Luxury accommodation in the Aegean countryside

Tag: construction (Page 1 of 3)

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!

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!

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.

 

Straw bales, bar stools, and a trip to the lake

So, I have to be quick with this post — early start tomorrow. For once I’m going to try to let the photos speak for themselves and not talk so much.

Roof complete, straw bales going in.

As you can see, the roof on building two is now complete. We had 250 straw bales delivered a couple of weeks ago, and they’re rapidly being stacked into walls.

Interior with windows and straw.

Beams, columns, and bales.

The weather has still been a bit mixed-up, but hopefully now we’re in the final stretch towards the long, dry summer. All the rain should hopefully mean a good year for local farmers anyway.

Rain clouds looming to the east. Temporary plastic sheeting helps protect the straw-bale walls.

There were lots of 5 x 25 cm timber pieces left over from trimming the ends of the rafters, so we thought we might be able to make them into bar stools for the cafe. Here are the two prototypes. The legs are angled for stability, which seems to make them more comfortable as the rail for your feet is further forward than usual.

Home-made bar stools.

One size fits all, we hope.

You can’t build stuff all the time though, so one Sunday we took time out for a trip to Lake Bafa (Bafa Gölü). It’s about 40km south of us on the road to Bodrum. Normally we just take the main road along the southern shore and admire the views, but this time we went exploring a bit and found the lovely village of Kapıkırı at the eastern end. The village is built on the ruins of ancient Heracleia and is really worth the drive. Lots of strange rock formations and a very laid-back restaurant on the sandy lake shore.

View of Lake Bafa with some of the ruins of Heracleia in the foreground.

Village of Kapıkırı.

Lunch on the beach.

Fishing boat on the lake.

Sirem’s sister Çisem enjoying the view.

Some readers have asked for more dog photos: here’s one of Zeytin in a rare contemplative moment. And of course there is never a shortage of cats to photograph.

Zeytin having another lazy afternoon.

Sasha has made a new home on the straw bale stockpile.

Leila on the rug.

And finally, a big thank-you to Cees, Anne, and Rene: you must have had the worst holiday ever but we appreciate the help!

Spring is coming

Winter is just about over. It’s been very wet but, thankfully for the animals of the village, not especially cold. And now there are definite signs of spring in the air — here are a couple of shots to prove it.

Misty morning landscape.

White flowers under the olive trees.

(These were taken only about a hundred metres from our new house: a short walk through the neighbour’s olives and you reach the crest of the ridge, opening up a lovely view to the east.)

We were surprised and happy to get more guests than we thought we would during the coldest part of the year. So a big thank you to all of our recent visitors. One couple was especially patient and helped us get some much-needed photos of breakfast in the cafe.

Breakfast from above.

And from the side!

A new friendlier look for the cafe: some posters and a blue-grey feature wall.

We have also managed to get some work done. The goal is still to get rooms three and four open as soon as we possibly can, hopefully in time for this summer. The roof structure is done, the waterproof membrane is on, and we’ve had some guys out to install the gutters. Tiles are being hauled up onto the roof as we speak and soon it will be time to get on with the straw-bale walls and the interior.

Roof ready for tiles.

Tile laying proceeding.

We’re really pleased with how well the pool pavilion is going to fit in with building two, as you can see in the next photo. That green mesh sunshade (on the back of the pavilion) is quite handy at the moment for making the pool area feel like less of a building site. But at some not-too-distant point in the future it will come down so we can plaster the wall behind.

Pool pavilion will end up looking like part of building two.

The new roof on building two makes it a great work space when it rains. So on days when it would have been too dangerous to go up on the slippery roof membrane, we knocked together two more picnic tables for the terrace. They just need to be painted and they’re ready for guests. The terrace is going to look a lot more hospitable having three tables instead of one.

Another picnic table getting painted.

Between guests and construction work we didn’t get a ton of time for animal photos this month, but I did manage one nice one of Lara in her new role as masked vigilante.

“Who are you?”
“I’m Batcat.”

See you next time!

It’s framing again

At the risk of never talking about anything except construction… it’s good to be doing timber framing again. Compared to detail work like making windows or furniture, it all goes very fast as most of the time you don’t need to sand or stain the wood. Just cut it to size, get it up there, and fire some nails into it. (OK, with some of the bigger beams it’s a bit more involved, but the basic story is the same.)

Framing the walls for rooms three and four.

And at the end of each day you’ve got something different to what you started with: it’s a great morale boost to see the skeleton of a building emerge from the concrete slab.

We’ve alternated our work on the two buildings (i.e., the bungalow that will be rooms three and four, versus our new house-to-be). First the brickwork, then the treated timber base plate, then on top of that the wall framing, followed by the central beams. Currently we’ve reached the stage of putting up rafters for building two. So a real roof is not far off. It’s going to make the straw bale work a lot easier this time to have the roof up first, the way it’s supposed to happen. We won’t have to panic and drag out the tarpaulins every time it rains.

Roof tiles will get used soon after a year of waiting around.

Treated timber bolted down to the slab for our new house.

Hopefully the pool pavilion will look a bit less lonely once building two is done. You can see in the shot below how close it is to the west wall of room three. Close enough to be partially tucked in under the eaves. And the solid wall of the new building will help make the pavilion a shady spot for a few more hours each day.

Rooms three and four main beam up.

