During 2006, I tackled the main house. But first I had to deal with some setbacks: in the garden house, a wall had collapsed because of the pressure of the mountain it is built against... During the rain period, the ground had gotten heavier and heavier heavier and the pressure on the wall had become too much. Apart from that, it turned out that the roof in the main house was leaking seriously. So I decided for an 'extreme makeover': a new roof, a new floor and a complete doing up of the garden house, preventing more local disasters from happening.
The new roof came first. It was delivered with a delay of only 2 months, which, as it turns out, corresponds to the Samian phrase "as soon as possible". Mr P. had other things to do as well, or so it turned out. But the result was and is beautiful, and I have forgiven him since. My house is now one of the few left with a roof of original rooftiles, laid in the traditional "one up and one down" way:
Next was the new floor. Again, Marc provided the much-needed help, without delays. We didn't miss the opportunity to take a few pics of a house without floors...
So there it was, the new floor and the new stairs. Now we could start cementing and plastering the walls. Friends came by, who were all too happy to give us some expert and non-expert advice. The plastering would take longer than predicted: working as a tour guide, the swims, the summer heat... coupled to a near-total inexperience with this line of work. But little by little things started taking shape.
On 1 October 2006, with things only halfway finished, we decided to move into the house anyway. It did speed up the work, and anyway we had no choice. The weather was perfect for some serious manual work now, and my father came over as well, helping me out in many ways with a grandmasterly eye for detail. And as De Volkskrant wrote that week: "A fit old-timer never leaves his boss"!
The plastering had taken a lot of time, but was now nearing the end. Other jobs also got done, as the photos above show. With 7 more days before my scheduled flight to Norway, I finally had the opportunity to raise the roof of the garden house. Probably the toughest working week of my life, but what joy when the new roof was actually there...
