Look A Patio

Finally after a week of intensive concrete pouring we have a patio. The concrete was poured in sections about a meter wide. Prior to each section being poured a small strip was laid to provide the level. Each pour took about 5 loads of the cement mixer. Some of the pieces had extra complications like a drain channel to take the water from the front steps down and out through the rain water drain.
But finally after a week of hard work and the purchase of a gazebo we now have some where nice outside to sit.

The patio takes shape.

Now mostly of the preparation work is it is time to surface the patio (outside Kitchen / barbecue area) The original surface had a large slope and although it was smooth was not that good when you wanted to sit at a table. So we decided to make a flat area ... The only problem was that the underlying ground was mostly solid rock.. So we desired that instead of trying to dig it all out we would just rise the level. To get it right it had to be in two steps... so that the patio would not be above the kitchen floor!!!!

There are a few more drains to go in though, the Rain water needs to be taken from the roof and from where it runs down the back steps. and the sink in the outside kitchen needs to be connected. So these pipes were put in first before the top step is added.
Once the drains are all done its the lower level was filled with rubble (most of this came from demolition in the kitchen). it was the plan to lay the lower level in three sections, rather than using shuttering to get the levels I decided to us a method that I had seen the local builders use. A line is strung to give the level and then a "wall" of concrete is laid to this level as below.

Once the level has set then the first part of the patio was laid... Only one small problem was that the concrete was not fine enough so that the surface was not that good. This was solved in later poring by adding a few shovels of sand. The quality of the surface is not too much of a problem as we intend to tile the area sometime.... (when we have the money).

Look a Flower Bed

As I explained in a earlier post behind one part of the wall we were going to put a small flower bed in. Well here it is. Having taken some good earth from a pile we had down the garden and mixing it liberally with some manure we have a very nice light soil to plant things in. The first thing to go in was a flower that had to be moved from the garden outside the kitchen window which is being removed. Then the other two things to go in were some herbs; thyme and rosemary. The flower bed also has scattered around some bits of broken flower pot which as well a looking pretty also try and stop Tabby from digging up the plants and using the place as a loo.

It's all gone down the drain. (Drains Phase two)

One small reason for all the work on the outside kitchen was that we have to continue laying the main drains under it, with all the connections for the sink in the outside kitchen and other services. So with the work on the walls approaching the end of the first phase it is now the time to dig the trench for the drains... To be honest I have been dreading this as there is not much soil around here so it was likely that we would have to dig the trench through solid rock.

We were in luck though.... as we found an old drain that ran from the garden at the right depth right through the kitchen to the old water tank that will be the bathroom. This took a good bit of excavating (including the demise of our heavy duty SDS drill) but once this was excavated, it only needed widening a little, it was simple to lay the drain...

Excavated trench outside,

under the kitchen,


And out to the entrance way

OK the connection to the existing part of the drain was a little complicated but in the end it all went in OK and was coved with concrete.

And here's the wobbly bit...

Next to go in was the pipes for the grey water and rain / ground water drain. A little more work as the grey water drain includes the kitchen and outside kitchen sink drains and also needed to be cut into the existing grey water drain the goes to the temp. kitchen.

Cutting the new grey water drain into the current one

All the drains laid

You will notice as well as laying drains there are lots of power conduits going in for power to the outside kitchen and the outside loo (will one day be where the washing machine will go...) and lighting.

Look Ma!.... A wall!

Well I never its a wall, OK its a little wonky in one or two places, but that will be OK once it is rendered. Now I have 3 piers to cast. I have had a few problems with casting concrete, mostly in making sure that the concrete stays where it should and the molding does not "Blow out".
I want these pillars to look good as I don't plan to render them, so I have spent a good bit of time preparing and oiling the wood that will be use. so that it should produce a nice smooth finish. I have also used to pieces of pipe and some wire paces through the shuttering (the mould for the pier) at the bottom to secure the bottom together and stop the mould from "Blowing out". Lets hope all the work is worth it....

