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.

House #1

Small Finca at the north of the island consisting of 4 buildings and 5 rooms. The main house (if you can call it that) is a typical Canarian Farm (Finca) house with one room down stairs and one room upstairs, built into the side of the hill. There are no stairs on the inside and the upstairs is accessed from the outside (another typical Canarian or Mediterranean thing).
The building in the background is the bathroom (one of the best rooms of the lot) The building next to the main house is the old cheese making building and could now be changed into a small kitchen. The final building is a small single bed room.

The houses are reached down a dirt track, that is about 1 Km long. The drive from the dirt track is about a 35 degree slope and 100M long. At the end of the drive is a flat area just about big enough to turn a car.

My initial thoughts about the place was it is a lot smaller than it looked on the web. Also it looks a bit run down and not well kept. But the location is beautiful with pine, almond, chestnut and fruit trees. The following are what I feel are the good and bad points:

Bad Points

• Some of the buildings have no planing permission - this seems to be not as much of a problem as in the UK.
• Rooms are small but usable, with imagination.
• Electrical fittings need work.
  
• Electric has been cut off and meter removed.
• Layout of the land is not good.
• There is some evidence that a forest fire has been within 100 to 120 m of the house in the past.
• Possible that one of the doors has been forced in the near past.
• Quite a bit of the land needs shoring up (but what do you expect on the side of a hill).
• Will be in the clouds for some of the winter (min temp around 5 deg C)
  

Good Points

• The place is very quite and peaceful - not over looked.
• Is within 10 to 20 minuets walk of the local shop and Bus stop
• Has a lot of promise to become a very personalised place.
• Has a lot of character
• Has established fruit trees, not many but some nice ones.

The funny thing is that although the place did not live up to expectations I kine of like the place and could see myself living there though getting the place up to scratch will take some work and there is the problem with the planing permission.

Ferry Fever

Yesterday we received a phone call from the ferry company informing us that they had moved the date of the ferry it was no longer going to be departing at 16:00 on Wednesday 21st March it was now going to be leaving on the Sunday 25th March at 01:00. Now as I had booked all the hotels and Channel Tunnel crossing this was a little bit inconvenient. So yesterday afternoon was spent cancelling and re booking hotels, finding hotels were booked, and generally faffing around. But I do now have a route and hotels booked again.

Our route I now as follows:

Sunday 18th March

Leave Home. Stay overnight at Folkstone

Monday 19th March

Channel Tunnel Crossing. Stay overnight at Tours

Tuesday 20th March

Stay overnight at Bayonne ( Just north of Spanish border)

Wednesday 21st March

Cross Spanish Border. Stay overnight at Salamanca

Thursday 22nd March

Stay for 2 nights in Sevilla

Friday 23rd March

Day in Sevilla

Saturday 24th March

Day in Cadiz. Make our way to ferry terminal in the evening ready to board Ferry.....

Sunday 25th March 01:00am .....

Board Ferry. Find Cabin. Fall to Sleep. ZZZZZzzzzzz.....

Monday 26th March 09:30am

Get up nice and refreshed to find that we have arrived at Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Drive to other end of the island.

Monday 26th March 08:00pm

Board the Los Christianos to Santa Cruz de La Palma Ferry.

Monday 26th March 10:00pm

Finally arrive in La Palma

Bertha Cam

Hi all
We plan to document our road trip from London to La Palma using time lapse movies. We have built a system to do this, it consists of a web-cam mounted behind the rear view mirror (so that it does not obstruct the drivers view of the road) and a laptop running Active WebCam from pysoft.
A few weeks ago we did a test run from London to Worthing. The software took 1 image every 5 seconds. The 1 hour 15 minute journey resulted in a 7.3Mb file. This file was then processed using VirtualDub By Avery Lee to convert it into an avi file running at 15 frames per second of 6.3Mb and lasting approximately 55 seconds.

London To Worthing Test Run

Launch in external player

This video is a bit jumpy so for the actual road trip, a setting of 1 image every 1 to 2 seconds will be used and the final avi will be at 30 frames per second this should result in files that are approximately. 126 Mb for each 5 hours of motoring (a days driving) and take approximately 10 minutes to run.

My Life in Boxes

The packing is going well with most of the house now packed away and the junk either in the pile to go on eBay or in the skips at the recycling center.

There is something strange about seeing your life reduced to about 40 boxes. The boxes are currently stacked in a 30 Sq ft storage unit. We have packed in the boxes everything that we do not need to have immediately when we arrive, also the particularly valuable items and especially fragile things (Like Telescopes) will be coming with us in the Van.

Spending Spree

Well in preparation for our move to La Palma early next year we have been on a bit of a spending spree buying things that we need for our new life out there. The main items we have been buying are the things that will be very hard for us to obtain once we are there.

