Luxury accommodation in the Aegean countryside

Author: Jason (Page 1 of 7)

House is nearly a house

First: thank you to everyone who has reached out to express their concern due to the recent fires here in Turkey. Fortunately for us, the big fires have been well to the south, with nothing closer than about 50 kilometres.

Satellite image of fires in Turkey
Satellite photo showing smoke from the fires on 3rd August 2021. We’re the red circle in the top left.

Certainly there has been an ominous haze and smoke in the air on some days. And there was a small fire in a local olive grove a few days ago that gave everyone a scare but thankfully the fire brigade quickly got it under control.

It could easily have been so much worse. Very sad scenes on the news from around Bodrum, Marmaris, and Antalya. And more recently the tragedy seems to have moved over to the Greek islands. Tough times all round.

On a more optimistic note, we’re finally getting there with our house. The plaster is on at last and there are only minor details left to do. You know, things like windows, doors, floor tiles, bathroom fixtures, etc…

Winter sunset
December 2020 sunset.

Our last update was back in December 2020. At that point we were deep in the process of putting up the straw bale walls, as in the photo below. The next stage after that would be putting in the electrical wiring. Then covering the straw walls with chicken-wire mesh inside and out, and tying both meshes together with baling twine pushed through the walls every 30 cm. Only then can the plastering itself begin. (Of course all of those phases take longer than you think they are going to take!)

Straw bale room
Completing the straw bale walls last winter.

The coronavirus era has been a very mixed bag for us, as I’m sure it has for most of you. For long stretches it has meant we’ve had no guests at all, and that’s been hard on our budget but good for making time to get work done. In 2020 we had a team of geothermal engineers who stayed with us often, and effectively kept our business going during a grim period when tourist visitors were non-existent. In early 2021, though, the team’s work took them elsewhere in the region and things were again very quiet for us.

At least we could work on the house! Nothing is ever simple though and in January we had some disturbing news that one of our immediate neighbours was selling their olive grove to a farmer who wanted to cut down the trees and build a cow-shed on the land. We weren’t particularly thrilled about this development, and were frankly a bit surprised because in Turkey it’s very bad form to cut down olive trees. But what really made it into a potential nightmare was that there was some ambiguity in the title deeds about exactly how this farmer was going to get access to the land. He certainly believed that he was going to be entitled to use our driveway. We weren’t so sure about that.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we had the choice of either fighting about the access issue in court (which wouldn’t really be good for anyone except the lawyers) or just pre-empting the whole thing by buying the land ourselves. So we scraped some money together and by February we were the proud owners of another half-acre or so.

Olive trees
Some of the olive trees on our new plot of land.

There are about 35 trees on the plot which is fantastic news for our goal to be self-sufficient with olives and olive oil. The new land is just behind our old farmhouse, and across the drive and downhill from the cafe. About a third of it is quite a steep slope, but the rest is flat which gives some possibilities for the future. No plans to do anything for now except harvest the olives, but Sirem is thinking we could do luxury camping among the trees down there one day.

View from the new plot of land, looking uphill and east towards the cafe veranda.

So with that distraction sorted, you’d think we would have pushed on with the plastering, right? Instead we engaged in some really advanced-level procrastination and decided that the front entrance of the hotel wasn’t looking good enough and we needed to finally lay some long-neglected paving stones, and build some short brick walls to improve things.

Hotel entrance as it was a couple of years ago.

In the shot above you can see the problems. The drainage canal, running down and to the left, was doing a great job of getting rid of water, but it was wider and uglier and more dangerous than it needed to be. (People were forever at risk of tripping and falling into it, particularly after a few drinks.) Also we hated the ugly concrete bridge at the lower left, and wanted something more appealing than the simple concrete path that led up to the cafe terrace area.

Stage one of the new plan: low walls to hide the drainage canal, PVC pipes under the walkways.

So we built some low brick walls to contain and disguise the drainage canal. We smashed the ugly concrete bridge with a sledgehammer: it took all of five minutes which doesn’t say much for its build quality!

We also shrank the canal quite a bit, which meant the driveway gained some useful width but we had to lay new paving stones in the reclaimed parts. We made a brand new entrance to the terrace at one spot where people were always jumping over the wall. And we ran PVC pipes under each walkway so the rainwater could flow unimpeded.

Putting grout between the new paving stones on the driveway.
Overview of the work in progress. Note helpful dogs.

The little walls look really ugly in basic red brick but once you render them it all starts to look a bit nicer. Sirem and Şehnaz (a woman from the village who’s been working with us and is good at everything) did lovely work setting tile fragments into mortar on top of the walls to make it all look amazing.

Close-up of helpful dog #1 (Zeytin).
Close-up of helpful dog #2 (Zeliş).

The next step was doing a smoother second coat of render, with really fine sand, and then limewashing all of the new walls (and the old ones too) to get the Mediterranean look we were after. I should take a moment to thank our poor old cement mixer which is soldiering on after much abuse from us.

Very hard-working and long-suffering cement mixer.
That’s more like it: limewashed walls looking a lot better. The driveway has gained some space which helps with parking and turning, too.
Moving up towards the cafe entrance. You can just see the new walkway on the left.
Cafe entrance looking much friendlier and safer!
Close-up of some of the decorative work on top of the new wall.
Night-time overview, job not quite finished, ignore ugly bits lower left.
Last part of the job: laying paving stones on the old concrete path and grouting around them.
Reverse view of the newly paved path.

And that was that. Almost. We still have one thing left to do here: in that final photo, try to imagine three pairs of timber posts, left and right of the path. One pair in the foreground, one in the middle-ground, and one pair right at the back near the ramp up from the driveway. Then we’ll use these posts to build a nice pergola, about nine metres by four metres, and grow grape vines and wisteria and honeysuckle all over it. That would really help with the amount of late afternoon sun we get on the terrace.

I have already gone on a bit, and I know that some readers will be getting antsy that there haven’t been enough animal photos. So, without further ado, I give you some cats, Zorro, and a tortoise, just to keep you going.

Pringles, also known as Tubby, enjoying the sun lounge.
Panini on the prowl.
Zorro being lovable.
Tortoise by the pool.

