The first week of work

After the transaction we had time to think about what we could do in the village, as now we are the owners. The next option for us to go to Spain was in the autumn holidays. Earlier on we tried to combine it with Spanish classes for the kids, but we couldn’t arrange extra free time from school, so we had to stick to the one week of school vacation.

We thought about starting at one of the houses which is in the relative good condition, like getting a door, so we could close it and store stuff there. But we had no electricity or tools as we had no space to keep stuff safe. So we were kind of stuck in a chicken and egg problem. To get out of this we set up a plan to get a container which we could lock. But that would not be there for this vacation.

Then Maaike’s parents asked: “Would it be of any use if we were there with some tools to clear away the burrs, bushes and so on?” Of course that would be great! We were happy that they were enthusiastic and by itself there was a plan to do that week. Cleanup and free the house and path's.

They even decided to go there a week earlier than us. They took a brushcutter, soil driller, pickaxe and machete so where fully equipped.

As we started working on the houses and land we wanted to make sure anyone wondering around would know what we are doing. Making communication easy to avoid problems building and hopefully when people know we are working on a good cause they would rather help than break things. 

Where could we order something like that, would it be expensive? By sheer incidence it turned out that we could order it on the same website we already ordered our leaflets. Tibor had to do a lot of fitting and measuring before the leaflet was transformed into a one meter wide board, but in the end it was perfect and costed about 50 euros. And it could be added to the stuff in Maaike’s parents car.

A lot of work was already done when we got there: the Calle Real was mostly cleaned, including the house that we want to reconstruct first!

So what did we do while the parents where removing all the burrs. We investigated what plants were growing on the land already, see how far we could come with soil driller (which was only 20cm for most of the lands and 40cm for the biggest land which is more clayey), take monsters from the soils (see another blog), attaching a mailbox and the information board and making plans about the reconstruction of the house (mainly for the roof and windows, to make it waterproof).