One of the main things that I have been getting is all the equipment that I require for my astronomical observatory which I will be setting up over there. Below are a few of the items that I have purchased so far.

10" LX200R Ritchey Chretien Telescope Tube


Sky-Watcher Pro ED80 80mm Refractor Telescope

EQ6 Pro Skyscan Equatorial Mount

Once I start to set these up and use them I will post more detailing the progress. In fact I am still waiting of the EQ6 Mount to be delivered.

Meet Bertha

Hello

Let me introduce you to the newest member of our family Bertha.



As you can see Bertha is a car, or to be more precisely she is a Citroen Berlingo. She has a 1.8 litre engine and most importantly she is left hand drive, Why you may ask ? Well the plan is that we will in March of next year (2007) drive Bertha across the channel down through France into Spain and to Cadiz where we can catch the ferry to the Canary Islands.

Bertha started her life in Gibraltar and was imported to the UK in 2002. As part of her importation several things have been changed that we would have to put back when we import her to Spain, These are;

1. Headlights - These have been replaced with UK versions and need to be swapped back to the European versions.
2. Fog Light - This has been converted from being on the left to being on the right, this is easy to swap back as the wire has been cut and another wire feed to the bulb on the other side, so cutting this and reconnecting will not be to difficult.
3. Speedometer - This has been altered to read in Miles per hour in order to convert this we need to remove the stickers that have been placed there and replace them with the correct kilometers per hour readings.

We will keep you abreast of the ongoing developments with Bertha. The next thing to do is plan our route though France and Spain.

Narrowing the Search

Below is a list of some of the things we are looking for in a property.


1. Edge of Village

We want to be reasonably close to a village for access to shops and other services. At the same time we don't really want to be right in the center of a large populated area.


2. Lack of Light Pollution

As my hobby is astronomy and being out in La Palma is an ideal place to pursue this, it is important to be away from any sources of light pollution. While La Palma does have laws that limit the amounts of light pollution there are still a number of places on the island that have large amounts of light.

3. Good Views of zenith an Western Skies

Again on the astronomy side of things it is important to have as much of the sky visible as possible . This would mean avoiding being in a dip or surrounded on all sides by tall trees or other obstructions.

4. Land to build Observatory

Ideally it would be nice to build the observatory a little distance away from the house to limit the effects of the air turblance caused by the heat rising from the house .

5. Accessible

Obviously a house would not be much good if you have to be a mountain goat to reach it. Now there are places in La Palma where access may entail a drive down a rough road but there are limits.

6. Ground for Vegetable Garden

As part of the new life style that we wish to have we would like to be able to grow a lot of our own food. This would entail us having a reasonable sized plot of flat land to use for vegetable growing and an area for fruit trees.


7. Services

There are a few basic services that we would need, the main ones being Electric, Water, Sanitation (even if this is a septic tank). Another critical service is an internet connection, being as some of the plans that we have revolve around web based services, being able to access the web is a must.

8. At least One Habitable Building

Even if there are parts of the building that cannot be lived in straight away as long as we have at least one place that we can eat and sleep warm and dry we could live in that while we finish the rest of the property renovations

Rejected

Hello

I have been looking for quite a while on the net at properties that are available in La Palma. Here are a couple of the ones I have found but I have at this stage rejected for various reasons.

Ruin in Mazo
While this property is cheap at only 55,000euro it is in a very bad state of repair and the ground is very over grown, also where a new road has been up in at the bottom of the grounds the access to the property has been limited. Whilst I do not know the cost of putting in a new access I feel that this would limit the funds we would have left for our plans. The other major factor in rejecting this property would have to be the overall cost of the repairs and extensions that would be required.

Our Dream

Our dream is to find a place in the sun that we can turn into a self sufficient retreat. We are fed-up with the high stress life of working and living in London and want some place where we can be at peace with life. Sounds like a load of words full of cliche's but that is what I am looking for.
Until recently it was only a dream but now it looks like it is going to be a reality, due to being made redundant. Now we have the money to make our dreams a reality.

An Introduction

Just to introduce ourselves and what our quest is about.

I'm Theresa, A 35 Year old Unix System Administrator from South London. This is me here sitting on a bench out side the town hall in Mazo. Now where is Mazo you ask? Well Mazo is a small town on the Island of La Palma in the Canaries.
It's our aim someday to come and live permanently on the Island. This Blog will follow us as we look around the Island (physically when we can but most of the time on the Internet).

This is Helen, My partner. Helen is also a Unix System Administrator. It was Helen that first introduced me to the Island of La Palma back in 2003.

Helen was first introduced to the Island when she went to work for the Royal Greenwich Observatory which has several large telescopes based on the Island. These are on the Island due to the extremely good observing conditions which exist due to the location.

Helen's Former work place in La Palma. The William Herschel Telescope