Now comes one of those moments when I have to confess that we don’t always do every single thing ourselves. We were busy enough with our other jobs that we decided to get some professionals in to plaster the house. I really do enjoy working with plaster, but we met a team of local guys who had been doing solid work in Sirem’s parent’s street, and the temptation to use their services was too great. In the photo below, you can see my sole contribution to plastering the house. That white mess near the front door was my effort to demonstrate how to do the first coat of lime plaster onto straw, which the guys had not worked with before.

Very first plaster going on to the house.
First coat of plaster going on in the kitchen area. Note all the electrical cabling about to be hidden behind the plaster.
First coat of plaster, bedroom.
First coat of plaster, north-east corner exterior.
First and second coats, upstairs studio/bedroom.
Kitchen area viewed from the bridge above.
Second coat completed, southwest corner.
Second coat complete, kitchen area. Our home-made scaffolding still stands!
Second coat complete, entrance area.
Lounge room windows, looking down the driveway.
Niche near the stairs, rough plaster coat.
View from the southeast showing the final coat of plaster, done with smooth sand.

And that’s where we are with the house. The plastering team did a great job. As mentioned earlier, all that remains for us is to make windows, doors, etc., etc. Our plan is to start with our bedroom and the ensuite bathroom, to at least get that part of the house clean and weatherproof, and then move in as soon as we can. That would free up room three for guests, and we could then finish off the house interior piece by piece.

Pool as it was until recently…

The year had one more surprise for us: about six weeks ago we got a visit from a man with a clipboard who explained to us that we had apparently been running an unlicensed swimming pool all this time. So we’ve had to make some changes. Compulsory pool-water lab tests once a month, for example. (I’m pleased to say we passed the first one with flying colours.) There were also a few safety-related things we had to do.

Flotation device for emergencies. Looks very nautical.
Depth in centimetres labelled at each side of the pool. This is the shallow end.

I don’t have any photos of this one, but I also had to go and get my bronze life-saving certificate under the tutelage of Osman, a local dive instructor. (Great guy and we 100% recommend him if any of our guests ever want to go diving.) The course was pretty intense but being comfortable in the water helped a lot. So, a big thank-you to the Australian custom of throwing your children into the pool very young, I guess.

We’re well into summer now, and have suffered through a bit of a heat-wave these past few weeks. But the hot weather, increasing vaccination rates, and the end of a long covid-lockdown in Turkey have combined to bring us a flood of guests recently, so we really cannot complain about that. Starting to see some intrepid foreign tourists returning too. Having been fully vaccinated ourselves, we’re OK with being around new people, although we’re still taking some basic precautions.

Deck chairs ready for visitors.
Gardens have just about made it through the hot summer, with plenty of extra watering.
August means figs.

Here’s hoping that this is at least the beginning of the end of the covid era. For any readers who are planning to come and visit, we’ll totally understand if you need to wait until you feel safer. Or indeed wait until you can fly home without quarantining! But nevertheless we hope to see you before too long.

View of the project from a neighbouring hill.

We’ll meet again

So, 2020 is drawing to a close. I’m guessing no-one will miss it. It’s been a strange year for us, as for everyone else. But what can you do except get on with the things you’re still able to do?

In June I mentioned that we’d had the straw bales delivered for the house, and that we were putting in the upstairs floorboards. Here’s a quick visual update on those two things.

The straw bale delivery: that’s most of the 230 bales needed for the walls of the house, with some more hidden away in what will become the walk-in wardrobe and the en-suite bathroom.
Loft room starts to take shape as we have finished the upstairs floorboards.

We’ve had surprisingly many guests this year. Perhaps because we’re a relatively isolated hotel out in the countryside, people see us as a safe place to get away for a while? Anyway, we’re grateful for the business, and we’ve tried to repay everyone’s confidence in us by being super-careful about social distancing and room cleaning.

Every now and then we make the time to get a change of scenery ourselves. Nothing as big as an overnight trip, but driving around the local area is always rewarding. Here are a few photos from a drive we took one evening last summer. (Whenever we do this we ask ourselves why we don’t do it more often.)

Lone tree by the Mediterranean. Kuşadası (L) and Samos (R) in the background.
Night-time fruit and veg stop in the village of Kirazlı (literally “Cherryville”).
Still life with peaches.

Just like last winter, we’re using the quieter times to get construction work done. With that in mind we’ve been officially closed since November. Sadly this turned out to be excellent timing as Turkey, like many countries, is experiencing a second wave of Covid cases. A good time to stay home and make things out of wood.

Using the loft room as a woodwork studio. This was one end of a new sofa for room four.

The big job, though, was working with straw. Turning what should be our final batch of straw bales into actual walls for the house. Step one was to nail up some plastic sheeting to keep the walls dry once the rains come. (Editor’s note: as of tonight, the rains are now here.) Then we dusted off the electric chainsaw and the baling twine and got to work.

The south end of the house: that’s the front door just left of centre.

I might have mentioned before that straw isn’t always the nicest material to work with, especially not when you have to lift the bales above your head. But it’s worth the hassle because, as the layers build up, you get a real sense of how your future living space is going to feel. It starts to look like a proper house, in other words!

We’re now really pleased that we went with Sirem’s suggestion of taller windows in the main room. It feels as though there will be plenty of light in there on winter days.

Main room of the house: kitchen on the left, lounge area on the right.
Nadire, Çisem, and Sirem working hard.
Another view of the kitchen area from up on the bridge.
Looking across the lounge to the kitchen.

Effectively it will be a house in three parts: first there’s the big open space of the main room, shown in the photos above. Second there are the downstairs rooms such as the bedroom and the study; the lower ceilings make them feel cozier. And finally the upstairs loft space, which might get too warm to be a great living space in summer but should be perfect in winter.

Standing at the back door looking south, straight through the house. Bedroom doorway on the extreme left; study and stairs on the right.
Bedroom from the doorway.
View from the loft space; this will be four north-facing windows.

This is our third building so we’re getting better at doing things in the right order. For example, remembering to leave a big lump of wood inside the inner surface of the bale wall so we can screw in some shelves later on. Or putting pipes through the walls now to make life easier when installing air-con or exhaust fans or ethernet cables. With the windows we’re taking the time to set up for lath-and-plaster work so we can get nicely defined window openings that “fan out” slightly to bounce light into the room better.

Window detail.