Talking of piers we have also cast the bottom of the arch between the kitchen and dining room...

Tip Top

Things are progressing well on the outside area and one part has had it's final top section cast. Behind this wall is a small area between the wall and the steps which we have now decided to make into a small garden area for herbs and flowers.

Toddler arriving in two months, need safety wall

With the family due out in two months we need to put up a small safety wall on top of the current terrace wall, as there is a 2 meter drop there, which does not combine well with a 16 month old grandson. We plan to put up a two breeze block high wall to act as both a safety barrier and a wind brake for the house garden come patio. The top of the rock wall that holds the house terrace up is not exactly flat or totally level but with careful work should be OK.
The wall will exists of 3 sections separated with cast concrete piers on one side of the steps and a short section between the steps and the house ( though this bit is not so urgently needed as there is a flower bed there.). I hope to have this finished and a gate added above the steps if there is time.
Well I got both ends of the wall stared, and I hope that they are level....

At last some work on the Kitchen

After two years of living with a hole in the wall between the dining room and the kitchen we have started to make the hole an artistic arch... (OK it may take another two years to get it done the way things have been going)
First we must run a few power feeds.... just a few.
The reason for this is that the main switches for the kitchen lights, outside lights and for the hot water heater are going to be located on the inside of the arch so they need to be put in before the left side of the arch is cast in concrete.
While I was excavating the base of the arch, for the cabling I found that the wall just sits on the ground ... only a few inches below the floor... I think that this was rock about 50 or 60 years ago when the house was built but now its a sort of hard clay... A little worrying but mostly OK... (I hope), so I have to dig a little deeper and wider than I wanted and then cast a foundation for the side of the arch. Now I just need to wait for that to set before I can cast the base of the arch.

Down the tube and round the bend

Every since we moved in, the outside of the house has looked a disaster and as was mentioned in a previous blog Dodging the Rain we have started to work on building the walls to hold back the terraces. One of the key things that needed doing was to re run the water pipe round the back of the wall so that it was hidden from view and to stop us from tripping over it all the time.


So one Saturday Helen set about measuring and cutting the steel piping that is used here for water pipe. The funny thing is that although Spain is fully metric the pipe used is 1/2 in and the thread cutter is British Standard Pipe Thread (BSPT). Once Helen had cut all the bits of the pipe then it was a matter of putting a screw thread on each end of the pipe and rough fitting it together.


Next comes the tricky bit. You then need to unscrew everything and put it back again only this time you need to wind the sealant into the threads at each joint, in the past horse hair was used but these days you can buy something in a tub which is like industrial strength dental floss which is a little easier to handle.
After all the pipes had been screwed together it was time to cross fingers and make the final connection to the mains. This connection was made and then breath was held while the pipe was checked for leaks, but none were found and we could breath again.


All that remained was to give the pipe a coat of paint to protect it from corrosion once it is buried and we were almost done. All that remained was a bit of concrete casting to finish off one level of the wall.

"YEUCK" a Plague of almost Biblical Proportions.

Things have not gone that well this week. It started well on Monday with a fiesta in Los Sauces so Theresa was off for the day which meant we had a quite day. On Tuesday evening we came home as usual after teaching to find the kitchen window covered, on the inside, with large black flies... I think there must have been around two hundred of them..... Its hard to get flies out of a house when there are fly screens on most windows to stop them coming in! We ended up using the vacuum cleaner to suck them up!
The whole episode sickened my stomach, Once most of the flies were gone I just went to bed and stayed there barricaded into the bed room till almost 3 o'clock the next afternoon. Just coming out to swat any new flies that appeared.
Theresa was so worried about me that she came home lunch time to see how I was doing...
After about 3:00 I finally got up the courage to search for what was the source of the plague. Once I moved a light into what was the old water tank and will be the bathroom I found the SOURCE, the remains of a Rat! Double Yuck! Tabby must have brought it in after killing it and left it there.
We have spent most of the rest of the week cleaning the house, including washing all the crockery etc in the kitchen. The result is that we have a clean house (and the cave of a water tank / bathroom) but nothing else much done, and I have been feeling very off mentally.

