Luxury accommodation in the Aegean countryside

Tag: landscaping

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.

So much to do

Winter has come. When we get a north wind in January, it gets colder here than you might imagine. (Certainly colder than I was imagining in 2014.) And again we had some snow this year.

Winter weather

A dusting of snow.

But this winter has been much easier than the last, as we have temporarily moved into room two. It’s been great. We’re pleased to report that straw bale walls insulate just as well as advertised. To give you an idea: in the evenings we use the reverse-cycle air conditioning to get the temperature up to about 21 degrees, then switch it off when we go to bed. Even on the coldest nights, the room is still at about 18 degrees in the morning.

I’m almost reluctant to share the next two shots, as the room doesn’t look as pretty as it did in the previous post. In fact it’s quite cluttered now, as we’ve crammed a lot of furniture in. There’s a bed, a kitchen table with chairs, two sofas, two computer tables, etc. We’re really happy that you can comfortably fit all that in, but of course we’re going to return it to the originally intended minimalist/rustic splendour before the paying guests arrive.

View from the door

Room 2 with all our domestic junk in it.

View from the bed

View when you wake up in the morning.

Also the floor is no longer bare concrete. We went with 30 x 30 cm tiles in a red clay colour with wide grout lines — blatantly stealing a look we’ve seen in old houses in Spain and Italy. Hopefully we’ll get away with it.

Panini with floor tiles

Panini welcoming us home: note the tiles!

The cats are very pleased with the new room, not least because of the aforementioned reverse-cycle air conditioning. Some of them spend the whole day lying on the bed or one of the sofas. I have tried to explain to them that this luxury is only temporary, and by April we will all be back down in the farmhouse, but I am not sure they are listening.

Çezmi

Cezmi takes a break from his building inspector role.

Coco

Coco pretends to be surprised by his own cuteness.

Life is harder for our loyal dogs, who spend their days warning us about approaching tractors or motorbikes on the road below.

Zeytin and Zeliş on duty.

Zeytin and Zeliş on duty.

The building is structurally complete now, so we’re moving on to interior fixtures and fittings. We’ve put the countertop and sink into room two’s little kitchen, but we still need to install a fridge and some cupboards under the counter, and to tile the backsplash.

Sink

Sink going in.

There will be furniture to make, too. After all the carpentry we’ve done on the building itself, making a bed or a coffee table feels very approachable. Here’s something we put together as a base for the bathroom sink.

Bathroom vanity

Chunky bathroom vanity unit.

Speaking of bathrooms, it has been life-changing to be back in a situation where you don’t have to go outside to get to the toilet. That’s not too bad in summer, but it gets old pretty quickly when the temperature is below zero. The en-suite bathroom in room two is not fancy, but it feels big and well-lit and most importantly it’s warm.

Bathroom working

Bathroom: still need to do a mirror, a shelf, some towel racks, etc.

Shower

Shower needs some finishing touches but is fully functional.

The ongoing saga of making all the windows and doors is reaching its conclusion. There is only one doorway left that still needs a frame, and about four or five more doors to do — in the cafe mostly — and then we’re finally done.

Kitchen window

Kitchen window showing the run straight through to the other side. Should lead to a nice breeze when cooking in summer.

Here’s one to file under “you can never have too much storage.” We completed the small attic above the kitchen the other day: the wooden floorboards also form the kitchen ceiling. Taller people may bump their heads on the occasional rafter, but there’s a huge amount of storage space up there. And two internal windows into the cafe area to let some natural light in.

Attic

New attic.

With the prospect of actually having two rentable rooms and a working cafe kitchen soon, it’s pushed us to get back to all the outside stuff: landscaping, drainage, paving the driveway, thinking about where to put cars, etc. We had a backhoe loader in last week and got the guy to smooth out some of our bigger piles of left-over dirt. And also to dig a long drainage trench all the way down from the top of the block to the driveway. Planning to hand-pour a lot of concrete and incorporate a few rocks to try to make the functional ditch into something a bit more attractive. Maybe even make a water feature out of it by pumping water back up to the top. Could be naff, could be wonderful. We will see.

House with drainage ditch

The so-nearly-completed building with a freshly dug drainage ditch in the foreground.

We’ve also started landscaping work at the back of the building, where there’s about four metres of space before the steep slope down to the road. The photo below is very messy, but there’s a few details that may be of interest. You can see our new fusebox on the left, and some short brick retaining walls that will define the garden (don’t worry, we’re going to render and limewash them). That’s our solar hot water system up on a steel tower which makes sure it gets lots of sun but is also hidden away on the north side of the structure. It’s a little ugly right now but when the leaves come back to the fig trees they’ll help hide it.

Landscaping at the back

Landscaping at the back

And finally: we had a couple of days of heavy rain a few weeks back, and all that water led to a little bit of shifting soil on the edge of the driveway. This made us nervous because the nightmare scenario has always been something like a cement truck going too close to the edge and ending up on its side in the farmhouse garden. So just to be safe, we ordered 180 tons of local stone dumped over the edge, to shore things up a bit like you would with a railway track. We lose a little bit of garden at the base, but it was a dark soggy area anyway. Personally I quite like the new look. (I also like ordering 180 tons of something — never gets old.)

Driveway reinforcement

Driveway reinforcement.

 

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