The wall timbers are up for the new house, and now we’re just waiting on some of the larger beams and joists to arrive for the next push upwards. The house has a significantly taller roofline than the other two buildings, to make room for that mezzanine first-floor bedroom. So there’s a minor worry that it could look a bit overly imposing. On the other hand, it should help that it will be the one right at the back. We’ll see how it works out. Too late to change the plans now!

New house starts to take shape.

Sketchup diagram of the new house shows what we’re working towards.

View through the house from front door to back.

One day these will be the kitchen windows looking out onto olive trees.

Winter brings a huge proportion of the annual rainfall around here, so that means we get days where it really buckets down. Not much you can do while that’s happening except take the day off, or maybe do some metalwork in our little workshop under the pool deck. The day afterwards is tricky, too, as you don’t want to be climbing up on woodwork that is still slippery from the rain.

Rainy day construction.

Rainy day metalwork: cutting some angle iron for corner bracing.

Luckily it is never too long until the sun comes out again. Here’s a nice sunny day shot looking up the driveway. You can see all the new work happening in the centre distance there.

View up the driveway from the cafe area. Gate coming one day soon.

It struck me the other day that I probably haven’t taken a photo that wasn’t cats, dogs, or construction in more than a year. Which is a bit sad, but it’s hard to get away and take pictures when there’s still so much to do. So this week I did try to do something a little bit different. But more on that below. First let’s get the required animal photos out of the way.

Coco, pretending not to be interested in the camera.

Lucy is growing up to be a lovely half-cat, half-giraffe cross.

Suzie, who you don’t get to see much of because she is shy.

Fluffy — not really our dog, but an admirer of Zeliş’s who visits a lot. He’s very sweet.

So I did get away, just slightly, to take some different photos to the usual. I confess I didn’t get very far though, and really they ended up being construction photos after all, so I will need to do more to break out of this rut. Anyway, here’s a trail winding up into the hills on the other side of the valley from our place. (Not the big Meander Valley; I mean the little valley our village sits in.)

Trail in the hills.

I went up there because it’s a hillside we look at every day, and I figured if we can see it there must be a good view from there looking back at us. Very happy with the resulting shots, as apart from the aerial shots on Google Maps we’ve never had such a nice overview of the project in one photo before. From left to right, you can see the water tanks, the new house, building two, the pavilion and the pool, the original building, and then the driveway winding down and to the left, leading down to the old farmhouse. It’s also nice to see how much we’re surrounded by olive trees.

View back towards our place giving an overview of the project.

Wider shot for context.

In the wide shot we’re that cluster of buildings about a third of the way in from the right-hand side. I really like this one as it properly shows we’re in the foothills of those mountains in the background.

And one final bit of news: we were pleasantly surprised to find some people had made bookings for February. Weren’t really expecting guests until things warm up in April or May. But we’re grateful, and I hope the weather repays their optimism!

Edit: by special request, some more Sketchup views of the house. There’s a fair bit of detail so you can click on these four images for a larger view.

View from the south.

View from the north-west showing rear veranda roof. Might make it into a covered porch one day.

Structure of the mezzanine area and stairs.

Interior view showing kitchen / lounge area and catwalk leading to south window (view from up there will be too good not to build a catwalk).

 

Booking dot com, cafe, cupboard, and cats

We’ve known for a long time that only being listed on Airbnb was probably foolish on our part and meant we were not reaching some potential customers. So we have finally gotten our act together and listed our place on booking.com.  Let’s see whether or not they send us a flood of new guests: time will tell.

One side effect of putting up a listing on a second booking site was that we needed to take some fresh photos to make sure we’re showing the place at its best. Here’s a shot of the main building from the driveway: leaves are falling from the fig trees but at least it’s still sunny.

Main entrance.

And another photo we really liked, that shows the connection between the rooms and the garden.

View from room two looking out at the olive grove.

For the same reason, we have at last set the cafe area up to properly look like a cafe. It’s crying out for a few more decorations to brighten up the place (posters on the walls, that sort of thing) but in general we’re pleased with how it’s coming together. Turns out we can seat about 20 people quite comfortably.

Cafe.

Looking back at the bar and reception area.

Spot the Christmas lights!

The cafe kitchen is done; I think the only thing left to do is to bring up the fridge from the old farmhouse so we can maximize our fridge space up here. The skeletal food cupboard you saw last time now has walls and doors and shelves and holds a ridiculous amount of food. And the loft has a real staircase so we can take the aluminium ladder outside and use it for more appropriate things.

Loft stairs and new pantry cupboard.

Every home needs one of these.

Some of the usual suspects have asked for more photos of our menagerie of animals. I do try to take these shots, I really do, but my camera is slow at auto-focusing, so with our high-energy demonic cats you should know that most of the photos come out like this…

Picasso cat! (Can you guess which one it is?)

Still, occasionally you will get a more narcissistic cat that behaves him or her-self and sits still long enough for a good photo.

Panini. With bonus purple disinfectant from a small operation after a fight went badly for him.

On the outdoor work front, the bricklaying is progressing well and you can now see where the fireplace, chimney, stairs, etc., will be in our new house.

Complicated pile of bricks that will one day be fireplace, thermal mass blob, and stairs.

And in fact the timber framing on building two has started as well, but no photos yet unfortunately. The goal is to get rooms three and four online as soon as we possibly can.

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