Our lovely Andalucian townhouse, when we bought it, was full of tiles. But unfortunately, most weren't those beautiful Spanish tiles that we all swoon over. They were mostly patterned, but arranged in the most migraine inducing way - a really terrible mix of colours...
Unlike previous renovations, when we've actually lived in the properties as they were being renovated, this time, we have lived in an apartment, by the sea, a good couple of hours drive away. Each trip over to the house, is over a four hour round trip, and so we...
The renovation - well, I say *renovation*, but what I really mean is demolition - started in earnest a few weeks ago. We are very lucky that we've bagged ourselves a gorgeous apartment to rent, in a lovely western coastal town called Sanlucar de Barrameda, meaning...
Finally, work has started in the house. We visited last week and arrived to the sound of chiselling and hammering as years of plaster was starting to be removed from the walls of the rooms on the first floor. The downstairs rooms were filling up with scaffolding and...
Although we have renovated houses before, this seems a very different renovation. In our very first house, we did change it a lot, but we did nothing structural. Mostly, it seemed to be constant decorating and moving things around, which we did ourselves. When we sold...
Although it still feels as if we are on a very extended holiday here in Andalucia, and will be returning to Istria and our stone house, we're going to soon realise that this is not the case. We actually completed on the Spanish house in October, but have only visited...
When we decided to sell our house in Istria and move to Spain, we initially didn't look at future renovation projects. We thought that we wanted somewhere we would move in, and tinker around the edges, putting our stamp on the property. But, the more that we looked...
Over the past four or five years, we've had mixed success with our three honeysuckle plants. They have been moved around the garden quite a lot, due to some extensive renovation works, and last year, we dug them up out of big wooden planters, where they were supported...
Our Istrian stone house has not an iota of art deco about it. With a very traditional Mediterranean stone house structure, a Scandi inspired interior and a contemporary exterior, there's nothing at all that hints at this popular design style of the 1920s and 1930s....
One of the stranger things we packed into the back of the removal lorry when we came out to Istria, was the large clay, chimney pot which had been removed from the roof of our West Didsbury house, when we were renovating it, because it was redundant. I'm not sure why...