Slow going

I have been ill recently with a terrible head cold. But on the positive side some things have been happening. Work on the front room has been going on slowly but the walls are almost complete and a lot of the wood work has been stripped. The windows have been re glazed.

We have also now exchanged our UK driving licenses for Spanish ones. After the normal chase around to get all the required bits of paperwork. We just left it up to the hestoria to got to the traffic office and do the paperwork. So we now have two little pieces of card that will do as driving licenses until our proper ones arrive.

We have also paid all our bills at the town hall. Only on slight snag was the fact that we should have gone to the town hall and changed them when we arrived. But this wasn't a major problem. Our town hall bills were as follows Rubbish Collection 38€, Water , Council Tax 16€

Would you like to find this in the Bath

Yesterday we noticed this little visitor to our garden.. It is 6 cm long with an abdomen of 2 cm... for a spider living in our garden I think it is the biggest I have seen. If you found this in the bath I think it would run off with the soap!
We also had some very nice visitors to our small home to day, Sheila and her son Julio, Norma (a good friend and local singer songwriter) and her friend Phil, who was over visiting Norma. It was the first time Norma had come over to visit.

Plough the Fields and Scatter

Although we have not blogged for a few weeks we have not been shirking the work. We have done two weekends on the steps and have what is starting to resemble a ramp....see below: Mind you we have another 10 meters to go to get it all finished.
Inside the house things are moving along as well, The entertainment room is mostly finished and working, so we have a nice place to sit of an evening if it is only on two sun loungers - must look at getting a settee one of these days but are waiting till we have the door way cut for the bathroom. We have started on the front room on that side of the house, designated "the Library" or the guest bedroom. All the old paint has been scraped off the walls (along with some of the plaster) and most of one wall filed. slow going but it is progress especially now Theresa is at work 4 mornings a week.
I had a go at making jam this week end - It was all I could think of doing with the small amount of Grapes we were able to heaviest, 90% of the crop was cooked on the vine by a very hot spell a few weeks ago, most of the grapes ended up looking like raisins. The Jam ended up OK but the first try did not set so had to boiled it all again and add the juice of a lemon.. and that seemed to work. Next it will be having a go at Marmalade with all the Oranges.
Today we finally got started on preparing the ground for the winter crop, the growing seasons seem to be reversed here, manly due to rain, it manly rains in the winter so unless you can water during the summer you grow in the winter. An hours struggling with the rotavater and we have some very nice ground ready for potatoes etc.Just a note to say the Tabby (our cat from the UK) is having a great time here. Here she is hiding up the vine:

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.

Still moving but slowly

After 10 days it seems like we have not got much more of the room done , but all that is left to do is vanish the doors and sort out the floor.

To day Theresa went looking for tile cement and floor leveling compound, she got the tile cement but not the floor leveling compound. It seems that no one knew what it was... could it be that they don't have it here on the island. That could be a small problem, but we should be able to work round it.

We hope to be finished with this room by the end of the week. And then its time for a few other things and then on to the next room and work on the solar power instillation..

Looking better

Over the last few weeks we have really been moving into high gear on getting the entertainment room sorted, and at last things are starting to happen. We have had a number of issues which have required a lot of attention. The first of these is the woodwork, which was covered in a green paint which was very cracked and poor. This has been striped completely back to the bear wood, a very messy and time consuming job. Once this is done and the wood has been sealed and varnished the results are fantastic. The other major issue has been the state of the walls, the surface of the walls was so poor that the have required a lot of filling and sanding to get them to a state where we would be happy to paint them. The main problem with all the filling and sanding is the resultant dust which gets everywhere through the house. But now we do have paint on over half the wall and the ceiling is complete with the plaster being painted and the beams sealed and varnished.

CCCCCCold.....

Some how I got talked into this.....

Our friend Sheila asked if we would go with her and her son Julio to join the other amateurs astronomers who were going to be out on one of the high peaks to watch the persied meteor shower. I agreed and we had decided to camp out at one of the local camp sites as we would be up quite late in the night and a 10 minute drive back to the camp site was better than an hour down the mountain, and anyway August in the Canaries won't be that cold.

How wrong could I be...

The night in question was Bad, as we drove up to the campsite we were hoping to come out of the cloud but we didn't, and by the time we had got the tent up and started to cook food it was getting dark, so dark in fact we ended up eating by torch light.

We went down to where everybody else was, as it was totally covered in cloud, add on top of that the fact that there were car lights on everywhere, people taking flash photographs, none of which aided night vision. When the cloud did clear the sky was impressive but unfortunately the meteor shower was disappointing. After a while we decided to call it a day as it was very cold. So we all returned to the tent and settled down for the night. In the early hours of the morning I was awake, needing the loo but not wanting to get up and wake everybody else up. Eventually I shifted my position and at this point Sheila said "Are you awake?", when I said "Yes" she replied "Good I can go to the loo now". We had both been lying there not wanting to get up for fear of waking the other up.

The Biggest Telescope in the World

Today we managed to piggy back on a tour of the telescopes that was being given by our friend Sheila. This also included a visit to the GranTeCan which at 10.4M when complete will make it the largest optical telescope in the World.