We always wanted to try putting a niche into one of the walls but never found the right spot for it previously. This time we think the staircase could be the perfect place: you have to imagine the niche with plaster, obviously, and the right light fitting.

Wall niche on the stairway.

And that’s about where we are with the house. The only thing to add is that over the last few days we’re putting heavy-duty cables into the walls to prepare for all the electrical connections and lighting. (Don’t worry, we’ll get a real electrician in to check the work and wire up the main board and the circuit breakers.)

What else?

The garden has had another year to grow and is looking more and more like a proper established thing which is great. Here’s an angle that I’ve shown you many times before but I really like how green everything is looking, especially that area on the right in front of room three.

Same old pool shot but look at the garden!
Another garden photo showing all three buildings.

We’re happy to report that all the animals are doing well this year. Leo was just an annoying kitten last time but now he is an annoying cat. He has graduated from special treatment (i.e., being in our arms all the time) and has been released into the general cat population. Which means he has to deal with all the other cats who are equally convinced that they should be the centre of attention.

Leo wants to know what I am doing.
Leo on the prowl.
Coco planning something awful.

Luckily the dogs are always patient and diplomatic and rise above the constant cat politics.

Zeytin in the sun.
Zorro not quite convinced that he wants his photo taken.

I will leave it at that. We miss you all. Here’s to a successful vaccine and a more normal world in 2021.

Best wishes from Ionia: Panini with Sirem.

Strange days

It’s been a year since we last spoke. Apparently you’re supposed to write a post at least once a month, otherwise your blog is a ghost town… but let’s not dwell on that.

On the bright side, a lot has happened and I have plenty of photos to share. By the way, if you’re interested in far more timely updates on what we’re doing, please do have a look at Sirem’s Instagram account.

Obviously COVID-19, lockdowns, and quarantine have profoundly affected millions of people’s lives over the last few months. We hope everyone is getting through this difficult period as best they can. It must be particularly tough for those of you living in apartments with not much access to outside space. The embarrassing truth for us is that the pandemic has hardly changed our lives at all. Of course Turkey had a strict lockdown period, and we now wear a mask to go to the shops. But most of the things we do continue as before. Turns out we were already pretty socially distanced!

Swallow using our pool as a drinking bowl.

Let’s start back at last summer. Every year as it gets warmer swallows start to appear in our skies. Presumably they’ve flown up from Africa. They particularly like drinking from our pool. This year I was ready for them and lay in wait with the zoom lens. They move so fast that it’s really hard to get a good photo: for every decent shot there were dozens that were out-of-focus. This was the best one I managed.

Last summer was our busiest so far in terms of guests. (Ah, the “before times”.) Most days were spent cooking, cleaning, and looking after people, and thus construction slowed right down. Not to complain though: it was great to have some money coming in, and it’s always very satisfying to see people enjoying the place.

Dean and Nala were two guests we won’t forget in a hurry. One fine morning Dean pushed his bicycle up our steep driveway. (I knew we would get on as we were both wearing Crocs.) He then revealed Nala, his lovely cat, sitting in a basket on the handlebars. Dean is on a mission to cycle around the world, and he had found Nala as a lost roadside kitten in Bosnia that he couldn’t bear to leave behind. They’d had a tough couple of days on the road from Izmir and a couple of flat tyres in a row and I think our place was a nice break for them both.

Visit from intrepid cyclist Dean and his cat Nala.

They had a really close bond, unsurprisingly. Nala was amazingly good at travelling and sitting in the bike basket for hours on end. There was much discussion about how none of our cats would tolerate it for more than ten seconds.

Their travels have been interrupted a bit by COVID-19 and border closures, but they’re still on the road and you can see their further adventures here. I should add that Dean is a great guy and is raising a lot of money for animal charities.

Street kitten living in our old barn.

Speaking of cats, as we often do: this is a shot of a beautiful grey and white kitten who we first noticed in late summer, when we realized her mum was raising her in our old barn. We still have roughly the same number of official pets, but a lot of the local strays, especially cats, have a kind of satellite status. They know that they can always drop in for some food, basically. The little one in the photo is now fully grown and a bit wild, but definitely still around. I regret that we missed our window to catch her and take her to the vet for vaccinations and spaying.

One thing that surprised us last year was the number of times we got requests from families to set up the room for mum, dad, and two kids. We thought that maybe we should have seen that request coming and promptly built a couple of single beds on wheels. Combined with the existing sofa in each room this gives us a lot more flexibility. Also, when they’re not in use, and with some appropriate cushions added, the single beds can double as flat sun-lounges by the pool.

Room set up with an extra bed for families. Back to front: original double bed, new roll-in single bed, and sofa-that-doubles-as-a-single-bed.

Summer turned to autumn, as it tends to do. We decided to pick our olives earlier this year, so that we could try for extra-virgin olive oil, using the cold-press machinery that our local pressing plant has had installed. You get a lower yield (maybe 20% less oil?) but it does taste amazing.

Olive harvest comes around again.

And then suddenly it was winter. The weather can still be nice here all the way through November, but there’s always a day in December when it’s properly cold and you realize you have eight or ten weeks of chilly weather and frequent rain to look forward to. The cats of course respond by spending more time inside and more time lying around (if that’s possible).

Coco and Suzie on the sofa.
Cezmi in the cafe.
Our little village in winter.
Zorro looking handsome, during a break in the rain.

With guest numbers naturally tailing off as the weather got colder, it was time for us to re-assess where we stood on building the house. Here’s how it looked on the 5th of December 2019.

State of the house, 5 Dec 2019.

We had managed to get some of the rafters up, but in truth it didn’t look all that different from the way it had a year earlier. (In our defence, there’d been a lot of work to do on finishing rooms three and four in the intervening months.)

Comparison shot: state of the house, 6 Dec 2018.

One of the reasons progress was so slow was that with just Sirem, Çisem, and myself doing the work, we had to do all the heavy lifting of rafters using ropes and pulleys. That’s all fine, it works well and is safe, but it takes ages to set up the rigging in a new position. And so we would typically manage only a couple of rafters a day.

Sirem and I raising a rafter with rope and pulleys. (Thanks, JP, for the photo.)
Roof from the inside, late Dec 2019. Slow going.

So we decided we needed some help. We thought that the timber frame of the house had been exposed to the elements for long enough and it was time to get the roof on as soon as possible. We hired a couple of local guys and that worked out well. Progress was much faster.

