Building walls brick by brick

Apparently some of you couldn't believe it when Susanne mentioned that the house was being built brick by brick, the traditional way. "Nobody builds houses that way", someone said.

Well, Juantxo does.

For the incredulous, here he is building (brick by brick) the walls of the bedrooms.

The exterior walls were also done this way and, in fact, they're load-bearing walls. That is, they form the structure of the house - together with two wooden pilars -, so they hold the weight of the entire house. There are no reinforced-concrete pilars anywhere in this house.

The other two rooms that you see opposite, whose walls Juantxo has just finished building, are the bathroom (right) and the dressing room (left).

Balcony

As we promised a week ago, here are the pictures of the structure for the balcony being set up by Joseba and Osvaldo.

Orientated to the South-West and completely protected from the North wind it is a nice and relaxed corner for spring-summer outdoor breakfasts.

A little bit of extreme gardenig

Sus and I have been on holidays for Easter. Our plan was to help Juantxo with his job, but he also got some days off to take his family to London. So instead, we've spent part of our holidays fighting brambles and wild roses to clear out a nice pice of bush at the south-western end of the plot.





Here is Donnou looking at part of the area that we've cleared out. Now it looks like a pretty civilized area, doesn't it? Believe me, before we started you couldn't see what there was on the other side.








He probably couldn't believe that a couple of "city guys" like us were capable of doing something like this and still look as if we were enjoying ourselves in the process. And, truth to be told, he's got a point: you cannot imagine how vicious the brambles and the wild roses were and how tough it was fighting them. But as hard as it is, it is also very rewarding to see all you've achieved at the end of the day.