Firstly we had a tour round the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) which is where Helen used to work about 10 years ago, it was the first time Helen had been back for a while as well. I have seen other large telescopes in the UK but nothing really prepares you for walking through a set of doors and being faced with a telescope that's over two stories high.
WHT Cassagrain instrument cluster with the ISIS specrograph and the bottom of the mirror cell, with our friend Sheila.
After a look round (not as in depth as I would like as it was a public tour) we went over to the GranTeCan. If I thought the WHT was big I was in for a shock. After putting on hard hats as this is technically still a building site, We walked up several flights of stairs just to get to the floor of the Telescope. As we came out into the dome my jaw just hit the floor. This thing was huge. The base of the telescope could almost hold a tennis court between the supporting legs.
Theresa looking at the base of the GranTeCan.

The base of the mirror supports is three stories high with the overall hight being almost twice that. The most spooky thing was as they rotated the telescope which weighs over 500tons there wasn't a single sound, the whole thing floats on a bed of high pressure oil and is rotated by a linear motor which runs completely round the base.

Back on the Road

Finally after two months our Berlingo si back on the road with Spanish plates. so were are now fully road legal with insurance, ITV(MOT), and road tax. This is a big relief as the hire car has been costing us a fortune. It also means we can now go out and get materials that it wasn't possible to get in the hire car.

At Last ...... Bertha is Back

Finally today Helen & Sheila went off to fetch the paperwork from the ITV (Spanish MOT) which will allow us to get Bertha our Berlingo van back on the road. I was expecting that we would have to wait a bit once we had got this paperwork, but when Helen got back I found out that all the paper work is done and we just have to go back on Tuesday to collect the documents and our new Spanish number plates. So hopefully next Tuesday afternoon we should be able to drive Bertha home again fully insured on Spanish plates.

Helen celebrates after sticking the label on the car which indicates when our ITV is next due.

The roof & The ceiling

There has been a lot of work going on since my last post

First the roof, The older part of the house had a flat roof which looked in a very sorry state of repair, with the waterproof paint flaking off and concrete to in some places. So we set to scraping off all the loose material off and patching the concrete up where needed.


Once the surface was clean and patched up where it need to be . Then it was time to apply the rubber biased roof paint. The was applied thickly with a roller using a paint brush to get the edges and any cracks in the surface well sealed. Two coats of this and we should now have a waterproof roof, or at least half of it, the other side which is a newer roof and in better surface condition does have one small crack which leaks very rarely. Once this roof is cleaned and painted all should be water tight.


Now that the roof is sealed from any leaks it was time to take a look at the underside. The underside of the roof is made from large beams of wood with thinner rough bits of wood between them which has concrete on the top to from the roof. now these rough bits of wood don't look all that nice, but the beams do. So we decided to plaster over the rough wood leaving the large beams exposed. We didn't want a perfectly flat finish as this would have looked wrong, so we have a smooth but slightly uneven surface which looks very pleasant and rustic. Below is a sequece of photos that show the process.


Don't worry to much about the yellow stains these will disappear under two coats of paint, this is just the colour leaching through from the wood. Talking of wood the beams have been sanded and given a coat of sealant which brings them up to a nice dark colour.

M51 First light casa de Estrellas

After many weeks of cloudy nights and just being plain tired I finally had a clear night when I was able to get the telescope out. So having got the telescope out on the roof, While I got the laptop up and running, Helen sorted out the polar alignment of the mount. Once it got dark I started to align the mount, then took a look at Saturn which unfortunately to low to attempt any imaging. So having lost Saturn in the haze close to the ground I swung the scope over to Jupiter which was fairly high in the sky. Having had a good look with my eyes, it was time for me to do something which I have been itching to do for quite a while I finally got the camera out and took some shots of Jupiter. I was amazed at how easy it was to get the thing to focus and having the target stably in view. I always used to struggle on my old scope and mount to keep even large objects in view. I have yet to process the images of Jupiter. But having been able to get a few good minutes of Jupiter I though I would give things a good test. So I slewed the scope round to M51 and once I had it located I took a set of 10 exposures each of 60 Sec. The following day looking at the images I though hmm these aren't that good, there was a lot of noise in then image, then I subtracted a dark frame which is an image taken with the cover over the scope so it will just capture the camera noise. Having done this I was blown away there was the classic double spiral of M51. Here is the result after stacking 4 of the images and Helen adjusting levels in Photoshop.

M51 Stacked image from 5 60 second unguided exposures. Mount: EQ6, Scope: Skywatcher ED80, Camera: Meade DSI Pro, Filter: IR block.
Taken: 17 July 2007 00:00 (Yes Midnight) First Photographic deep sky image from Casa de Estrellas, Canary Islands

Floored

Two major events this week and they both happened yesterday.

• First we got the new floor down in the entertainment room, around 24 loads of concrete and one cement mixer. We thought that it would take most if not all the sand and gravel we had and 4 or 5 hours work. In the end we only used half to two thirds of the sand and finished in 3 hours. The only problem was that the cement mixer stopped working just before we started the last load .. so had to mix this by hand. Getting the concrete level was fun, used a laser , a peace of wood and a garden rake.. The laser is aligned with marks on the walls and a mark on the peace of wood that corresponds to the correct height of the concrete. The Rake is used to move the concrete around and get it level.
• Second the previous owner arrived and cleared out the second under croft so we now have a second storage/work room to use.
  

