Gutters, garage, cave room and terrace - finished!

In "gutters-or-no-gutters" we discussed that we opted for ground floor gutters. This is how it turned out:

This should prove one of the most important measures: there's a slab of concrete under these tiles, where there was sand and gravel before, allowing water to reach the back wall, which indeed was damp on the inside, too.

Any water splashing down ends up in these canals. The new andaluz tiles on the walls protect the walls. The staircase has turned out quite nice too. We think. Oh, the hand railings need to be put back still.

The terrace is now tiled:

Still some wet spots in the garage when it rains heavily:

That is caused by water running off against the wall, where a little bit still seeps into the wall and below. We'll put row of small tiles on the wall there, or use that terrace-rubber-paint.

The garage floor was painted with spcial paint for garage floors:

The cave has it's new Kerakoll breathing plaster. And you can see where the walls are still damp, a few weeks later:

This will slowly dry out in time. Moisture that until now was trapped under "plastico wallpaint".

This is now the front of the house:

Not strictly necessary for protection, but for appearance.

Piso del garaje

Look! The rarest of sights! An empty garage.

We're going to have a layer of concrete on the terrace above the garage, but also on the garage floor. It's very bad cement, irregular, and letting loose stones and sand.

The garage has separate electrics, and grounding. Engineer Jansen prefers not to have all that embedded in concrete, so he tied the incoming wire up with some rope, and encased the earth pin in a plastic tube.

The earth pin had two wires, hardly connected to it, as the screw was loose. One wire goes to the copper water pipe (good), the other went into the wall. Not far though, I could pull it out just like that (bad). Properly tinned the proper ground wire, cleaned the screw, and put back in place. I guess the same guy as always is responsible for this "ground", too.

Tomorrow the concrete will be poured.

Garage Windows

Oh, one of the little tasks that had been halted due to the installation of the garage door and the doing-up of the main windows of the house is the doing-up of the simple white windows, shutters and frames of the workshop/garage. They suffered the damp early this year a lot, and the paint flaked off massively. The wood itself has barely survived, thanks to our ventilation measures.

With paint you can choose between acrylic, alkyd, unless you want to spend a lot of money on polyurethane paint. Not in Spain. Here you can choose between acrylic. En now and then polyurethane.

Those paints don't especially like each other. You cannot paint over the one with the other. We did not have much choice (see above), so acrylic it is. And sanding heavily. Which was not easier due to the fact meanwhile the rejas (grills) had been installed, so you can no longer sand the frame with the machine. And no, those rejas cannot be removed. Which is the idea, actually.

Oh, and primer. Quite unknown in Spain as well. Only a specialist shop had one brand. On the tin it said that for wood you first need yet another primer product for best results, but we gave that the finger.

And the "glazing bars", the small wooden slats that keep the glass in place: never properly painted, and so pretty tired. I removed them, and the glass panes, so we can paint the entire window, even the corners behind the glass. The window panes were standing against the wall, and then smashed with an iron thing dropping on them, smashing a few. Lucky we now had a spare window, which had been replaced by the garage door, so that can now donate glass and slats.

Yes, we still have a week and a half left.

Garage 2: Ramp

Today the ramp is ready. Outside and inside the garage, to pass the irrigation channel.

And not a day early, because:

This bit of concrete was put in only this morning.

Garage / Balsa

Today the garage is taking shape. The "rejas" (grate) are mounted, and the door was installed.

The growth has been removed with a small digger.

Zoomba supervising the job.

Et voilá.

Unfortunately, the "balsa" is no "balsa". It probably just is an old walled vegetable patch, that is easy to flood for watering. The wall I thought to have found was just hard soil and loose stones. A pity on the one hand, as there is no nice reservoir that is easily turned into a swimming pool. On the other hand, there is no concrete floor that is too shallow to remove, and we're now free to choose a spot for the swimming pool. Provided we reach an agreement here, of course.

Oh, and the water conduit now is in the ground, and is not baking in the sun any more.

Door

This is the old door of the workshop/garage. (It's rotten.)

And this is the new one. (Not rotten.)

We did keep the old lock.

Because you don't want to get rid of such a nice old ironwork key.

Eh?