Tag: Renovation in Spain

Month three of Project Pego.  Wow! Our Spanish townhouse renovation has been hard going this trip.  When we arrived just over four weeks ago I though I was going to have a full on melt down.  We’d just come back to Spain after spending the summer in our  clean, warm flat in Southampton.  Chilling out.  Going to festivals.  Visiting friends and family.

We arrived in Pego after a long drive from the UK  via France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland (our 30th country visited!) and soon remembered just what sort of project we had let ourselves in for.

See blog post: Oh F#*k! What have we brought?

Our original plan to concentrate on the main living.  Then we decided to make the terrace nice and fit the family bathroom.  But, as ever, the plans changed.

In the past four weeks, the house has completely changed.  The terrace has had a lot of work done to it, and although not finished, it looks a million miles from the drab, dilapidated, and leaking space that it was. 

The family bathroom now has a new external wall (how the original ever lasted is beyond us) with a new window.  The internal wall is gone – it took less than a minute to completely remove all trace!

Downstairs, the hideous courtyard wall has been rendered.  Gee what a difference that has made.  All three other external walls on the courtyard have been amended, too.  We’ve removed a set of doors from one side which we wont be replacing, and blocked another which will form the new wall of the downstairs ensuite.  The upper stable wall has been rebuilt with a huge space for patio doors which will now be part of the master bedroom suite.

Talking of master bedroom.  I am going to be like a princess!  We knocked the wall down adjoining the original large bedroom and stable to create one humongous space.  I’m pretty excited about this room.  And yes, I have already drawn the furniture in its space.  And a vase of flowers…. As well as knocking down the wall, we pulled down the original ceiling ready to replace next time, and rebuilt the floor in the stable before the termites ate it into a pile.

If that wasn’t enough, tiles have been flying off the wall in the kitchen, bathroom and from the ‘skirting boards’ around the other rooms and up the stairs.

Here’s a video of our progress at month three.  It’s a bit of a blurry quality this time (not sure why) and I sniff a few too many times (sorry – we’ve been quite poorly this last week) but it’s incredible the progress we’ve made this month!  I honestly didn’t think this would be the case four weeks ago!  Thanks mum & Gary for helping us 🙂

See blog post: Project Pego Progress: 2 months in

Darren and I have just started our sixth renovation project.  This time, our task is to renovate a two bedroom Spanish town house in Pego, an hours drive from both Alicante or Valencia.  After mum bought her own villa in the town, we pursued the local estate agents online, and fell in love with the house we are now calling our Spanish home.  Having never visited the town before, we put a cheeky offer in on the property the first time we saw it (just 5 days after arriving in Pego).  Much to our surprise, the offer was accepted straight away.

Although perhaps we shouldn’t have been so surprised that he wanted to get the house off his hands.

The house is in need of a full renovation.  The roof leaks.  The water pipes leak.  There is minimal working electrics.  The electrics which do work cause electric shocks.  Bare wires dangling down are common.    Some plug sockets only work if you have a light switch on.  Others don’t work at all.  There is only hot water in the shower (although this is a new addition – there was no hot water when we moved in).  The toilet doesn’t flush.  The drains are knackered.  And they stink.  Paint is peeling off the wall.  In fact the walls are crumbling.  Some of the windows don’t have glass.  Some of the door frames don’t have doors – this includes external doors.  There is no such thing as central heating, and although we have two fireplaces there are no chimneys.  We also have woodworm.

Here’s a little video I took a few days after collecting the keys to the derelict house that we bought.  It’s the first time I’ve made a video of a home renovation project, and I can’t wait to look back on it next year, when we *hope* to have finished the works!

If you’ve done a similar project, I’ld love you to leave some links below so I can have a look at your progress / achievement.