What a Day...

The peace and quiet of our calm rural lifestyle

Sitting on the sofa chatting through the best place we could build a car park, we knew it was going to be a crazy day.

But after slurping down a mug of coffee and heading up the hill a little after 8.15am we had no idea of the level chaos that was already enveloping our building site.

We arrived to find a shipping container semi-suspended from the bucket of a huge bulldozer, one end pile-driven into the ground, the other scraping the edge of the mountain of dried cement known locally as the concrete poop.

What could possibly go wrong? Most things as it turned out.

I immediately went into “I told you so” mode.

Having spent the last week trying to get someone from the digger company to come out first to have a look and plan what to do I immediately went for our engineer José: “I knew this would happen – it’s like a slow motion car crash,” I wailed.

He shrugged, heads were scratched and a plan was hatched.

“They’ll find a solution,” he said calmly. “Things are done differently in Portugal from what you’re used to.”

I’m not really used to anything, having never built any houses, moved any large metal boxes or guided any diggers, I just thought planning was the right thing to do...but José is usually right and watches our back.

I was frantic, stressed and manic. Ana was the voice of calm.

Just as we were fretting about the container – and the increasing cost of unplanned machine hours – a cement mixer arrived and had to squeeze past the bulldozer.

It was the final day of the Nightmare Polished Concrete Floor Job Before Christmas...and at least the mixer had arrived and had the confidence to drive through the mud.

The main building inside and out: hopefully the new pour will dry the correct colour

The polished concrete guys have been anything but polished, and immediately started shouting about how they had to work the night before in the dark because there was no electricity.

There is power, they just didn’t ask where the socket was...but at least that provided an explanation for how wrongly they’d coloured the floors: they had done it in the dark.

They started work on November 7^th, got stuck in the mud reversing the cement mixer too close to the house to save them wheeling it, and then had an industrial dispute with management which culminated in dumping about 30 tonnes of cement on our land (the aforementioned concrete poop).

Then the company ghosted us for a fortnight, dropped by for one day only to do a couple of floors before disappearing again amid excuses about a national concrete shortage.

They were never seen again until this week when we pointed out the Fifty Shades of Yellow that now covered our supposedly uniform “gr-eige” floors – each relating to a different team using a different percentage of colour on a different occasion.

But then we had to travel to Lisbon for a bank meeting and they were left unaccompanied on the building site.

Doing the decks - the Unpolished Polishers did the decks in a day with the pump…who’d have thought that would be quicker?

We’d missed the sight of the large concrete pump arriving and doing all the outside decks in one day (why couldn’t they have done that weeks ago?), and apart from the different colours it seemed to have generally gone OK.

As we watched them shovelling concrete on top of the metal reinforcing grids (rather than placing the grids inside the hardening mass) and we fretted about whether they’d remembered to add the underfloor heating liquid, the doors and windows guy arrived.

He was wanting final confirmation of every PVC unit and I was battling to understand his Portuguese.

On the other side of the building site the bulldozer was now moving concrete slabs, lifting the workers’ cabin and having another go at placing the 40 foot shipping container on the four concrete feet built for the purpose.

We’d stopped it just before the tracked monster had taken a short cut across the “future vineyard” which we had seeded and turned over at great cost and effort a few weeks ago and had been delighted to see the green shoots now emerging.

Then the leader of the Un-polished Pratts started shouting at José for something else as his phone kept ringing.

Amid the madness Ana was preoccupied on her phone desperately trying to give directions to a delivery truck driver bringing us a solar pump kit from Spain.

I didn’t know where to turn. Everything was out of control, everything was happening at once and then Ana said I had to drop everything and drive to the main road to meet the delivery van and guide him in.

I got into the car, shut the door and enjoyed a precious moment of calm.

New concrete poop: not quite as tricky to shift

Google maps take delivery drivers up impossible hills – which is why we have a series of signposts guiding visitors to our door – but meeting at the road is the best way to guarantee they don’t give up and tell the office “they weren’t in.”

The only way the 200kg pallet of solar panels, metal frames and a powerful water pump will make it down the valley is on the back of our trailer slowly towed behind the 4x4, so I helped the guy deliver it directly onto the trailer.

All went smoothly, and while I had been preoccupied the container had been placed and the bulldozer had started task two: levelling ground and digging holes for the water treatment tanks and reed beds.

As I headed back up towards the chaos on the building site and looked across the valley I saw the excavator excavating in the wrong place...and raced up the hill to try and stop them.

Much as we’d like to make a point about how all our water waste is recycled we really don’t want the reed bed septic tank to be the first thing people look at when they walk onto their balcony and take in the view.

The accidental deck: perhaps a good spot for a Mira Douro, or great view of the valley

It was too high up on the hill, which was strange because we’d walked it and talked it with Sr Manuel and Rui the water guy – and even pegged out the place with wooden stakes.

By the time we arrived to redirect the digger we already had a 3m x 20m chunk taken out of the hillside.

As both the focus of attention and the digger moved down the hill, we pondered the possibilities of an accidentally created new hillside deck and seating area.

Not easily undone: digging the water treatment tanks into the right spot

We watched nervously as Sr Manuel referred to a printed-out scan of dimensions and Joaquim the 76 year old builder was jumping in and out of the holes with a tape measure and a spirit level making sure the depths were correct as the giant bucket swung soil between pine trees.

Suddenly the bulldozer engine cut, work stopped and the cheerful guy at the wheel shouted almoçar and everything went quiet for lunch.

Somehow we had made it through the morning.

Looking good: despite it all we’re making slow but steady progress

After inhaling a couple of fried eggs we picked up our recently-returned neighbour Daniel –to show him where his water is now supposed to come from and to try and work out why it wasn’t coming from there anymore and had stopped filling our new pillow tank.

Turning a few taps on and off, way down the valley, somehow did the trick.

With after lunch work stopped by a faulty hydraulic pipe on the digger and concrete polishing proceeding apace, we felt comfortable enough to abandon the site and head to the town hall to submit some documents and then travel out to the PVC guy’s workshop just to go over all the things he’d said earlier in the day which we hadn’t really understood amid the chaos.

When we got back the bulldozer was still stranded with one final job remaining, Carlos the landscaper had brought his small digger ready for a pipe burying job the next day. And I had a beer.

Ana and I made for the sofa, put on a film and tried to reconnect with Garfunkel – the big dog – who still hadn’t forgiven us for going to Lisbon for a few days and taking Simon.

Simon loves a good tree to pee on, but in the case of this Banyan Tree in our local Lisbon park he didn’t really know where to start…

The little LA dog loves the city and had a wonderful time sniffing every tree and lamppost.

“You would have hated it Garfie,” we tried to explain and I think he understood.

“It’s just too busy and crazy and hectic in the city...and here it’s...calm and...quiet and, erm, relaxed...”

Now, where should we put that car park?

“You'd really hate it in Lisbon, Garfie. It appears as if they put dogs like you in shop windows.”