The end of the road

Well fianlly after about 12 years I have finally paid off all my debts. As some of you may know in the late 90's I got into some financial difficulties and ended with a large number of debts and county court judgments. One of these was with a company called Paragon Finance, I went to pay this debt of before I came out here only to discover that without my knoweledge they had been adding interest to the court judgment. So I have been fighting with them for quite a while to argue that I don't owe them any more than what I have paid them already, and a last this week the following letter arrived.As you should be able to see this letter states that the debt is paid in full. You sould have seen my reaction I was dancing around the kitchen. Saying "I've won, I've won".

The Crazy Helresa Concrete Slide of DOOM

Here we are with another Helresa contraption to make things a little more easy for us.
The Problem:
We need to pour concrete for the foundation of the wall repair two terraces below the cement mixer. In the past we have just carried it down in a bucket. This time there is quite a bit to move (about 8 to ten mixes) at 4 bucket loads a mix that is around 40 trips.
The Solution:
A rope slide... We have ridged up a line from the poles that hold up the vines out side the back of the house, down to a power pole on the terrace. Then the bucket gets slid down ... the concrete poured in to a wheelbarrow and then poured in to the foundation.

The Slide of DOOM

Poring concrete - There is a wheelbarrow there honest.

In Practice:
Once it was set up we discovered one small problem, the rope streches a little under load so that the bucket hit the ground on the terrace above its destination. But this was simple to solve, a little less in the bucket and put the rope up a little higher on the pole. Once this was done it actually worked quite well, most of the time.

The bucket on the slide.

Theresa did let go of the rope once or twice, neatly coating the power pole with concrete and almost decapitating me, but in the end we had the foundation done .. now its time for a shower and off out.The Finished foundations... A Good Mornings work.

The weeds are as high as an Elephants eye.

We may have problems growing veg but weeds just grow, and then we have to cut them down. Here is Theresa trying to strim some thistles that are almost as tall as she is....

Image by Sheila

With a Little Help From Our Friends

Well to be totally honest "With a lot of help from our friends".

Saturday Sheila and family came over to give me my delayed Christmas Present, it was delayed due to the weather, "One days Hard labor" So we spent the day doing work around the place on things that needed several good bodies to get them done.

Carlos digging for Spain

We (well Sheila and Carlos manly) cleared most of the collapse of part of one of the terrace walls, We had cleaned it up last November but did not have the spare cash for the concrete needed to start fixing it, and due to all the rain another section collapsed. Carlos was great, give him a shovel and ply him with beer (Ops forgot the beer) and he will dig his way to the center of the Earth. By the end of the day most of the fall was cleared and almost ready for the new foundations.

Watching a man at work

Just before lunch Anne and David arrived with their land rover full of Blockes (Breeze blocks), They were kind enough to say that they would pick any building materials up (that they could fit in the van) when they were going past, as Bertha is no more..

After lunch and another session of clearing , Carlos helped to erect the new temporary bathroom roof, (I hope that this time it will not leek, mind you it may not rain that much more now.) All in all it was a very good day.

The new loo roof - some plastic and old water pipes

Carlos helping getting the new roof up.
Image by Sheila

Then this week, we found that, when we returned from teaching in Santa Cruz on Tuesday that Anne and David and been again with another load of Blockes and all the Plastic piping that we need to run the drains under the kitchen floor and for the drainage for the BBQ and patio area.

We are so grateful for our friends, with out them we could not get this place sorted out.

