27/1 – Wooden Houses and more RAIN!

Its bl***dy cold here! And what’s more the wind is really strong, coming up from the coast over the steep cliffs that our apartment overlooks from the top floor, the gales were so strong last night that we didn’t get much sleep, we could hear things moving around on the roof (presumably our air conditioning units getting bashed by the gale) and the shutters that we have on each of the windows were taking a beating, being blown by the wind and having the rain rattle against them – not a good nights sleep.

We have never seen the sea as rough as it was that morning, the photo doesnt do it justice, you will have to take my word for it that the white water that you can see is indeed very very rough!

In fact this morning we found further evidence of how windy it had been last night when we went outside to drive to the wooden house builders with whom we had an appointment. A tree on our urbanisation, on the next block down (so about 15 feet from our block door) had been uprooted during the night – see the photo.

As most of you will know, we have workmen taking off the old paint around the urbanisation in preparation for its new, long awaited, coat of paint (the first in 20+ years), well the storm did some good and seemed to remove quite a lot of paint during the evening, depositing most of it, it seems, in our hallway!

We drove to the office of http://www.costahomes.com/ where we met Patrick to talk about the wooden houses that they sell. The idea is that they will place a house on any land that you buy, it all sounds quite exciting and the prices are very reasonable. We saw a number of plots of land, one was perfect, 5000 meters squared of land, nestled between fields of vines with a view of the mountains to the back, the only draw back was that it was within hearing distance of a busy dual carriageway and although your couldn’t see the traffic you could hear it – we therefore dismissed it.

The main nagging doubt that we came away with was that it sounded too good to be true, and this was confirmed when we visited another “temporary house” builder in the area (the wooden structures are build on concrete legs and are therefore regarded as ‘portable’, although I would not like to see anyone try to move one!) This builder seemed a little more open to discussing the legality of building on land that was smaller than the minimum required by law to build on (that of 10,000 meters squared), he told us that it was his responsibility to point out that if we proceeded when we would in fact be breaking the law, he also pointed out that they had never sold a house ‘legally’ and that EVERYONE builds this type of house on land smaller than that allowed by law and that the worst that could happen would be a fine from the local town hall!!!

We decided to think very carefully before going down this route, it just seemed too risky.