Architect number 4

I think I am coming down with a cold.  Feeling kind of cranky about that, along with kind of tired.  I woke up fine. Then I started sneezing, then my eyes were itchy, I thought allergy.  Now my throat is sore and my nose is plugging up....I'm thinking a cold.  D*mn.

Blech.

Met the new architect this morning, I like him!!!

He asked when we want to start....already?

I said that yes, we want to start already.

He listened, he's going to show us a couple of houses where they have done similar things like I have mentioned, I could understand his Catalan, he didn't scorn ideas.  He said the roof may not be too bad, for which I could love him, and he didn't seem too concerned about the crack in the wall.  We are getting together again on Saturday at 9am.  I like 9am, feels like the guy wants to get stuff done.

Now he has to pass the man's evaluation, but I think we have our guy.

I asked a friend at work about him, it is a village, and she had never heard anything negative either. They were friends when they were young, she said he is a good sort and honest.  YiPEEEEE

He also knew the house from before.....good good good all around.

A room with a view! and with paint and an easel and a comfy chair I don't care if it gets messy and a stereo.......

Been painting, and feeling excited about it, I probably won't have a second for it after this week, as my teaching schedule goes nuts after Monday....

But!

But but butbutbut,

I just figured out where I can put a small space for me to paint in the new house. Quiet, with a view, and I can lay it out and leave it out! MINE!

I'll let the man in there too. Two arm chairs, a little boom box...somehow I like music when I am painting, especially happy music, a table and some drawers...and the easel I am planning on making, we've got the wood, we've just never had anywhere to put it!

I am SO excited.

Now to convince the man (probably easy), the architect (should be easy) and the ajuntamin (fingers crossed)!

OOooooooHHH!!!!

Cross your fingers and legs and toes and knuckles and armpits if you can for me, m'kay?

Meeting with another architect tomorrow morning....some finger etcetcetcetc crossing for that would be most welcome too. I so want to get this thing started.


Oh, and here's what I've been up too:

This first one was kind of an accident...or at least it was running with what I was handed.  Underneath is a painting I didn't like....at all, and when I went to do something over it, I discovered that my favorite giant tub of blue had turned to jello over the summer....

OK, let's see what we can do with that, and here's what I've ended up with.

Not quite done though.

This one below, I started last spring, and I think it is finish...cheery and funny.....

Feeling all Georgia O'Keeffe today it would seem.  Actually I took a bunch of photos of poppies quite a while ago and they have been stewing around on my phone for ages and today was the day. 

Not done. Blogging while I wait for paint to dry.....

Brmmmmmbrmmmmm, woof woof.

You know when your car starts making a weird and kind of expensive little sound.

You know how you try to ignore it for a while, ostrich like, cause you just don't want to go into the mechanics and drop a thousand bucks on the bucket.

Then you go in, and it either

a) doesn't make the sound at all and persistently is fine the whole time you are there,

or

b)makes the sound, which the mechanic cannot diagnose, which them disappears completely and never reoccurs, leaving you feeling a little bit like a ninny, and a little bit taken.

Chuck....he's just like a car in some ways.

Chuckbacca has been feeling a little weird these days. Sleeping a lot, falling asleep really easily, not getting up to greet people, but greeting me with absolutely frantic delight, following me around the house (which he hasn't done in AGES) getting tired in the hills and taking a long time to recover.

Finally went down to the vet.

She couldn't find anything, which was reassuring because this leishmania thing is a drag and we have to be so vigilant. She thought, and I agreed that it may be any one of a number of things. Jet lag, annoyance that we are all back at school and work, a virus, being out of shape, having too much fur for the heat here......

That said,

After we went to the mechanic vet and she couldn't find anything wrong....

He's just fine now, thankyouverymuch.

We interupt our regular programming

Inspired by ElPadawan's gorgeous photos of Georgian Bay, I am actually going to get around to posting some photos from the summer.

They didn't get up before this for two reasons, first,  I was insanely busy and second because I miss the boat and found it a little hard to go through the photos.....

Whatever.


So, here go the photos.  This first one is part of the channel that we took this summer when we were sailing.

Well, that didn't go well, I tried to upload about 10 photos and got only the last one in the wrong place.  Seems the new blogger screen needs a little work still.....

Ahhhh, you get a little window thing so you can select where to put them in your text...kinda cool....