State of the house, 2 Feb 2020. Main rafters complete, flying rafters still to go.

We also rented some proper scaffolding, as you can see in the shot above. That helped a lot in making it safer to do work at height. It’s 5.4 metres from the main roof beam down to the concrete slab, so you really don’t want to come down the hard way.

By the 24th of February it was starting to look like a proper roof. The flying rafters were up (that’s the pair that seem to “float” at the front there). All the planks were on except that we’d left a nicely framed hole for the chimney flue to go through. We’d also started building the posts for the south veranda.

State of the house, 24 Feb. This is the south end of the house and that will be the front door, to the left of the central column.

Around this time I took the camera up on the roof and got a full panorama of the view. With the extra elevation up there you can see down to Germencik and the Meander Valley beyond. I really like this shot because it’s the best way I can think of to place the house into the surrounding landscape. (The centre of the photo is north if you’re curious.)

Rooftop 360 degree panorama. Try right-clicking and opening in a new window or tab as it’s quite a large image.

Then it was time to lug rolls and rolls of bitumen membrane plus a couple of thousand tiles up onto the roof and actually do the part that keeps the rain off. Laying the tiles isn’t so bad; it’s getting them up there that’s hard.

Roof tiles are on at last: 25 Mar 2020.
From this angle you can see the veranda structure and the framing for six upstairs windows.
One day soon this will be the open-plan kitchen and lounge room.
Detail of some of the south-facing windows upstairs.
Chimney successfully installed. Got to be careful to make sure everything close to it is heat-resistant.
Google maps helping out by updating their aerial imagery to show all three buildings with a roof on.

And then at the end of March, people finally realized how serious coronavirus was and the country closed down, basically. Regrettably we had to let our two new guys go: we had hoped to give them at least a month or two of additional work. (Apologies, Recep and Murat. You worked really hard and we appreciate it.)

So the early months of 2020 were mostly about getting a roof on the house, but that doesn’t mean we did absolutely nothing else. There is always time to take photos of the dogs, for example.

Zelis being shy and adorable.
Zeytin with baskets.

I never get tired of the rich colours of winter sunsets around here. (I know, I know, I have posted similar photos before, but bear with me.)

January sunset.
Sunset with minaret.

I had a very unusual day out when I was invited to the Germencik camel wrestling festival. I’ve known about this one for a while but hadn’t seen it before. (I confess to being disappointed when I learned that the wrestling was camel vs. camel and not man-against-camel.)

So, a surprising number of local families keep camels. I think that many decades ago they were used as a proper pack animal and now they’re more of a prestige thing. You don’t see much of the camels throughout the year but in January everyone dresses their camel up in a fancy harness and takes it down to the local showground for the main event.

Two camels wrestling. Each is using its neck and shoulders to try to force the other one to the ground.

I’m not 100% sure how I feel about this one. Clearly it’s a big thing on the local calendar, and it was nice to see some of our neighbours getting a rare opportunity to socialize and drink rakı and watch some wrestling. It’s not quite clear how the camels feel about it. They seem to lead a very quiet life for the rest of the year so perhaps they’re up for a bit of aggro. And to be fair, they’re seen as much too valuable to allow them to seriously hurt each other: if two camels really get stuck into it they’re quickly dragged apart with ropes.

Camel wrangling.

Definitely something different. Come in January if you’d like to see it.

Just before the lockdown hit we had a visit from an old friend and that gave us an excuse to take him to Miletus, one of the ancient Greek cities in the area, and one we hadn’t seen much of. Miletus was the home of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, so you can make a case for it being the birthplace of philosophy, apparently.

Philosophy aside, they certainly knew how to make monumental things out of stone. It’s yet another really impressive site in our valley.

Stone arches at Miletus.
Conversation in the temple, pre social distancing.

We’ve been slowly teaching ourselves how to make videos, and we used the emergence of spring colour in the garden as a theme for our first effort. You can choose between Sirem’s version that uses only ambient sound and has a calm, Zen-like atmosphere…

…or my version, with an entirely inappropriate blues-funk soundtrack and some jarring “I just learned how to edit!” cuts.

And of course we can’t go a whole year without adopting any new animals. So here is a quick look at Leo, who was found wet and miserable and angry and hungry on a cold day in January. He had grown up a bit by the time this video was filmed, and he’s now a very happy and extremely annoying cat. But we love him.

That’s almost everything. Thank you to everybody who came to visit last year, and a shout-out to all the people who had bookings for this year and have understandably had to cancel. We hope to see you all again one day when the world has gone back to normal.

In the meantime we’re back to working on our own and we’re pushing on with the house. On the north side there’s going to be a raised porch with insect screens, and we finished the framework for that a couple of weeks ago.

North porch taking shape.

One of the current jobs is putting in a floor for the upstairs bedroom area. Careful work as you have to get the nails in at 45 degrees inside the groove of the tongue-and-groove floorboards. That way they don’t show later on.

Starting to put in the upstairs floorboards.

And things move fast enough that my photos are already out of date. In fact the straw for the walls was delivered two days ago, and is now stacked neatly in what’s going to be the kitchen. But I don’t have any photos of that yet (Sirem does though!).

Thanks for reading.

Video time

Again, it’s been a long wait between blog posts. I’m sorry about that. But honestly, it will probably happen again. We’ve been as busy as ever, with guests and with construction. It’s hard to make the time to post something that feels like more than a tiny incremental update. So here’s a random assortment of things instead!

The headline news is that with the help of some friends we finally made a video tour for the hotel. Huge thank you to Tim and Selda for all the time they put into it. At 2 minutes 16 seconds, I’ll let the video speak for itself…

We hope you liked it. If anyone is up for helping us add subtitles in different languages, drop me a line. (Currently have English, Turkish, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Japanese, with French, Italian, and Polish on the way. Cheers to all of our translators.)

If you’re still up for looking at mere photos after that, I’ve collected a few landscape shots taken from within a couple of hundred metres of the hotel. Putting us into the surrounding landscape, if you like. These were taken in late winter, and you can see from the green grass that we got a lot of rain this year.

Mountains in the distance.
Olive grove.
The Meander Valley, looking south-east.
Our place through the trees.

