out the washing just hangs there limp and wet. The utility has been great as a drying room this winter but it has been frustrating when there has been a good drying breeze and I’ve not been able to make use of it.

Our next ‘job’ is the fence. We are not going to try anything so ridiculous as to fence in all our land, trying to fence in 7 acres would be a task similar to that of painting the Forth road bridge. So, we have decided to fence in the immediate area around the front and side of the house. This will mean we have safety from any roaming animals getting near the house or the dogs, it means at night Brandy & Brinkley are close to the house and I know where to find them, and it means I can start to plant out my vegetable patch without becoming a, ‘All you can Eat Buffet’ for the rabbits, of which we have many.

On Friday, when I was down in town I received a phone call. ‘Estás la mujer de Nil?’ Now, this has been asked of me many times since moving to this house and it always make me smile. I no longer have my own identity, I am simply the ‘wife of Neil’. ‘Sí, claro’ I responded and then waited until I managed to hear enough words I recognised from the following rapid fire conversation to work out who was ringing.

It didn’t take me long to realise it was the ‘Metal Man’. All the stuff for our fencing was ready. I was only a hundred yards away so I said I would call into the office as it is so much easier talking face to face. They wanted to deliver everything that afternoon and wanted to know if someone would be at home. Apparently, even the ‘wife of Nil’ would do. All the Spanish call Neil, Nil which I find quite amusing for a language which generally pronounces every letter – we now have a redundant ‘e’.

And so, we are now the proud owners of a pile of fence posts, rolls of chain link fencing and more brackets and bolts than I’ve ever seen outside of B&Q.

Hopefully the weather will remain warm and dry for the next few weeks while we are digging holes, concreting posts and unravelling a heck of a lot of chain link fence.