Thursday, May 01, 2008
Work Begins in Eliaohori
At last work has started on our house in Greece. Amazingly it is almost exactly 2 years since we first saw the property. I believe we saw it first on May 25th 2006.
Around the 22nd/23rd April Jamie, our architect, met up with Taki the builder and Roland the electrician at the house. Jamie was expecting to be having a pre-work discussion with them. However when he arrived he found that work had already started and was progressing fast. He took these pictures.
I feel very odd when I see that something that has been in my head for so long is now actually being realised. We really are doing this! Of course now the exchange rate GBP v. Euro is hideous and only getting worse. Property prices are falling fast and the cost of our renovation has increased in all possible ways. We must be crazy. And yet, oddly, it all still feels very much the right thing to do.
Around the 22nd/23rd April Jamie, our architect, met up with Taki the builder and Roland the electrician at the house. Jamie was expecting to be having a pre-work discussion with them. However when he arrived he found that work had already started and was progressing fast. He took these pictures.
I feel very odd when I see that something that has been in my head for so long is now actually being realised. We really are doing this! Of course now the exchange rate GBP v. Euro is hideous and only getting worse. Property prices are falling fast and the cost of our renovation has increased in all possible ways. We must be crazy. And yet, oddly, it all still feels very much the right thing to do.
I am exploding with creativity at the moment and have created an ideas book for the house. One of my better ideas is to incorporate labyrinths into the design as much as possible. I have one concrete finger-labyrinth that I will use, possibly as a wall tile or I may lay it horizontally somewhere. I intend to source more labyrinths and also create some myself. I want to have them all over the house and garden. I love the idea of people discovering them all over the place. I don’t know if there will be enough space to mark one out on the ground but if there is I will do this too. Labyrinth House! Very appropriate for Greece I feel.
My worry at the moment is that the builders have torn off the door to the wall cupboard that you can see in this photograph. This may seem
like a trivial thing, but it is a very special door. The cupboard –which we call the Gecko Cupboard, because of the sweet little Gecko that lives/lived there (I hope he’s escaped OK) - has been in the house for a long time. It fills in an old window opening. Since at least the 1940’s various people have autographed the inside of the door. It is a wonderful sort of visitor’s book. But what have the builders done with it? Jamie promises that nothing has yet been thrown away and that he will get them to retrieve it from wherever they have thrown it. I hope so. I am still waiting to hear. A great example of what can happen when you are not around to keep an eye on things. I had requested the cupboard be left intact but obviously this was forgotten in the frenzy of tearing everything down.
I am off out to Greece on the 18th May. I wonder what I will find?
