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.
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…
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