Here we have his Chuckiness on the first day sailing. To say that he was not an entirely comfortable dog with this whole boat moving and swaying would be an understatement.  He spent the trip primarily curled up under our feet where he felt safest.

Above is some of the scenery from Georgian Bay...love the rocks.  Below another navigation mark.....

The girls spent quite a bit of time teaching Chuck to swim.  In fact he already can swim, he just hates too.  Nothing a little bacon or chicken can't overcome though....

Not a happy doggie face there, though at the end he was willing to wade it, it was only when his feet came off the bottom that he wasn't so sure about all this silliness.

 

There she is, Oreneta in Ontario!

And Chuck later on in the trip.  He got happier on the boat and more accustomed to the entire venture....which is a good thing.  All to do again next year!

Have a great day!

Cheers,

O

Villa Villekulla

As far as the neighbourhood kids are concerned, the new house is Pippi's place in real life.

No furniture, the adults aren't worried about dirt or water, a garden overgrown and mad, water everywhere and it is all a little dusty and musty and kids fort-y....

Half the neighbourhood and their cousins were there today.....I ended up just hanging out semi-supervising....they ranged in age from 2 to 18...honestly. 

The group is now somewhat divided by gender...the girls are all up here hanging their dolls off the balcony at the boys and dressing up in horrifying Halloween masks and leering at the boys.

We are debating bathrooms in the new house.  There is a possibility that the only shower may be downstairs, the exit would be in full view of the street when the windows are open, which would mean that we would all have to skitter around the corner as fast as we could in our towels everytime we had a shower...and then if we had guests over....

We may have to come up with another solution.

Maybe all the local kids can think of something.  I'm taking them all up in the mountain in a bit....them, the dog and their dolls.  A fun Sunday.

Safareig ideas.

A friend lent us a calendar of some safareiges that had been renovated and turned into fountains. I took photos of them to remember some of the ideas, and I thought I might share.....












See all those ones with the mossy rock things...those are quite traditional, and our house did had one. Indeed the rocks are still there. We are probably not going to keep that, I am not sure I want to pay for water to be running down that day and night forever. A little extravagant in a land that is so dry. Maybe that is the point though.




A little more for those of you who have made it this far. We sort of have a garden with this house too. There is a walled garden in front that USED to belong to the house officially, but hasn't since the civil war, as well, the lady who lived there before us used it all the time.

I am keeping up with the tradition. I may add that I have never before been in a garden entirely planted with spiky thorny grasping nasty plants.

Holly trees...(who knew THAT existed) and rose bushes and I don't know what all else but one of them is a nasty spreading ugly thing that has thorns on the tip of every leaf and there are lots of them.

All massively overgrown after three years or more without being tended. Got some work ahead of me and some garden planning!

Wet walls

I went into the house yesterday to ponder....ruminate....imagine possibilities.

While I was there, I had a look at this area behind the door to the patio. I had been worried about it as the sand just kept falling, buy Hubris Architect said that it was nothing, just the plaster. Sorry about the blurry photo.



So I picked at it a bit. I figure if it is loose enough to come off in chunks, it is going to have to come off eventually anyway.


I was however rather alarmed by what I saw. That nice light beige stuff? Crumbly but dry. The dark brown? Soaking freaking wet.

Ho hum.

You can see these weird straight lines between the wet areas and the dry. Haven't figured out what that is all about.

From the position I figured that there were one of three possibilities about where the water could becoming from.

1. The sink in the pati....a leaky drain and it is wicking in.

2. Something on the other side of the wall.

3. (and most worrying) that it is leaking from the roof all the way down to the ground floor.



At that point I lost my nerve, went home, put on happy music and painted.

Ostrich-like I know, but there it is.

Today I felt braver. I pulled more of the plaster off to see how far the damage went....a long way.

Then I went upstairs to look at the big fat crack in the wall there that is right over top of the wet spot in the kitchen.

See it there? Floor to ceiling.


Then I pulled out some of the plaster.

It is wet back there, very very wet. It is also, as far as I can see, pure mud, these walls don't seem to have any rocks in them at all.

There are also some VERY deep cracks in it.


See?

llalalalalalalala.....

Ho hum.

Good thing those walls are three feet thick.

Ohhhhh, on the good news front, our very good friend who also is an electrician/plumber/gas installer also knows an architect that he personally has used and with whom he has worked often.