There’s a tourist attraction near Dilek National Park called the “Cave of Zeus”. For some reason I always assumed it would be disappointing and never bothered to have a look at it until this year, despite it being just off the main road. Turns out it’s pretty cool. Didn’t get to meet Zeus though, sadly.

Cave of Zeus.
Yet another sunset.

More recently, with the place all cleaned up in preparation for shooting the video, I took advantage by taking a couple of panoramas. Hopefully they show how the pool area has come along.

Panorama from the south end of the pool.
Panorama from the poolside seating.
Sun lounges by the pool.

I know I keep saying this, but as the gardens mature they change everything for the better. Here’s a little bit of supporting evidence.

Flowers outside room 2.
Newly planted palm trees. Should have planted them years ago!

One of the main construction jobs has been extending the paved driveway further up towards our new house, and also trying to sort out the entrances to rooms three and four. They needed gardens, of course, but also pathways and little bridges to connect them to the drive. Things were especially tricky with room four, because if we got it wrong the pathway would send rainwater flooding down onto the veranda. Thankfully things seem to be working OK.

Paving the driveway and building a garden for room 4. In the background you can see a short wall that will act as a screen between our place and the guest areas of the hotel.
Small garden between rooms 3 and 4.
Room 4 exterior looking better: apologies for all the construction stuff.

Sirem had the bright idea to use our vast collection of broken tiles to decorate the garden walls. Smashing them into fragments with a hammer is easy enough, but it’s a lot of work cementing them onto the wall and adding grout. I think it looks pretty cool though.

Garden wall detail.

The other big job is getting room four into a habitable state. We’re actually in a massive rush to get it done right now, having fallen into our usual trap of a self-imposed deadline. (Some regular guests are arriving soon and asked about staying in the new room; we foolishly said yes and are currently scrambling to get everything finished in time!)

Room 4 progresses… this shot is out of date even as we speak.

And after room four is done, of course the next big push will be to finish our house. Disappointed not to have more to show you on that front, but this summer should bring progress. And we’re looking on the bright side: the milestone of having all four guest rooms operational will be something worth celebrating.

And finally some cat photos. Dogs next time, I promise.

Suzie and Leyla on the prowl.
Sezar: “no more questions!”

Hello again

Well that was quite a gap between updates. Sorry! Not that it’s any excuse, but I was ill with a mystery bug and didn’t feel like making blog posts or doing anything much else for a while. Feeling better now though, cheers for asking.

We were also busy with guests, which is a good problem to have. Thanks especially to the growing group of people who’ve stayed with us more than once. It’s a fantastic vote of confidence when people want to come back.

Pool still looking inviting in November.

Or sit, have a drink, and watch the sun set.

Latest news on the construction front is that, by mutual agreement, Koray is no longer working with us. He was on the job for over two years, he did a huge amount of work, and we’ll always be grateful for his contribution. We wish him all the best in his new worm-compost business.

Of course there’s still a lot to do before rooms three and four are guest-ready and before we have a new house. And now it’s all on us (with some help from family and friends). Exciting but also a little scary. For example, lifting the big beams into place on previous buildings was always a job for Koray and me. With half of that team gone, it pushed us to think about how on earth we were going to get the beams and rafters into place on the new house.

So we went out and bought rope and pulleys in order to set up a block-and-tackle system. Probably should have done it years ago actually. Three pulley wheels at the top and three at the bottom makes for a six-times mechanical advantage, not counting friction on the rope. And they work really well. I know this is not exactly new technology but it does feel very cool to be able to lift a 180kg beam a couple of metres into the air with one hand.

Lifting one of our largest beams with the new block and tackle.

In fact it was Sirem and Çisem who did the actual lifting when it came time to put up the heaviest two beams in the whole project. I had the easy job of shepherding each end into place and getting some safety screws in to hold them there.

Here’s a shot of both beams in place. The one on the left is down the spine of the house and has the important job of holding up a column that will support the ridge beam for the roof. The one on the right is to make a pair of them so we can build a catwalk upstairs, heading out over the double-height space of the main room. All just so people can appreciate the view from the south window up there. Anyway, I’m sure the cats will enjoy it one day.

Support for the roof beams and a catwalk.

Catwalk completed!

The catwalk is not the safest place to be right now, particularly after it’s been raining, as there are no railings yet. The view is worth it though. And it provides some much-needed scaffolding for the roof work that’s coming soon. Currently we’ve put up the upstairs columns, so the next step is to get the ridge beam up. After that it’s the 48 rafters, then planks, membrane, tiles, and voilà, we’ll have a roof.

Upper-level columns going up with plenty of temporary diagonal bracing.

You can just about see what the roof line will be like.

We’re rushing to get the roof onto our house right now because it would be great to get the timber frame protected (parts of it have been up for about a year) and a covered space would be very handy for storing equipment and straw bales. Before that, though, we did get room three to a habitable condition: here’s the bathroom looking a lot more civilized than the last time you saw it.

Bathroom looking better now.

Room three front door. Changed the design a little.

Room three feels so habitable now that we are in fact inhabiting it. Such is life. It’s good to no longer be competing with our own guests for winter accommodation in rooms one and two. And getting back to work on room four (which is currently plastered but doesn’t have windows) is the next big part of the project once the house has a roof. We’ll get there.

We took time out from house-building the other day for a minor safety improvement to building one: we have this loft space above the kitchen (which will be even more useful once we put some better shelving in). It’s been dangerous to be up there as there was nothing to stop you from falling down the ladder back into the kitchen. So, some angle iron, a bit of welding, a bit of painting, and we have a safety railing. Backing down the ladder doesn’t feel nearly so weird now.

New safety railing for the kitchen loft; should stop us breaking our necks.

It hasn’t all been work. My old friend Richard came to visit, and to celebrate we all went to the beach in Dilek National Park. I’ve known Richard since 1995 and have missed a few important developments in his life since moving here, so it was great to be able to catch up.

Richard came to visit. Wow, I really need a haircut.

Candid shot of Sirem and me. (Thanks, Krista, for both of these photos.)

And the national park is always a relaxing place to be. Plenty of things to point a camera at certainly.

Still good beach weather in late September. Well, maybe not for actual swimming.

Finally got a good shot of the wild pigs that live in the park.

What else has happened?