Dodging the Rain

The weather has been so wet this spring that we have not managed to get much done, Most of the jobs on the house are ether outside or need dry conditions.... But we have made some headway in between the showers, with the outside kitchen (BBQ area and patio), Laying Drains and Yearly Vine work.
Outside Kitchen:

All the iron work for the support pliers for the walls have been put in and some of the concrete has been pored and we have even laid some blocks. Work has stalled this week though as we have run out of cement, having a small car means that we can only buy two bags at a time at the moment so can not get in a large stock, and all the shops are shut as its Easter, but maybe tomorrow...

Overview of the BBQ area

We only plain to put the walls up only part way at the moment, and put in the patio so that we can use the area for this Summer and we have limited funds but it will be nice to have somewhere for the BBQ and to sit that is not on a large slope.

Ironwork for piers

Main Drains:

Work has started on running main Drain to the Pozo Negro (Big dark hole in the ground) again, It needs to go under the floor of the kitchen and into the new bathroom. Luckily it looks like the old drain (just a sort of troff that allowed the water from the old kitchen sink to drain to the garden) can be used to lay the pipe most of the way to the bathroom. But this still needs to be excavated as it is full of dirt, the hot and cold pipes to and from the shower, and a lot of other things that I don't want to mention...

Excavation of the old drainage channel

Kitchen:
Not much has been done on here, need to get the drains laid and the flower bed moved as well as water proofing the roof.
Vines:
I have pruned most of the vines, again this has run very late partly due to the wet weather and partly due to the lack of time. This year I have experimented with a very brutal pruning, reducing the number of new branches. At the moment this seems to be doing very well. We will see how things work out later in the year.

One other thing that has slowed things down, is that I seem to not be able to get going, there is so much to do that sometimes I just seem to run round not doing anything just trying to workout what to do. Then when I try to write a list of what to do I just put too much down so that at the end of a week I am so tired that I need to rest for the next week.
One Day I might get it right, I just hope that it is sometime soon....

Passing the Buck

On Friday morning we drove over to Santa Domingo which is where the town hall for the region of Garafia is located. We went over there for two reasons one was to pay the water bill, which we were unable to do as the girl wasn't there. The second was to pick up a letter from the post office which needed to be signed for. Now we knew that the letter was from the Cabildo but we didn't know what it was about. So when we read it we discovered that as the part of the road where we had the accident with the rock is currently being worked on that the responsibility of the cabildo is suspended for the duration of the works and that our claim had been sent to the Consejeria of Public works and Transport. So our claim for the money for Bertha has now gone up the the Canarian Government, not just the island government. So the chances of us getting any money soon have just got slimmer.

Spring has sprung

After what has seen like an eternity and like some one just flicked a switch spring has finally arrived in La Palma. Overnight we went from it being cold and rainy to clear blue skies and sunshine. OK at the moment we have calima which is when we get the wind from off the sahara along with a lot of dust. This generates very warm dry conditions and you also get a misty effect like a mild fog.
But with the warm weather arriving we can finally start to get some things done on the outside of the house. One of the major jobs we have been doing is the annual trimming of last years growth off the vines. And as part of this job this year we have been re arranging many of the poles which support the vines top bring them a little bit lower. This has also opened up the area around the old pig pen to the sky which is kind of good considering that I will hopefully be turning it in to an observatory later in the year.

The future home of the telescope the old pig pen!!!!!

The other thing at this time of year is to asses the damage that has been done over the winter.

What last year was just a small collapse!!!

Believe it or not this was just a small area of wall which had collapsed last year however the winter rains have made it a lot worse. so this will need to be cleared so that we can pour concrete in the base and start rebuilding the wall.
The other thing that has started recently is work on the walls outside which eventually become part of the outside kitchen but at the moment they are just mainly there to hold the earth in place and enable us to have a more usable space outside.

The first of the support columns for the wall goes in (and Tabby investigates)

The wall has now been raised to the same hight all along the house terrace

One of the problems we have is that now we only have the small car it is difficult for us to get some of the materials that we need but this week luckily help was at hand from our friends Anne and David from La Casita who kindly offered to pick us up some building supplies while they were out.

