Step by Step

We went to the town hall on Friday to finally pick up the works license for the steps out the front of the house. This is from the request we put in back in May and were told that it would be ready in 3 weeks. As we have found they have a special type of week here that has 30 days. But we now have the piece of paper that says we can work on the steps, and having paid 600 € bail we can now start work again.
The paperwork for the bathroom isn't ready yet. The woman at the council said it would be about 2 weeks so it should be ready some time in December.
The work has also started on decorating the spare bedroom / library which means the dust will start to fly everywhere, but at least this time we can tape some plastic over the doorway which should reduce it down a bit.

First Days at School and the Paperwork Trail

This Wednesday saw my first day working at the school in Los Sauces. After 6 Months of not working having to get up in the mornings came as a great shock to the system. The job isn't that bad all I have to do is basically talk English to the kids. It is still early days yet but based on the evidence so far I think that I am going to enjoy things there as the kids are really nice and fun to work with.

Of course with me starting work comes a whole raft of extra paper work. As I am effectively self employed I have to register for tax and Social Security. So we started this morning at that Hacienda (Tax Office) and having paid for the appropriate form a filled in the basics we went up to the appropriate desk and to my surprise the guy took the form and filled in the rest for us, stamped the forms and that was it. Next on to the Social Security, took our number, waited, our number was called, got to the desk, two seconds later were out again to get photocopies of the paperwork from the tax office. The nearest place was in town (the Hacienda is down by the port). So a walk into town and back later. We are in the queue again for the Social Security and after a few minutes we are being seen and lo and behold we have sorted out my Social Security. Then in order to get Helen added to it as my dependent we have to go to the office at the far end of town, so off we go expecting when we get there to be told that we will need a translation of the civil partnership certificate, but we get there and everything is fine and Helen gets her health cover to. So when we were expecting this paperwork to take ages and that we would have to run around for obscure bits of paper, the whole lot was done in one morning, and by Spanish standards that's a miracle.

At Home things are going Very well in fact we have now moved the computer and desk back into the entertainment room and all connected in, We also have the surround sound system wired in with the speakers mounted on the wall brackets.

Found it & I have a Job!!!

Well despite what Helen posted earlier about not being able to find the leveling compound, we finally found some. It seems what we needed was Cemento Autonivelante (Self leveling cement). So we got a couple of bags. Once we got home we mixed this up and laid it down, only to discover that I should have brought a few more bags and it didn't quite bring the level up to where we needed it. So I had to wait till Monday before I could go out and get another 4 bags of the stuff. This involves a trip virtually round half the island. But we now have the floor leveled and all the whole tiles are now down apart from the section where the door to the bathroom will be going. Next job to do is to cut all the tiles round the edges and lay those.

We have some news on the bathroom but it will have to wait until we have the paperwork through......

The next piece of news is that I have a Job! Yep as of Monday I will be the English language teaching assistant for the school in Los Sauces. OK it's not that well paid, it's only part time and for 10 months of the year. But at least it is a job and should pay enough to cover all the monthly bills.