Some lessons

Settling into the new home and  surroundings has been a bit of a roller coaster.

The wood stove oven (and central heater) does a nice job of heating the house but turning on the under floor heating puts some strain on its ability to maintain the tank temperature at a level that makes for comfortable showers.

A tank temperature of 30°C yields a luke-warm shower while 40°C is on the edge of being hot enough to make you wonder if you should turn on a little bit of cold.

Maintaining the wood stove during the winter takes effort.  It is much like the wood stove we had in our previous house in that regard.  It was raining quite a bit in our first week so we didn't had a good chance to see how the sun influenced the temperature of the water.  The photovoltaic cells on one or two days were generating enough heat to at least contribute a little to the effort.

The underfloor heating is on a separate circuit and so we have learned to turn it off overnight so that the cooling oven is still able to maintain the water temperature.

As it has warmed, the photovoltaic system and wood stove working together have driven the temperature up to 60°C.   When we arrived the tank was at 20°C after no external heat for about 3 months so if we can maintain the tank at 60°C if could make the floor heating more effective and less of a drain on the heat and allow us to have comfortable showers!  We'll have to see.

Each of the toilets have a small hose and a spray gun which, let's just say, have been an interesting experiment in alternatives to toilet paper.  The taps in two of the bathrooms can be adjusted to warm the water, but given our first week's experimentation with heated water this is also something I haven't felt justifies waiting for the water to run hot.   The effect is a little alarming and I have a love-hate relationship with the practice.  I suspect I'll warm to it over time.

We have needed a lot of things.  The previous occupants stripped most things that we'd have expected to be left.  Mirrors, some light fittings and shelves in the built-in cupboards were all removed.  

So we have made multiple trips to the local hardware store, eventually caving towards the end of this week to buy some power tools which I have put to good use:  mounting brackets in the under-stairs storage room for brooms etc and moving the TV wall mount downstairs.  There will be many more little projects that will no doubt occupy weekends for a good while to come.

I have never really considered myself a handyman although I do have a few projects that I completed in our first house in South Africa.  I was pretty happy to see in the realty photographs that went up for our old house in Cross Street, Grahamstown that the built-in cupboards and book case in one of the front rooms are still intact.

The big problem with not being quite handy enough is starting a project that quickly deteriorates into disaster.  My worst moments involved floods of water under a kitchen sink where I had just replaced a seal or when I stripped a bolt deep in a cavity of the engine of a car we owned.

It seems almost certain that living in Portugal is going to involve lots of handiwork and I had a pretty successful weekend with a succession of projects that involved drilling holes into concrete and mounting brackets and hooks for various objects.  I learned how to replace a lock on the garage door - which turned out to be pretty simple once I watched a you-tube video on the topic.

We also did a little exploring in the farmland near our house - we are right on the edge of the hamlet so we are able to amble along a farm road just outside our gate.

The rain has been good, given the news about how long the drought has been in the Algarve.  It is funny how your attitude towards rain changes based on the knowledge of how rare it is.  We have welcomed it and have marveled at how the landscape has greened and how many little flowers have sprouted up all over the place.

The soil here is very rocky.  In the distance in the photograph above is a roughly 5ft (1.5m) wall comprised of huge rocks that appear to have been dug from the ground.  The rocks vary in size but some of them are as big as a fridge.

It is going to make things interesting for us as we look at garden projects.

On one visit to the hardware store Anne and I had a moment where our strategies for planning projects collided.  I'm fairly conservative in my approach - picking the first thing that I think we need to do and then working on that till it is accomplished before looking at what's next - a natural offshoot of my technology work.  Anne has the whole vision and is quite happy to get everything that she imagines we need before starting on it.

So we found ourselves arguing in the hardware store because we had decided that we wanted to put up a circular wash line.  Anne was loading the cart with all the necessary components and implements needed to install one (the wash and its base, spades, picks etc.).  I on the other hand wanted to buy only a spade and a pick - thinking that our first step was to dig a hole and was determined to only do that step before looking for the rest of the inventory.  I mean, honestly, what if we can't even dig the hole?

We've been together for long enough for this not to have been a crisis, but it did take a minutes of heated explanations on both our parts.  Anne's point of view prevailed as it often does in these situations and we arrived back home with all we imagined might be needed to complete the project.

We took a while to dig the hole because after we determined that the ground is very rocky we also started to wonder whether there are any electrical cables buried in some shallow trench where we had planned to dig.  So we left it for a few days before resuming with caution.

Another huge expense has been getting a car.  We sold our two cars last year and have kept the money aside for what we'll use in Portugal - even so, it is tough to lay out that much money in so short a time.  Probably no surprise that we went over our budget for the car by about a third to buy a second hand hybrid.  We justified it with the knowledge that the more expensive car will be very fuel-efficient.  Fuel is costly here at around 1.74EU per litre (that's about $7US per gallon).  We should have the car later next week.

In the meantime, Anne has been informed that her temporary residence visa is ready and can be added to her passport.  We don't regret coming here before the consulate let us know that the visa was ready because we already feel a lot more settled than we did two weeks ago.

Anne has an option to mail the passport into the Boston consulate and have them send it back to her, but she does have to be outside of Portugal for this process so that the new visa can be stamped at the border when she returns as a temporary resident.  The logistics of this are unfolding but will have Anne visiting our daughters in England for a few days.  Flights at short notice to the USA are incredibly expensive right now so the choice was $90 to England vs $1440 each way to the USA.

Cafe and playground in Silves

 

So I'll be spending the first weekend alone in the new house.  Since 2020 and the COVID lockdowns Anne and I have been more or less joined at the hip, so it will be weird to be apart for a few days.  There are plenty of projects here that I'll be able to work on in the meantime.

Anne has insisted that none of them include climbing a ladder - we have to still figure out the emergency response situation.