Because we are such publicity hounds, we said “yes” last summer when CNN Türk asked if they could come and film the crazy straw-bale people. Their program aired a few weeks ago and they did a fantastic job with only a couple of hours of raw footage to work with. In particular they took some great drone shots that showed our work from an angle we’d never seen before. The program is available on YouTube if anyone is curious. Obviously you’ll get more out of it if you speak Turkish, but the drone shots go beyond language. :)

Also in the publicity department: a week ago I finally made a “hey, we built a straw-bale hotel!” post to reddit/diy. And then sat at the computer for 11 hours answering people’s questions and comments. It’s nice to get feedback though and the feedback was almost entirely nice.

And, déjà vu, the olive harvesting season has come around again, a little early this time as it was a dry summer. I admit I did absolutely no work on this important job, because I was building the catwalk. Or something. The hard-working olive pickers were Sirem, Çisem, their mum Nadire, and local farmer Mustafa who was our hired expert.

Gently shaking the olives from one of our trees onto a sheet.

Sirem and Çisem doing it old-school: picking up fallen olives from the hillside.

Shaking the trees and gathering the olives is the hard part. It gets a lot easier and more rewarding when you take your crop to the local factory to be pressed into olive oil.

Rainy day at the olive oil factory. Each pile of bags is from someone’s olive farm. Our pile was very small compared to these!

Our olives going into the system.

Leaves and branches blown away, only the olives remain.

Recently the factory has brought in fancy new pressing equipment from Italy to make cold-pressed olive oil possible. This gives nicer oil but a lower yield than the standard warm-pressed method. Decided to give it a try and we couldn’t be happier; the oil is really magnificent.

Where the (cold-pressed) magic happens.

You might remember from last time that we adopted a little white puppy called Nina. She has turned out to be all-labrador, or we’re pretty sure she is anyway. She is wonderful and beautiful and extremely naughty and likes to chew on things that she shouldn’t. And she grew so quickly! I should never have given her all those eggs and all that milk…

Nina a few months ago.

Nina now: huge!

And just for some dog-cat balance, here is a photo of Suzie. She’s been with us for ages but you don’t get to see pictures of her very often as sometimes she decides she is shy, and disappears for a week or two.

Suzie looking soulfully into the distance.

And finally a couple of photos to try to show you how nice the light gets around here as the days get shorter and the air hazier.

I know, I know, like the world needs another sunset photo. But look at those rays!

View of distant hills.

Will try not to go quiet for so long this time!

And now for something completely different…

Perhaps we didn’t get as much done this month as we would have liked. But we had the best possible excuse: we’ve been really busy with guests. Which is great.

Two of those guests were my mum and dad, and they felt for us in that we’ve been working on our construction site almost without interruption for a couple of years now. They invited us on a short trip down to Bodrum to stay in a charming centre-of-town hotel they know from previous visits. We allowed our arms to be twisted and went along: call it a research trip, we thought.

Visiting the competition! Hotel Su in Bodrum.

Hotel Su was fantastic. They’re a bit bigger than we’re ever planning to be, and they have about a 20-year head start on us, but it was interesting to see how other people do things and to note down ideas for later shameless copying. Particularly great work by them on the garden (and bar) arranged around the central courtyard. The staff and the owners were extremely nice and we can happily recommend the place if anyone is heading to Bodrum before or after staying with us.

Lovely architectural details at Hotel Su.

Bodrum (formerly Halicarnassus) is always fun. It’s very much centred around the harbour, with lots of good restaurants along the shore. If you were thinking of chartering a boat for an Aegean cruise it’s definitely the place to go.

Gülets (Turkish yachts) moored on the quayside in Bodrum.

More boats in the harbour.

Back in Hıdırbeyli we had some drama. We were out by the pool one night when we saw flames on the opposite hillside: there was a fire in somebody’s olive grove. I think we were the first to call the emergency services as we had a clear view of what was happening. The fire looked really bad for a while, and we thought it was going to spread along the hillside and possibly threaten some houses. Very impressed though when the fire brigade arrived in seven minutes and had the fire under control shortly afterwards.

Fire on the other side of the village.

Fire now under control: that’s the fire brigade, top left. Remains of the fire smouldering on the left edge of the frame.

Surprise, surprise: the cats were completely unimpressed by the fire. Here are a few shots of them relaxing on the pool terrace that same evening.

Panini reclining.

Pablo, who we don’t see enough of because he is shy.

Cezmi inspecting his pool.

So, golf has never really been my cup of tea, but I realize it’s a big deal for some people. We’ve known for a while there was a serious golf course over in the hills near Kuşadası but hadn’t found an excuse to visit. More than one guest has mentioned that we should list the place on our  “Local attractions” page, and I really should.

Kuşadası International Golf Club.

Anyway, we drove over there as my dad wanted to see their accommodation options in the event that a future trip with some Australian friends turns into too many people for our place. I can’t tell you whether it’s a great golf course, but the views were very nice.

View from the club house looking west towards Samos.

We did do some construction work this month, of course. Room three is getting really close to habitability now: all the window frames are in and the tiles are down in the main room and in the bathroom. Only some grouting to go.

Room 3 has floor tiles now.

Bathroom tiles looking OK.

Thanks to Sirem’s sister Çisem, all 48  six-metre rafters for our new house have been sanded and are ready for mounting. But four of them were a bit of a mess: they had twisted when drying and looked more like bananas than nice straight pieces of wood. So we tried an old carpentry trick and put them in the pool for a week. (Don’t tell any guests, eh?) Unbelievably it actually worked, and we have nailed and strapped them together so that this time they should dry straight.

Rafters for the house being straightened.

And the last piece of news: we know we really don’t need any more animals, but we found a very beautiful and sweet puppy abandoned on the side of the road below our place. We normally try to do the sensible thing and take animals to the local shelter (where they’re vaccinated and spayed and eventually released if no-one adopts them). But this time we looked into the eyes of little Nina and we just couldn’t do it. Maybe the photos will explain why.

Meet Nina. (She was going to be Misha but then we realized he was a she.)

Nina looking content.

Nina fighting a mop.

Nina looking cheeky.

Until next time!

Moon shot

The last hours of July are ebbing away and I have a few photos to share but to tell the truth it’s been a bit of an incremental month — no huge surprises to report. Lots of small forms of progress though.

