The Small Things
Sprinting through the spreadsheet mountain
We love having friends over – especially the ones who haven’t been to our place in a while.
“Wow...you’ve done so much! It’s amazing...it’s almost finished,” they all say and we breathe out a little, smile and nod to each other acknowledging the reminder of just how far we have actually come in such a short time.
Blessed by the reassurance we aren’t complete idiots we can relax into a nice lunch and present a little Alentejo tell-and-taste wine story, imagining a day when we’re finished enough to open and do this for strangers.
Then all the worries start flooding back in.
But before I plunge into the long list of sleep-sapping challenges, something else lifted my spirits this week...something that reminded me of the way the building started.
It’s all about the small things, and it first happened when this whole crazy project hung in the balance, when Ana and I took turns telling the other why it was madness and when the loan was about to time out without a single receipt being filed.
Despite having no builder under contract, no construction permit and no deposit paid, a large pile of steel reinforcing rods turned up one day.
They weren’t invited, they weren’t expected, they hadn’t been paid for, but yet they were there – maybe ten thousand euros’ worth – on the bit of flat land that used to be a eucalyptus forest.
That’s when we realised it was going to happen.
This week it wasn’t an arrival which marked a milestone, but it was the departure...of a machine which has fascinated me since it first landed.
The giant red cement mixer on wheels scoops up ratios of sand, gravel and cement by the bulldozer bucket.
It churned out foundations, pillars and beams...and now it’s gone.
Wooden boards, building materials, scaffolding have all slowly been melting away and everything starting to look a bit less like a building site and a bit more like an off-grid eco-luxe countryside lodge.
Maybe we are almost finished?
The heat pumps have finally migrated from sheltering under plastic on the hillside to taking up their positions ready for installation, and our focus has firmly shifted towards the interiors which Ana has been hammering away at for months now.
Malcolm Gladwell argues you need 10,000 hours to attain true expertise in anything and Ana’s not far off when it comes to developing the style of our interiors.
The beds are ready for delivery, the leather sofas and beautiful headboards are here, one kitchen is on its way from Germany, two more are coming from nearby, we have fridges, a stove, cork flooring on order, marble tables being made and are investigating lighting.
We have to find the perfect wine tasting glasses, the right crockery, bedside tables, wardrobes, chairs, patio furniture...the Excel sheet is long and sprawling.
It’s a lot of shopping: sourcing, chasing, finding, thinking, researching, calculating and delving for discounts.
An unexpectedly speedy car service date gave us a day in the Algarve to wander and ponder in shops and factory stores and with the new-found confidence to spot a deal and go with it.
It was an expensive day but a fun day – we found ourselves smiling quite a lot – and it was punctuated by our regular Algarvian sushi lunch.
It’s curiously calming to spend large amounts of borrowed money, knowing that every single thing we buy is one less thing we need to buy.
The receipts are piling up and I’m desperately trying to keep up with the accounting: are we over budget (yes), is it by too much (hopefully not).
Should we have invested in the two stand up paddle boards for guests to rent out? (Probably not). Are they a good addition to the business and what we are offering? (Probably).
Sadly we missed this month’s auction, which is probably best given what we picked up last time around (a fruit machine was not on the Excel sheet).
This week’s hugely welcome visitors were our pals Richard and Pauline who run a lovely café in the Algarve called Earth and brought visiting Dutch journalist/photographer couple Jaaruen and Eline to see our project.
“Congratulations,” Richard said...which stopped me in my tracks: that’s the kind of thing you say when something’s finished.
The floors are still a mishmash of colours from yellow to greige and our unpolished concrete people have gone very quiet on us since trying a new treatment which failed to solve the problem.
Oh, and the big concrete poop remains a defining feature.
There’s the obvious absence of doors and windows accompanied by builder’s shrug and the concerning ease at which “beginning of March” became “beginning of April.”
Electricity cables loll against walls and the water treatment station is still a work in progress, but “will we get the licence in time?” is still our most common refrain.
It’s not a baseless fear.
Our engineer keeps telling us of another tourist lodge that still hasn’t been licensed more than a year since it was finished...and we have been trying to get paperwork for our guesthouse for almost three years now.
We’ve been throwing everything at it – the surveyor has already been to precisely map out where all the buildings ended up – and we are on the town hall’s fast track programme...but that really depends on the track: dirt roads are a lot slower than tarmac.
Our dirt track has been particularly slow recently because of all the rain, and a gaping cavern had opened which Cassie the Hilux was increasingly struggling to navigate.
I may have passed my Portuguese exam last week, but I still didn’t quite follow the Cow King who I bumped into at the building materials shop a couple of weeks ago when he announced something about rocks.
It was all good, I just didn’t know exactly what he meant, but I did understand his phone conversation with Ana “your husband doesn’t speak much Portuguese” he said, “but I have a load of rocks which you can have to repair the road.”
And so we had a workout, and I think it worked out.
We also have the Cow King to thank for our lunch, along with a failing freezer, which led Ana to reach for the bottom drawer and something meaty from the hunting club.
It’s always worth having a bit of freezer space for when O Rei das Vacas drops by with blood-dripping blue plastic bags of wild boar (wild boar) or venison.
With the clock ticking on the lifespan of my mum & dad’s old John Lewis fridge freezer (which must be at least 25 years old), the javali was released and slow-cooked by Ana to perfection.
Slow cooking also sums up my experience with DHL Express, which is expressing no real urgency in delivering my original birth certificate and a new officially stamped one from the UK so we can take the next bureaucratic step towards Portuguese longevity.
Ana has Portuguese citizenship and now I have my shiny new A2 language qualification we just need some stamped, translated, stamped again, re-officiated, and double-authenticated paperwork and we get new passports.
Toda a gente adora um novo passaporte.
Please keep watching this space...but I do have temporary residency until 2027, so we should be OK.
I thought the whole learning a language thing might be the hardest – and it has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done...and this is just stage one...but hey...just like this whole crazy adventure it’s all aboot surprising yourself, eh? (IYKYK)
It’s the small steps that are getting you closer to the glorious day when your step back
Champagne chilling in the buckets
A chilled glass in your hand and you turn to Ana and you both say
“We did it , despite every set back , every road block ( figuratively & realistic) here we are at last thriving in this incredible place we have created “
There is cheering & clapping & music
You’ve both got this and it will be amazing
Your supporters will be queing up to reserve a room when it is all finished, and I will be one of them! Mentally I’m with you on your mammoth journey.