It's Fiesta Time

No we have not signed for the house but its carnival so everything is shut.
If all goes well we should be signing the end of this week .. If all the parties can get together. In the mean time I have been putting the floor plan of the house into Autocad and doing some rough designs for the kitchen and bathroom.

Current Layout of the House

The dimensions were taken from a photo of a drawing the seller did. I am not quite sure that they are completely correct.
Bed Room 1 is mostly done - just a coat of paint on the walls and ceiling and the windows. The wooden floor needs sanding and vanishing but compared to the rest of the house it is virtually done.
The Dinning Hall (named as it is both a hall between all the rooms and the dinning room) needs quite bit done to it including rendering the walls and possibly the ceiling and quite a few other bits.

The second Bed Room (Temporary office) and living room need a few things done but I can not remember much of there state at the moment.

As to the kitchen and new Bathroom, the current plan is to covert the water tank into the bathroom and remodel the kitchen as shown below:

Ya ha llegado mi dinero?

Well things on the house front are moving... Slowly.

But we do have some good news. The documents are with the notary who is now preparing the sale contract. The only slight snag is that the house is owned by 3 people as it was left to them as an inheritance, so there is the issue of how the proceeds are split. But this will only delay things a week as we just need to get everybody together at the same time to sign.

The other good news is that we now have access to the Spanish bank over the Internet, after much swearing and cursing, and discovering that it doesn't work in Firefox. This has also meant we are now able to confirm that the money has arrived from the UK and is happily sitting in our account.

Numero de Identidad de Extranjeros

Today we went into town to collect our Numero de Identidad de Extranjeros or N.I.E as it is know. This is your Spanish identity number. You need this number to open a bank account, buy a house or car, to work and pay socal security. So as you can see getting this number is a big thing. To get this number you have to go to a Extranjeros department at a national police station with your passport and a completed form (Plus Copies), then if you are lucky about 7 to 10 days later you can go and collect your number. So having picked the number up we went off to the bank to open account. So we now have a bank account and with any luck the money should be on it's way from the UK.

At Last ..... A House

Or is it a building site?

Well we could not afford much and the first place we looked at has gone up from 79,000 to 103,000. This place was not on our list as the web advert was not correct when we were drawing up the list , but after our second chose in Franceses was sold and the 3rd place was soooooo small we had a look at this one..
The house is a square concrete (and probably rubble) block with windows... Built in to the side of a hill (Like most places on La Palma). The entrance to the place is at the rear from a concrete road, with a parking space (which is higher than the roof).
All the living space is on the top floor with two small storage rooms below.
The living space consists of 3 rooms and a large hallway that doubles as a dining room ( or is that a small dining room that doubles as a hallway).
The Kitchen is almost from the last century (though I don't think the house is that old) and one of the features that Theresa (and I ) like, as it has an open fire come barbecue to cook over. It looks like the kitchen was a later addition to the house but did not have direct access to the rest of the place. So one seems to have been made! But is in need of finishing.
It looks like you enter the kitchen via a tunnel... We are thinking of a nice arched opening here... I like arches!

There is one room that is mostly finished and looks very nice, basic but nice. It's the main bedroom so at least we can sleep in some comfort.
The rest of the rooms need some work - from fixing the rendering between the beams to rendering the walls and putting down floor tiles.
Why buy the place I here you say? well at €62,000 around £40,000 its cheep and well within our budget. Also it has some land (around 1150 to 1500 M² depending on who you talk to) divided up into terraces which will be adequate for our needs. But mainly, although you may think us mad, we like the place.

Some of the vines on the land

A view of the entrance

Where it is on La Plama

Sold, Rejected and Dejected

Things of the house hunting front are going a little slowly. There are two main reasons for this. The first being the fact that were are on La Palma and things tend to happen more slowly here, and the other is the fact that we have both been under the weather with a very nasty bug that has been doing the rounds on the island. This has left us with very sore throats and feeling very run down.

But the house front is going ahead slowly, we have found out that our second choice house has been sold.

Second choice house which has been sold

Also we had a look round the outside of another house and discovered that it was just going to be far to small and require far to much work in order to get anywhere near what we would need.

Nice but just far to small

So we have now viewed 4 houses and 2 of them we can rule out as possibilities. The other one we have seen I am going to keep quite about for now until we have been able to sort out a few things. I promise I will tell all soon.