One big thing that happened: we had a tourist coach full of people come to the cafe for a Sunday morning breakfast. We learned the day before that they would arrive at 8am and we had to have them fed and out the door by 9 so they could travel on to Bodrum. It was about fifty people in total and we don’t even have that many chairs so we were frantically borrowing from the neighbours the evening before.

Borrowing every chair we could get.

We also had couples staying in both rooms that night but thankfully they were super-agreeable guests who were OK with having their breakfast a bit later. Anyway, it was a very stressful morning but turned out fine in the end. Nobody went away hungry and we got lots of nice comments about the cafe and the food and even the clean bathrooms. So that was good.

Breakfast is ready. Bring on the crowds.

Cafe has never been so full!

I know that one day a bus load of people might feel normal, and obviously there are loads of busy cafes where it would just be another morning. But for us it was a trial by fire that was hopefully worth it because now fifty more people know we exist.

What else? Last Friday was the lunar eclipse. We were really lucky to have clear skies and good viewing conditions; peak darkness of the moon was at around 11:30pm local time. Seemed only right to try to take a few photos. Wasn’t sure how well they would turn out as I don’t really have a long-enough lens for astronomical stuff. Happy with the results though.

Moon with earth’s shadow encroaching.

Blood moon! #nofilter #onlykiddingloadsoffilters

The moon and Mars.

And then it was after midnight and I still had all the gear out so I figured why not take more photos? I really like night-time landscape shots but I don’t take them often enough due to being terribly lazy. Here’s two of the better ones.

Driveway and gardens, looking west to Mount Mycale, late at night.

Pool in a reflective mood.

As usual we continue to build stuff. Finally got around to putting together our prototype sun-lounge. With wheels! It’s proving popular with both humans and cats so now it’s time to make five more.

Sun-lounge prototype. Cushions on order.

Building two is coming along. We’re again at the stage of building windows and door frames which feels like deja vu but it also feels good because it means we’re that much closer to habitability.

Window frames again.

We did some more concreting work up in our house, so now there’s a complete flight of stairs up to the mezzanine floor, a fireplace area for a solid fuel stove, and a big bricked-in box of about 1500kg of clay soil that’s meant to act as our thermal-mass heat storage. All of that is the brick structure on the centre right of the photo.

Fireplace and thermal-mass-box developments. Billowing sunshade for that post-apocalyptic settlement feel.

And that’s where we are right now. In one sense the place is still a construction site, but in another sense it’s not. Guests in the cafe or in the first two rooms can relax and enjoy themselves on the veranda or by the pool and the stuff we’re working on is no longer out there in the open but increasingly hidden away at the other end of the block. Which feels like progress.

Tropical outlook from room one’s veranda.

Gratuitous pool shot.

Couldn’t forget some animal representation, of course. The cats have been lazy in the heat this month and haven’t done anything supremely photogenic. But the dogs are always around and always being themselves.

Zeliş and Zeytin summing up their respective personalities in one photo.

See you next month.

 

 

Days of wine and plaster

Summer is here, guests are slowly starting to find us, and we keep working on construction as usual. That’s the short version.

The long version? OK. My mum and dad were here for a few weeks recently. It was great to see them and they were a huge help. And, as often happens, visitors gave us a reason to take a few days off to enjoy the local area. First stop was the village of Kapıkırı, by Lake Bafa — we mentioned it on the blog a couple of months ago. It’s such a tranquil and beautiful spot that we thought my parents needed to see it too.

Restaurant and ruined castle on the lake.

Lakeside houses dwarfed by the rocky mountainside.

We went back to the same restaurant, where the menu is fantastically simple: it’s basically either fish or köfte (meatballs). This time we were up on the terrace instead of down on the beach though.

Shady table at the restaurant.

We had a small team of professional restaurant cats lurking under the table hoping to get some scraps. (Yes, of course we gave them some scraps.) Here’s a shot of the smallest and cutest one. We didn’t actually take this little guy home, but we made sure he got the most fish. If you look at his face you can hopefully see why we have trouble with adopting too many cats in Turkey.

Kitten under the table.

Our second tourist stop was a hidden gem we’d learned about from one of our guests: Ayda Vineyards & Winery. They’re about 20km west of Izmir airport, way up in the hills. Their wine is really impressive, but we were also blown away by how good their restaurant was. And they have a few hotel rooms in case you drink a little too much for the drive home. Overall a fabulous place, and I’m sure we’ll be recommending it to future guests.

Selection of wines.

I should add that they took wine-tasting really seriously, too. Everyone gets eight glasses and a water glass!

The tasting room.

So many glasses!

I didn’t get a perfect photo of the setting so this shot of their lawn terrace will have to do. But it’s a glorious spot with views in all directions.

Terrace with a view.

Meanwhile back at our place, it was great to have the pool and the gardens so much further along since my mum and dad’s previous visit. The poolside area really feels like a comfortable place to spend time now.

Morning sun on the pool.

Lucy relaxing.

Rainy day by the pool.

Not sure if it’s clear from the photo above, but it was raining that day. It has been a strange wet summer so far, with afternoon thunderstorms a lot more common than usual. Good for the garden though.

And yes, that is a piece of wood floating in the pool. Don’t ask. (Well, since you asked: it’s the best way to straighten them out when they warp from uneven drying in the sun.)

Now for your regularly scheduled dog, cat, and flower photos.

Sleeping dogs.

Leyla at full speed.

Leyla looks concerned. She is probably thinking about biscuits.

Roses and figs.

I think that’s a daffodil? No? Maybe?

On to the serious stuff: with my dad on mixing duty and Koray on plastering duty, lots of progress has been made on the second building. The outside plastering is pretty much done. Currently the interior of room four still looks a bit rough, but room three is getting close to complete. Almost ready for guests — we just need to do the tiling, the bathroom, and the mini-kitchen area. Oh, and I have to make all the windows. Details, details.

Room four is the sanding workstation right now.

Room three is getting there!

Lathe and plaster, rear view.

In parallel with all the plastering work, we’ve made some progress on our new house. The floor joists for the second, mezzanine floor are now in, and I’ve tossed up some temporary floor boards so we can walk around up there. I sort of wish I’d planned for more upstairs windows as the views from the top floor are going to be great.

Our new house: view from the lounge/kitchen looking through to the bedroom. Upstairs floor joists now installed.

