Using other peoples expertise.

The first year we were living here, everyone wanted to visit. I think some of them thought it was going to be like their Spanish holidays, complex with lots to do. They were badly mistaken!. We live 5km from anywhere. The nearest house is about 0.5km away.
We had people visiting from April to November with about 20 days off spread between visits. It began to feel like a hotel changing beds, washing sheets and cleaning in the morning for the new guests to arrive in the afternoon!
We decided that the fireplace was a bit useless to cook with as the actual burning area was a bit small. With all these guests coming I would need an oven.  A friend offered us a second hand range that needed cleaning up so we bought that. The fireplace was removed and finally I had a cooker that doubles up as a heater too. Fantastic!

My parents came out first and so the sockets in the kitchen were installed.

The white pipe has all the wires in it running around the kitchen. We had 4 sockets put in around the worktop.
2 weeks later we had a friend visiting who was a plasterer, so Kev dug out chanels in the wall to hide the wires and on his visit he plastered the walls that we were not tiling.

                   Wires hidden and newly plastered wall .

I didn't want the plastering to be perfect and the rest of the house is not, it is very rustic looking.

As the plastering friend left, that afternoon, my son arrived and he tiled the kitchen walls. This was fantastic! For about 18 months we had been using the kitchen with concrete walls and now it was truly finished.

Getting there

  Finished Kitchen with new floor too

Some where in-between all of this madness we had new doors fitted out onto the terrace. The door we had made the kitchen very dark and we wanted as much natural light in there as we could get!

 

Outside door

 

 

Inside door (we have saved these for other uses)

 

 

New doors fitted.

 

 

From inside the kitchen

Why so long to finish jobs?  When we moved here we were told that we would have 2 rainy seasons, March/April and September/October. We decided that we would work outside while it was fine and when the rains came we would work inside. Only problem being that year the rains did not come! So we got nothing done in the house at all that year other than by using the visitors that came!