Another section done

29 Jan 2016

Finally, the tortured section around the front door is complete with three coats of plaster.  It has been a marathon, this bit, and I'm so glad it's finished.

 I'm rather pleased with the curves around the front door, I think it's nice and welcoming.  I cleaned up the paving, and used the last half-barrow of plaster to put some paving on the left-side window sill.  I'll try and grout this soon, so the area will have a more finished feel.

 Dave's band had a gig, with Vinnie as guest bass, because Panos had to be in Athens.

 And no rest for the rock god: now we've finished the latest section of plastering, there's windows to be painted and limewash applied.  We extended the scaffolding to full height, and up Dave went.

with just time to do our Greek homework in the sunshine before our lesson.

Timber!

27 Jan 2016

Beso was back to finish the trees, with the big chainsaw.  We couldn't bear to look.  He climbed the tree, tied off a rope, came back down, and while his friend held the rope to steer the fall, he cut the trunk.  There was a solid booming thud as each one came down in turn. 

 An action shot, snapped on the run, as the pole toppled sooner than I expected.

 I asked for this multi-stump to be left cut at different lengths.  We can make bee holes in it, and use it as a feature in some way.

 I suggested one of the big stump cuttings could be used as a coffee table, and Beso liked that idea, cutting several smaller chunks into stools and more tables.  The main poles were otherwise cut into 3m lengths so we can use them around the house, possibly.

Interesting finds

Sunday 24 Jan 2016

The dog has left.  Hurrah.  Some other friends of Robbie's have volunteered to take it off our hands.  We are very relieved, it was looking increasingly hangdog each day as we did nothing more interesting than climb the scaffolding and put more plaster on the wall.

So we went for an unencumbered walk, which was a joy.  We definitely are not dog people.  Dave wanted to show me some ruins he'd discovered.  Big blocks of stone, well cut and very old.  I wonder if the archaeologists know about them.  And a very lovely donkey.

Making a garden

16 - 24 Jan 2016

 There is very little top soil on our acre.  We need time to build soil fertility, and to clear areas for planting, but the first step, we decided, was to get some 'Kopria' - (Greek for manure) to help along the process.

We tracked down someone who keeps a goat farm on the mainland, and tried to buy 28 sacks for 100 euros, but he refused, and offered us 30 sacks for 90 euros - as the Greeks say with a shrug 'What can we do?'

The farmer turned up very promptly, and he and his daughter happily unloaded 30 kilo sacks like they were feather pillows.  He spoke only Greek, but had curly ginger hair and beard, and would have looked at home in Southern Ireland.  The Kopria was top quality, well rotted, lovely black gold.

 Thirty stuffed sacks, ready to be wheelbarrowed down the hill.

 The outcome of my surveying attempts last month - a 1 cm to 1 metre scale plan of the land.  The coloured circles are repositionable trees and shrubs as I attempt to work out where to fit everything we'd like to have into the space available.

 This is our bed for annual vegetables, it is the area we cleared for potatoes a few years ago, and have since mulched with straw.  Now we have a week of chilly weather, too cold for plaster to cure properly in, so we're setting it up again.  First Dave rotovated it, while I retrieved some old boards left behind when the Winnebago left, to construct a series of raised beds.  Incredibly, we had made the beds a random length which turned out to be 4.8m - the exact length of the boards.  It is weird when that happens.

 Here are some of the beds ready to be screwed together, and piles of mulch to go over the manure.  The land is alive with wild iris at the moment, and we had to take some care not to crush them.

One still, clear night, I caught this corona round the full moon

Some works are going on on our road down to Nidri.  One day we saw this decorated branch stuck into the sand heap - an unexpected quirk of whimsy from the road crew, it would seem.

Timber

Thursday 14 Jan 2016

It has been a difficult decision, but we finally decided to go ahead and have the monster cypresses taken down.  They are over 30 metres tall, and significantly shadow our electric and hot-water making facilities in the shortest months of the year.  In the summer, the sun is so high overhead they cast only a very little shade.  As we want to press on with planting some of the trees for our projected 'Forest Garden', it was time to fell the trees and clear the land.

 First tree stripped to a bare pole

 They cut all the side branches off first, and made an enormous, smokey fire of the green needles.  We had thought of keeping the leafy bits and putting them through the chipper, but it would've been an overwhelming job, so we decided against it.

 The ash heap actually smouldered for a week despite two days of heavy rain

 Even the side branches of  the first two trees made a significant pile of firewood

Bare poles.  The workmen were waiting on a part for the big chainsaw, so they stopped at this point for a while, but at least we had sunshine on our solar panels for a lot longer each day: warm water and electricity - hurray!

Around the front door

13 Jan 2016

Around the front door is a terribly tortured area to plaster.  It is up under the eaves, with rounded windowsills that prevent the scaffolding getting in close, with stepped paving underfoot.  It's all about banged heads and long stretches, and awkward angles that a trowel won't fit in to. 

Scrumping leaf mould

6 - 9 Jan 2016

We pressed on with mostly interior lathing and some plastering, as the weather has been a bit drizzly, and quite cold. 

 Interior base coats (direct onto the straw through the wood frame)

 ... and some top coats, over laths, which brings the plaster up to the front edge of the wood frame.

 Panos and Lucy came by with some musical friends and we had a fun jam session crammed into the music room

 Then we took the dog out scrumping fallen leaves from the plane trees up by the waterfalls.  We will put the leaves in one of our compost bins and let them rot down till we need them.

Dave admiring the waterfalls

... while the dog gets a really good run for once.

Quiet New Year

Weds 30 Dec to Sat 2 Jan 2016

For the first time since having small children, we decided to have a quiet New Year  So we saw in the new year by stocking up the log stores, doing a bit of gentle plastering, and taking Robbie's dog for some decent walks.

 A good day's chainsawing and chopping to fill up the small log store and part of the larger one.

 We've been having cat flap wars with a local tom cat who wants to come in, eat the cat food and spray everywhere to claim his territory.  After he'd broken in through polythene in various places, worked out how the cat flap operated, and generally made a nuisance of himself, I sealed up everything - but one evening I forgot to close the plywood flap that we open to reach in and unlatch the front door from outside.  Next morning there were these great gouges out of the newly third-coated wall by the door, where he'd scrabbled for purchase before getting in and spraying the ground floor yet again. Eugh!

 On a walk around Nidri, we found an incredibly posh new bus stop has been installed, so Dave and the dog posed in it for this photo

 Just to prove we had a quiet NYE, we did a bit of the interior wall in the living room on the 1st of Jan.

 A lovely long walk in the hills on 2nd Jan.

Followed by the essential New Year tradition of a small beer in warm sunshine at the Elite cafe

 until the sun sets and the mainland turns pink.