Things move slowly on the bathroom front, we are still awaiting the quote from the builder and still don't have an idea which type of documentation is requited for the planing permission - mind you in a strange way I am not so bothered about it. It will get done some time, I must be becoming a local. The only problem is if we have enough Money!

Wash day Blues

Today I finally got to do the washing at home instead of driving half way across the island to use the machine at our friends Sheila. The machine was delivered several weeks ago but we just hadn't got round to sorting it out, so with Sheila out of the country it was a case of necessity. So having dismantled the worktop which was resting on top and moved the machine into the middle of the room so that the hose would reach to the tap, and it was ready to go. The only trouble is the outflow was via a large pipe that just empties out into the garden outside. All worked fine and we now have clean clothes. I tried to hang stuff up on the line to dry but with 30km/h winds stuff kept falling off so it's now all on the indoor drying rack.


On other things the floor has now been totally removed from the entertainment room. We have started to run over the conduits for the power, read surround sound speakers, and a feed for a possible projector which would be mounted at the top of the back wall. We now need to mark out the floor level and get the conduits fixed to the wall and then once we have the damp proof lining down start mixing concrete and put it all back again.

Breathing Space

Well thankfully today the previous owner of the house came and cleared out one of the rooms down stairs. So we now have another room available in the house, which means we now somewhere to store some of the boxes that arrived on Wednesday. On another note the plastering has been done in the entertainment room and I have got mains sockets and lights wired in the to rooms on that side of the house.

It's Here

Well after three months our stuff we had shipped from england has finally arrived. This morning all 62 boxes were delivered. Everything seems to be OK in the boxes we have opened so far. One of the most welcome items in the shipping was all the major power tools, and also our DVD collection, we had brought a number with us but after 3 months we were beginning to run out of DVD's to watch. The biggest problem now is where to put everything, as the rooms downstairs at the front of the house are still full of the previous owners stuff we are very limited as to where things can go. This may create a problem in doing the floor in the entertainment room as a lot of the boxes are in there.

There's a hole in my floor

Yep there's a dirty great hole in the floor. OK it's there intentionally, after months of just sitting around and not getting a whole lot done we have started to try and crack on and get some things done. We had a planning meeting an came up with a list of jobs for the week and stuck them down on a sheet. Yes those of you at the telegraph where we used to work will get the irony, yes we have a resource sheet.

The first of the jobs we have decided to tackle was the floor in what we are calling the entertainment room. This will be the room where the telly, computer & stereo will live. The main problem in this room is the damp in the floor. Having spoken to David & Ann who are an English couple that live at the other end of the village. They have already done up their place so know a few of the tricks, so we will have to lay down a damp proof membrane under the floor, but to do this and still have enough space to put tiles down without having to remove the doors means that we have to remove all the floor and re lay.



As we're taking up the floor this was the ideal time to run the cable conduit and put the wall boxes in for the mains, 12v, TV & Satellite antenna feeds, Front and rear speaker connections, & Network connections. So we have been chiseling into the wall to put the wall boxes in. the main problem is that the wall between this room and the bedroom is very thin and made of concrete mixed with rocks so if you are not careful you can got right through and come out the other side. But all the boxes are now in the wall and all the conduit is run on the floor ready to go under the concrete when we have lifted the other 2/3's of the floor. The wall should be plastered later on this afternoon.

Right now the lifting of the floor is on hold as we are having to prepare clear spaces ready to receive all the boxes of our stuff which has finally arrived from England.

And as requested here is a picture of Helen in her ghost busters outfit dusting the vines with sulphur

Of Windows, Floors, Water and Grapes

As always when one thing is done another three pop up ....

The first set of windows is done and they look good .. here are the before and after photos..



Although the second window is not painted yet, still waiting for the putty to set, at least you can not hinge the panes out.

The channeling out of the floor for power conduits was going well, and I suppose is still going well but after talking to another English couple who have renovated a local finca, we think it will be better to remove the whole floor so that we can lay a damp proof membrane to stop the damp coming up through the floor. OK I here you say, just add it on top of the sub floor that is there now. The problem with that is that the floor level would then be too height for the doors and door sill. So it looks like more of the floor has to go.... The work so far is shown here.

The filtering on the gray water recycle test blocked up again - so that has been temporarily removed and for now greasy and very dirty water will not go into the system. For now that will have to do..

Next on the list are the grape vines, 3 terraces of vines, at first seemed like a good idea but we did not quire realise the amount of work it would be. I have managed to handle on terrace so far. Striping off the extra leaves and shoots so that the grapes are exposed to the sun, I am not totally sure what I am doing - just following instructions for the Guy we brought the place from. And then you have to dust them with sulphur to help stop mold. We have this thing that sits on my back with a bellows attached to go around like one of the Ghost busters to dust the stuff... Got one terrace done yesterday and it rained today so I will have to do it again tomorrow...