Getting Ready

Well, you can't just go and slap a house down on any old bit of land, you know. Despite the intensive, non-stop building that goes on down on the coastal strip, up here in the mountains it isn't the case. The Malagan authorities profess to want to control development. Ha! Ha! In reality, if you're not a developer with plenty of money to flash around the right places, it can be difficult to build a new house under the current rules.

The answer is to reform a house. This in itself isn't necessarily straightforward since most of the houses out in the campo (countyside) are tiny, do not have water connected through the local authority system and are not connected to the electricity grid. Additionally, a project has to be created, usually by an architect, to detail how the reform will be done including the house design, materials, land and water usage and water quality. The project is then submitted to the local town hall for them to spend an inordinate amount of time to ponder over and check it conforms to the rules issued by Malaga.

So, having had the project submitted to the town hall in March 2005 the permission eventually came through at the end of August meaning that we could go ahead and complete the purchase on 16th September.

Interestingly, the house that the architect designed for the project gets thrown away since in practise it just wouldn't be possible to utilise the walls in the way described in the project. What a joke. She, the architect, gets €2000 for 'organising' the project without anything of any use to us! Instead, we've spent ages drawing up all sorts of designs and painting 'artist's impressions' of what we think it will look like.

Eventually, the design had to be changed again since we decided to build it ourselves, literally. This calls for a different approach to make it slightly more practical to achieve. We also need guidance on the foundations and supporting wall design, so hire a guy called Salvador as the technical architect. He immediately says that we should knock down the old house and clear the land so that he can make a proper judgement. This is ideal for us since we didn't want to get involved with trying to re-use the old building.

So here we are. Mid-September and waiting to finalise the purchase and start our project. Loads of things to work out; site layout, water, electric, help, materials, final design, more help, laying foundations, retaining walls, drainage, more help, etc. It will interesting to look back at this website in a years time. Lets hope we've made progress!!!  

Note the difference between the winter (green) pictures and summer (brown).