We’ve never had huge outdoor spaces anywhere that we’ve lived previously. In our last house in West Didsbury, we managed to create quite a funky little haven, out of scaffold planks. But it was still a bit of a tight squeeze and although we loved it, we never had a...
Our last cause for confusion centred around the Croatian banking system, which admittedly is getting a little less confusing as we just keep returning to the bank. We’re sure that one day all will slot into place and we’ll be glad of the multiple bank accounts we seem...
You know when things go really smoothly and you get lulled into a false sense of security, that this is how it will always be? Well, that happened to us very recently… We had arranged with the people we’d bought the house from, that while everything else they had left...
After two days of drowning in boxes and bubblewrap, we finally carved out a tiny corner of normality in the living room – unpacking and putting together our sofa was a joy, as was having some cosy candlelight. This may look very lovely (above), but careful...
This room, above, when we viewed for the first time in July 2016, was something of a mess. Two sets of bunk beds, random shelving, dishevelled bedding, bare plaster walls, bare floor boards - all in all, pretty dismal. BUT, with a beautiful soaring ceiling, original...
So, three months after we signed all of the legal documents for The House in the solictors’ office in Rijeka, we found ourselves, on 1st March 2017, heading from our stop-over in Zagreb, to the village of Zrenj in Istria. A very good friend of ours had helped us to...
Fast forward a couple of months from the last blog, and Monday 5th December, saw us sitting in a solicitors’ office in Riejka, with the sellers, signing paperwork & taking possession of the keys to the house… Just five months after seeing it online for the very...
So, on Monday 5th December 2016, *this* happened. Meaning, it’s now all very real, indeed…
December is going to herald in some big changes! We fly out on 1st December to Bergamo in Northern Italy and pick up a car, which we’ll drive down to Istria. On Dec 2nd we apply for our Croatian Osobni Identifikacijski Broj numbers – ID numbers, similar to our NI...
So, we’d arrived in Istria and hired a car, with the intention of finding the house we’d spotted online. Armed with a map and sat-nav we set off, climbing higher and higher up into the Istrian hills. Although it was July, it was quite cool and a overcast, but we could...