The Renovation

The house had been used as a family holiday home for many years, without modernisation. Many of the rooms had very low false ceilings, which hid old beams.

Unfortunately, several of those beams turned out to be rotten. Replacing them meant removing whole floors - time-consuming and expensive! The kitchen, like all of the house, was perfectly serviceable, but a higher ceiling, new beams and modern equipment make a difference. Photo, right, courtesy Alex Wolfe Warman.

The lounge is large and airy, like most of the house, and this was one of the things that attracted us. It has a balcony - to the left - out onto the quiet cobbled street. This was one of the floors that had to be removed.

Apart from replacing the floor, replastering the walls, and painting them, this room didn't need much work. Photo, right, courtesy Alex Wolfe Warman.

Again, this bathroom was usable, but looked dated. It was also the only bathroom in a five-bedroomed house. We've converted one of the bedrooms to a second bathroom - that one complete with bath, rather than just shower - to get a better balance.

The new bathroom is immediately above this one, and it was another room in which the floor had to come out altogether. Ho hum. For a time, while work was in progress, this bathroom therefore had a ceiling twice as high as normal. It was quite tempting to keep it - lying back in a bath in such a room would feel very grand!

We bought the house with a little basic furniture left in it, which enabled us to stay in it for a couple of weeks when we first came to Spain, while we waited for our belongings to catch up. This was our bedroom for that period. The plaster needed a bit of work, and the floor sloped enough to make sleeping on the far side of the bed a little hazardous!

Again, the old beams had to go. They had been covered in plaster, and looked as though they would be pretty if we cleaned them up. Instead, we simply found how badly decayed they were. Like the lounge, above, it is quite an airy room. And the floor's level now. Photo, right, courtesy Alex Wolfe Warman.

This room leads out onto the balcony at the rear of the house, from which the shot of the church, on our Home page, was taken. The balcony itself wasn't huge, and the positions of other buildings restricted direct sunlight, especially during the winter months. This room was quite quaint - the floor was very uneven, the beamed ceiling was beautifully rustic, and there was an old, but sadly no longer usable, fireplace in one corner.

The outside wall has now been pulled in a few feet, to enlarge the balcony beyond. The wall on the right has also come in a little, to allow for steps on the other side that lead up to the roof terrace, over this room and an adjacent bedroom. The new roof terrace also meant the rustic roof had to go, to be replaced by something more robust. There is a small kitchenette unit here, to prepare light meals and drinks for on the terrace, as the kitchen is a couple of floors below. And we were working on what is now the roof terrace on the shortest day of the year in bright sunshine!

The ground floor patio was perhaps the most unpromising aspect of the whole house.

It was a fairly inhospitable patch of uneven concrete.

However, with a little imagination, a bit of hard work and the books from a certain British garden programme... (AWW)

... and a great builder, it's come out quite nicely. (AWW)