Hope rises up again.

Welcome to the rollercoaster ride that is home renovation.

Homework...all kinds of it.

OK, the other answer is this: (-2) to the power of four = (+2) to the power of four.

Indeed (-x) to the power of y= (+x) to the power of y as long as y is a even number.

HAH! I can't believe I got that!

We had the joy of Spanish verb conjugations, as well as synonyms and antonyms today from 10 to 10:45 pm. Yeehaw!

It is tricky to find synonyms and antonyms in a language you don't speak.

We are still looking for an architect. When we spoke to a friend who used the latest one, we were told that he is quite stubborn and our buddy had to have some fairly serious arguments to have the house done his way not the architect's way. Seems he has lost sight of the fact that he is no, oh, say, Frank Gehry and therefore we want just a wee bit more imput into the house we are going to be living in.

Fingers crossed.

The worst of it is we have a great friend in TO who is a fabulous innovative and interesting architect......who can't work here.

We'll have to get a chunk of land there some day if only to get to work with him.

TOMA! Math goddess for a moment!

Eldest and math are back together again, and OH so happy about it.

She has math homework every single day. Something I am most delighted about considering what was going on last year.

This also means that we are checking her math homework and reviewing questions with her every night.

Now, may I add, the man is freaking brilliant at math. Heck, he works out equations in the evenings for the entertainment value. I kid you not, I look over some night and he has this booklet out and a pencil and he's working away at them. NO idea what they are all about, but there it is. My Mom is also excellent at maths, my Dad and my sister both work with numbers. I liked math for a long time, but eventually reached a point (in grade 13) where I was confused.

I have always been the math dummy in the family. (not that pathetic, just the competition has been a mite fierce)

ANYWHO....

Eldest had one math problem that she couldn't figure out. I didn't get it at first and called in the big guns...."Honey, how does this go....."

Brace yourselves, cause I'm gonna do some wicked gloating here.....

I figured it out FIRST!!!!!

*happy dancing and general (rude)self-congratulatory hooting*

Da da da da DA DA!

okokokokok,

I know....how many does he get right and how many do I get right...nonetheless.!

Here it is, let's see what you can do.....answer provided later.

Find two different numbers taken to the same exponent, that when worked out, have an equal value.

Sooooo?

Good luck all...ask your teens who've done this math more recently, they may figure it out faster.

No googling allowed!

You want how much in cash????

Our lawyer phoned us at 6:55 pm the night before we bought the house to tell us that the vendor wants 15,000 of the money for the house in cash.

Say what????

OK......

What????

Aside from all the other issues....

Our little village bank ain't going to have that sort of cash just laying around.....

Went into the bank first thing in the morning and I'll let our bank manager know.

What was that all about you may ask?

Well, the manager wasn't surprised. They taxes have to be paid and in Spain in general it seems, the vendors aren't trusted enough to come up with the money, so they have to pay on the spot before the house is turned over. As most people don't have 20,000 Euros lying around, and the check takes a while to clear, they want cash.

Strangely, he had enough cash too, though it was a heck of a lot of 50's to be carting around.

Weird.

If you are ever asked to do this, just make sure that the documents you sign actually include the total price of the house, not just the amount that the check covers. Foreigners may not want to get on the wrong side of the tax man.

Met with another architect yesterday, I am coming to the conclusion that a fair number of architects are somewhat glutted by hubris.

He seemed OK, a bit of a poser. He wants us to keep the sink in the back cause the tiles are a hundred years old and from some traditional town. I know what he means, but the suckers are ugly, and I have to look at them every single freaking day....plus the "courtyard" is tiny and if we keep the safareig AND the sink we won't have anywhere to sit down......I need a home, not just a museum.

He wants to be paid 10% of what we pay the builders, that is over and above what we pay them. This does bring in interesting ethical questions. For instance, it is just as easy for him to design something a little (or a lot) more expensive as to design something cheaper, indeed probably easier to go more expensive. You can please the clients and you don't have to think very hard.

Plus you make more cash that way.

Also, as he is the one who is supposed to supervise the builders, he would not have our financial interest at heart as the pair of them together could inflate the bills quite nicely.

Hmmmmm.

Have to find out if this is a typical arrangement.

If nothing else, I am learning to ask the stupid questions and not finding myself surprised by things so often.

Whew.