Home-made joist hangers, as seen in Sketchup!

Interior shot. This will be our bedroom one day.

Temporary floor boards so we can work upstairs.

View from upstairs looking south.

Next step is to get the big beams and columns in that will make up the spine of the house. Then to finally get a roof on it!

When too much breakfast is barely enough

A quick one this time.

Last time around I thought that problematic levels of food photography were still far in our future, but it turns out that the future arrives sooner than you think. With the cafe being open on Sundays now, we thought we should take a few more shots of our breakfast offerings. Mostly so we could include them on the cover of the menu or in printed flyers or something like that. So please enjoy the selection. And if any of the photos succeed in making you hungry, we are most certainly sorry-not-sorry.

Breakfast I.

Breakfast II.

Breakfast: overhead view.

Olives.

Breakfast in the shade, morning sun warming the landscape.

What can I say about the dogs that has not been said already? They continue to be loyal, selfless, deeply lazy animals. The most recent arrival is still looking for a definite name, by the way. Suggestions welcome.

Fluffy (AKA Fluffer, AKA Honey, AKA Honeybunny, AKA Lucky, AKA Lion) in  the garden. Note the  look that says “Am I allowed to be lying here? Is he going to yell at me?”

Zeliş being beautiful. “This is my pile of sand, how dare you make plaster out of it?”

In between breakfast photos we have actually done some work. Plaster is going onto the walls of rooms three and four, inside and out. Most importantly, the west wall of room three, the one facing the pool, has had its final coat of plaster so the pool area is looking much less like a construction site.

Plaster progress.

Pool pavilion tiled.

Pool area progress.

The gardens are looking great, and as usual there’s almost nothing to do except to add water sometimes.

Sunflower.

Garden gone wilder.

And we’ve had a few more guests. Thanks, people — you know who you are. Guests are doubly welcome as they provide an excuse for us to do something other than the usual construction work. So here’s one photo of further explorations at Magnesia (not sure what this building is, possibly warehouses down by the ancient harbour). Plus a gratuitous kitchen photo showing that sometimes we branch out beyond Turkish food.

Cloudy Magnesia afternoon.

Making pasta.

Ciao!

Sunshine and how to escape it

One day, not too far in the future, the feel of this blog is going to change. It will be great, one day, to make a post called “Hotel and house finally finished!”, or something similar. Then I guess we might switch the focus to food photos and landscapes and shots of undiscovered local oddities. But for now, we are still in the realm of incremental construction progress. So I hope you are all OK with another post that feels like a small step forward from the one before.

Overview of the project.

One bit of news is that the cafe is now open for business — at least it is on Sundays! And some local people have come by for long, leisurely Turkish breakfasts. We’d love to open more than just one day a week (and we do if someone books especially) but at the moment it’s hard to justify too much time away from the building work. Sadly we just can’t afford to have one or two of us sitting in the cafe all day waiting for potential customers.

Terrace looking welcoming, we hope, with a few more tables and the dog houses moved to a more suitable location at the other end of the property.

Terrace and cafe by night.

We’re still experimenting with exactly what goes into our breakfasts, but there are some staples that are always there: eggs in some form, fried vegetables, fruit, cheese, olives, lots of different jams, and of course bread.

Front to back: boiled eggs, tahini pekmez (sesame paste mixed with grape molasses), olives, butter & honey.

Front to back: apple, kiwi fruit & banana; peppers and aubergines in a tomato sauce; various jams; sigara börek (fried pastry rolls stuffed with cheese).

Spring seems to be rapidly turning into summer: today’s high will be 32 °C. And once again the warm weather has been great for the gardens. The wet winter has made it an especially good year for green things to launch themselves out of the ground.

Rose bush gone wild in the front right.

Gardens outside rooms one and two.

Garden with a view at the north end of the pool. Note the fast-growing mulberry tree just behind the trellis.

All this sunshine reminded us, though, that the pool was always going to need more shade before summer comes in earnest. The pavilion we built earlier is great, but it’s at its best in the morning. The late afternoon sun shines straight in and makes it much less hospitable. For a long time we considered going with big umbrellas (and you’ve probably seen the green umbrellas that the nice people at TwoFour Productions bought for us).  Still, the trouble with umbrellas is that a strong wind coming up the valley will often as not send them into the pool. So we sat down with Sketchup and designed a more permanent solution.

New sunshade.

One nice feature of the new sunshade is that from about 2pm in the afternoon it starts to shade one corner of the pool, making it possible for easily sunburned people (e.g., me) to get out of those UV rays.

Two layers of green shadecloth seems about right.

Middle of the day sees lots of shade around the pool now.

It’s not only the human population that have been enjoying the new and shadier pool environment. Cezmi and Sasha claimed two of the deck chairs for themselves. (Which reminds me, I need to build some nice wooden sun lounges as these chairs have seen better days.)

Cats enjoying the shade.

The cats, being cats, have been trying to claim territory all over the place. We had some guests who were far too nice and let Lucy sit on their laptop for a bit. I had a word with her afterwards though and she assures me it won’t happen again.

Cat enjoying laptop of tolerant guest. “Don’t look at gmail, look at me!”

The dogs are much more helpful and reliable, as ever. They’re not very keen on where we put their dog houses when we moved them up from the cafe terrace, so instead they have installed themselves as watchdogs in rooms three and four. They seem very happy there but I will have to break it to them eventually that rooms are for people.

Zeytin: straw dog.

And we have of course done some actual construction work. The second building has really taken shape now, with all the straw bales in. Just the fabric and mesh work to go before plastering begins.

Building two progress.

Interior progress, room four. Strips of wood define the bathroom walls, ready for old-fashioned lathe-and-plaster work.

The good weather has also given us more excuses to get out and about. Here are a couple of shots from Dilek National Park, 50 minutes south-west of us.

National park view. Greek island of Samos in the background.

Coastal drive with tree.

Finally, something we’ve never thought to include before. Opening the cafe meant we had to make sure the cafe bathrooms were finished and ready for business. You get to them by going outside, onto the veranda, and then around the corner. Thus nobody’s table is too close to the loo, which is good, but there’s a side effect of giving the bathrooms quite a nice northerly view. Here’s a photo of one of the bathrooms with an attempt to catch the view in the mirror.

Cafe bathroom.

 

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