One nice pile of reinforcing bars thanks to Anne and David

All Hail Kiki - May She Run For ever

Yes a week and a half ago we finally decided that we could not afford to keep hiring a car and poor old Bertha was not going to get repaired soon, so we took all our reserves out of the Bank and now have a new SMALL car... And here is Kiki, a 1.1 C2. OK She is not good for hauling Building materials, but she does get us from A to B quite cheaply. As the main problem was getting Theresa to all the classes she has to teach she solves that problem quite nicely.
As to the Local Council (Cabildo) paying for the Repairs to Bertha well at the moment that is with the insurance Lawyers and it may take a few months or several years to get that sorted out. In the end I expect that Bertha will soon be meeting a rather nasty end with the local car crusher....
I will not say that things are going well here at the moment, this episode with the car and having to buy a new one has not had a good effect on me or Theresa, we are both feeling down and rather worried about money. Also as we now don't have a van that can carry bloques (breeze blocks), multiple bags of cement or plastic pipe we are going to have to change the way we do things on the house, like having to get things delivered in bulk or hiring a van to go and get things which will cost more...
But we have managed to get some things done, the annual time for pruning the vines is here and is progressing, also I can not access a part of one of the walls that needs finishing as the plants have been pruned down. But apart for that things are going slowly.

The light at the end of the tunnel

Since Tuesday I have been a little busy. But there is a bit of a light at the end of the tunnel. It does appear that we can in fact claim for the island government for the damage caused by the rock but in order to do this we had to jump through a number of hoops the first was to register a complaint with the local police in Barlovento, so on Wednesday morning that is what me a Sheila did. At the same time we popped home to feed Tabby who was a bit hungry having not had her supper the night before or breakfast that morning and along the way we stopped to get some more photos from the scene.

The rock and my hand for comparison

The location.

And having got the details yesterday of the person who told us that if we took photos that we could claim. Today we went off to the Island government to put in our claim. Now if any of you have seen The Incredibles then you will know what I am about to talk about. There is a scene in which the superhero tells the old lady exactly which forms she needs to fill in and who to see in order to get her claim paid. We had a similar situication today and as it happened the lady at our insurance company gave us the piece of paper which listed exactly what documents we needed so when we went to talk to the Cabildo we had exactly what we needed and our claim was done very quickly (Thanks to sheila for the tanslations, I still can't get my head round past tenses in spanish). Now all we have to do is wait and see how much the car is going to cost and when the insurance assesor is going to look at it so they can start work.

Gona Live on Solid Rock

Well the first post of 2008 and it's bad news I'm afraid. Last night as we were driving home after teaching we had just got to the other side of Barlovento and were driving down one of the many ravines that cross the north of the island when I noticed out of the corner of my eye some movement on the side of the road, with horror I realised that it was a rock of a significant size. I did what I could but as the rock hit the road only about a meter in front there was not a lot I could do and I hit the rock square on the front of the car at about 30 - 40Km/h.

We pushed the rock about 2 - 3 Meters further down the road. When we got out to inspect the damage we discovered the rock firmly wedged under the front of the car. I rock was in fact about the size of 2 footballs. As we rolled the rock out from under the car and to the side of the road I saw the horrible sight of water running down the road which could only mean one thing the radiator was toast.

Luckily just then a land rover came past and stopped to help as the car wasn't going to go anywhere under it's own power the guy offered to tow us to somewhere safe where we could wait for a truck to come and pick us up. Just as we were sorting out the tow rope another car stopped and said that if we take some photos we could claim from the island government the cost of the repair. So we took some photos. We then phoned our friend Sheila to ask her to call the insurance company and ask for a tow. About an hour later the tow truck arrived and the stricken bertha was loaded on board and we and the car were taken to Santa Cruz where Sheila picked us up. We finally got to bed at about 1am.