Hello everybody,
I already told you how the arrival to the house was, how we started to clean it with effort (and bleach), and how little by little we were giving it life again. Well now I bring you the second part of this story, that moment when you not only clean, but you start dreaming in colors.
For our fourth weekend in the house, we arrived on Saturday at noon, although the idea was to leave early. I had every intention of painting the facade that weekend, but it kept raining.
We went to Leroy Merlin and bought the paint for the facade and chalk paint for the furniture. It was going to be gray epoxy, but I ended up choosing another special one for facades, supposedly waterproofing. In the end, I kept the original color of the house because the Cenlle Council has heritage rules about that.
As soon as we arrived, we also started cleaning the wood-burning oven in the kitchen again. We had forgotten to protect it from the leak, which was still there because the former owner had not yet sent anyone to repair it. We tried to light the wood to use the stove for heating (it was still cold, and we were in May) but there was no way we could get it to light.
We spent the whole weekend painting with chalk paint: a dining room table (now Diego’s desk), two chairs and a white bookcase in the living room.
The result? Disaster.
The paint didn’t cover well, it skipped with any rubbing, and on top of that the consistency was lousy. The can was probably old. I was very frustrated. I didn’t even like that bookcase from the beginning. But since it’s expensive and custom-made, we decided to keep it. Now I’m considering giving it away so someone can take it out of my house.
The black chairs looked a little better, but I didn’t like them either. In fact, I’m already thinking about putting them in the garage. It would have been cheaper and more effective to buy two black chairs at Ikea for 15 euros each than to spend almost 40 on two cans of paint.
As the Ikea furniture had not yet arrived, there was not much else to do. We took the opportunity to install two lamps in the living room, which was quite an odyssey because the ceiling is very high. We didn’t have a proper ladder, so we improvised a structure with a table, chairs and a stool so that Diego could reach it.
We also did the second deep cleaning of the garage, this time with pure bleach and almost got intoxicated. The previous time we used diluted bleach and everything was fine. This time it was so strong that my eyes stung all night. But well, the garage was clean and with less musty smell.
We also put an anti-vibration base for the washing machine, and we finally used it. It was already squeaky clean from the previous weekend, so that was another small step.
Finally, we put together the two office chairs we had bought at Carrefour.
For the fifth weekend Porto farewelled us with a hailstorm and we arrived in Ourense after lunchtime. This weekend we could not paint either as it rained non-stop.
While Diego was assembling two kitchen chairs (15 € each from IKEA), I took the opportunity to start cleaning the ceiling more thoroughly and puttying with plastic putty all the cracks from the settlement of the renovation work. There were still kilos of lint, dust and dirt coming out of the corners of the ceiling.
With the chairs ready, we moved on to the foyer. Four Trones shoe racks ended up being the solution after having looked at many options. A stone wall also has its complications as it is hard to drill, and the shoe racks were crooked due to the unevenness of the wall.
We moved on to cleaning the ceiling and wall in the bedroom area and I decided to change the layout of the room so I could keep the white bed and closet.
On Sunday we changed two light fixtures and cleaned the bathroom ceiling.
Although we didn’t have much to do this weekend, we took the opportunity to have the technician come to inspect the leak that would be repaired when it stopped raining, a man also came to measure the windows to make the budget and on Monday the sofa and the kitchen island were delivered.
We also decided that we had to renovate the kitchen, and I told the carpenter to come and take the measurements.
On May 16, we left very early because the technician was finally coming to repair the leak we had been dealing with for a month.
That same afternoon, I started to clean the gutter on the terrace side and to spray bleach again on all the parts that still had moss. As it was very sunny this weekend, I managed to remove quite a lot of moss.
That Friday we did almost nothing as Diego had to work and I was tired.
On Saturday we started to paint the facade and the back of the house; it was not an easy task due to the height of the house and the fact that we had no scaffolding. Fortunately, the house doesn’t have much to paint.
The carpenter also came and took the measurements of the kitchen. Also, because the bathroom walls were made of plasterboard, we realized that we could not put the door as I wanted.
On the penultimate weekend of May, we left on Friday night from Porto and, as had become customary, made a strategic stop at IKEA. We had made a habit of going there at least once a week, always hoping to find something interesting in the second hand section.
We arrived in Ourense around one o’clock in the morning, straight to sleep.
Saturday we got an early start with some unfinished business: we raised the bed to the highest level and finally got to use the green set of sheets we had been looking for for months. Diego got down to work with the bedside tables we had bought at IKEA Portugal. Theoretically, we were going to order them through the IKEA Spain website, but after an odyssey with the accumulated points and an “incidence” that was never resolved, we didn’t care and bought them directly in Portugal.
As we had no big plans for that weekend, we took the opportunity to assemble them. Afterwards, Diego tried again to install the mirror effect paper on the door leading to the terrace. He had tried it before, but the first time the paper broke and we had to order a new one.
After that we got right into another project: putting up a wallpaper that I had bought to stick on the back of the closet. That part of the closet faces the area we use as a work area, and we had to decorate it somehow. So, the idea was to embellish it a bit with a forest-themed wallpaper, to give it a cozier feel and make it blend in better with the rest of the space.
We spent practically all of what was left of Saturday, from after lunch until late at night, on that. You can’t imagine what a job it was. Despite the glitches, it turned out well.
Sunday, we continued with the never-ending list of tasks. This time it was the ceiling: we cleaned the part that is just above the work area, and we only had one little piece left, the one above the sofa, which we left pending for when we install it. We also got into the kitchen ceiling, which had its fair share of accumulated dust, and we put together an island from IKEA that we had ordered some time ago.
But, of course, that too was an odyssey. It arrived wrong, with a repeated piece, so we had to arrange a return, wait for them to pick it up, to send the package again. A disaster. The truth is that both IKEA Spain and Portugal have given us more headaches than joys.
After that I started to clean the garage a bit, and that’s when we realized that both the toilet and shower pipes were leaking. Yet another problem. Yet another hidden vice that, clearly, the ex-owner should take care of. So, we took photos, recorded videos and sent them to him. His response: that we would take care of it and then bill him.
That weekend a bricklayer who had been recommended to me, from a very small company in the area, also came. I took advantage of the occasion to ask him a thousand questions and to prepare estimates. But to give you an idea of what the situation is like in Ourense: the one for the kitchen and the one for the windows had already told me that they were not available until September, and this man told me that he didn’t have any space until 2026.
Finally, we finished sanitizing the top of the wood stove and applied a high temperature resistant black paint.
And so ended another weekend. I felt like we hadn’t done that much, but when I thought about it, aesthetically we had come a long way. The house was starting to look a little more like what I had in mind.
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