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So uh I’ve been having a bit of a mental block
on the videos lately…. uh, loads of stuff has been happening but yeah, where are the videos? I can’t
seem to put a video together. I just had it in my head that I wanted to do a video of the final
terrace transformation when it’s all done um and we’ve done loads, it’s almost all done, but there’s
like one or two things. The light’s weird… but yeah there’s like one or two things which are not
done. The guttering and getting the sofa up there, and I did want to put some more plants as
well, that was the goal, but so I thought I would maybe just come here and talk to you a little
bit about the ruin since uh… everyone always wants to know about the ruin, right? And what
our plans are for that. And we have moved forward a little bit with it over the last few
weeks, we’ve had like the fire people come and have a look and check that we don’t need to
take down any trees or do any special like mitigation… we had some more talks with the town
hall architect and looking at stuff about access, quotes for the road access, improving
that and stuff like that… so yeah, we’re sort of moving forward on it. I’m just getting some celery for
dinner and I think I’m going to do a salad so I’m going to pick some calendula flowers to put in,
always looks nice. Yeah so the ruin, should we do a little tour? Should I show you around? Should
we talk a little bit about what we want to do? I normally do these videos these bonus videos
for our channel members and on Patreon, they’re just usually like shorter little videos, maybe updates in the middle of projects or just little projects that don’t really make their
way into the main videos. So there are nine other videos of these over on Patreon or as a
channel member, you would have access to them. But I thought since everyone is always asking
about the ruin I would make this one public. Okay should we go inside? So here’s the door… I
haven’t got Santi with me by the way because I don’t like going in here with him, it’s a bit
sketchy. Right, we are going in. I don’t even know which way this door opens… this way… we very
rarely go in here. We’ve been in here maybe once or twice because it doesn’t take much to have
a quick look around and just get a bit overwhelmed. So this is the ground floor volume/ footprint, I
guess… it’s a little bit smaller than upstairs because that’s a rock, basically, so above on the
next floor, the upstairs room extends like over the top of the rock. The whole floor slopes away
that way. There is a… oh I’ve never gone this far in before. There is a bit of a chimney/ fireplace
in the corner here which really makes you wonder, because I just can’t imagine anyone wanting to
ever have lived in here. Was it ever used? Sid anyone ever live in here? There’s a chair, tables,
old agricultural stuff, like spraying equipment… quite a lot of old firewood, shoes, clothes…
Over here to this side we have another little room. I’m going to guess that this creepy looking
string and rope hanging from the rafters was to hang up like animal feed and stuff so it
wouldn’t get eaten by rats. I don’t know, that’s the explanation I would like to believe in. Tiny
little chair. And then straight ahead as you come in – that’s the little room we were just in – straight
ahead… if only I had a wide angle lens! I should have bought the GoPro but the audio is really bad
on that. Straight in here is, I guess, the old animal stalls. Lots of cañas there and what
looks like not a too bad bed frame. Funny enough I was actually looking for
something like that a while ago. I had no idea that we had one. I’ve never
been in this far. Wow look, a really old stone sink or basin… oh no, it’s brick,
never mind. Let’s go upstairs now. So coming up to the top of the stairs
here we have this huge area up here which is bigger than the downstairs area. Again, lots
more cañas, animal stuff, nice spade… we have an exit this way. More canes, a beautiful view. I’m
quite high up here, actually. And over there as well. Back here is another room which you can’t
actually get to at the moment because the access was from the other side and the other side
has collapsed. This is where I burned some pine processionary caterpillars a couple of years ago.
there’s a very useful pipe which we’ve just stored up here, not sure what to do with it. And then
coming out back to the top of the stairs you can see as we look over the roof… yeah. So we’ve been in
this room, we’ve been in that area, and beyond that is the collapsed section. This stone wall is the
outside wall of the collapsed area where the roof and the modern – the new building parts have come
down. Coming around here we’ve got the car, so I’ve got to come past the car and I’ve got to go all
the way around to the back to see what’s going on there. Okay and again this is massively overgrown.
Luckily there’s a great big rock here which is quite a cool feature but yeah, luckily this is
here and at least provides a little bit of a pathway. So yeah then around the back we have the
area that neither of us want to think about but we have to – the collapsed section. There’s the room that
we can’t get to up there. It’s just a mess and it’s really bad. But we will fix it. One day this will
all be gone and we’ll have a beautiful house here. So yeah, the ruin! It is… uh I’m not sure how many
square feet footprint it is, I’ll get Mauro to calculate it from the drone shots later and we’ll
we’ll put it on the screen. But yeah we are going to… we can build the same volume basically in the
same spot. We can do a restoration… where am I going? Why am I going to the car for a basket? My
brain’s not working. We can do a renovation or a new build. We have in mind the architect we
want to use. When they start looking at things properly we’ll know for sure whether it’s
going to be a new build or a restoration. Hopefully it’s going to be a restoration because that
makes things a little bit simpler. I’ve got my basket. So clearly it is a ruin on top of a ruin. There’s
an old stone original footprint which has a few walls still intact and then there’s a sort of
80s era modern build on top of that, which… there’s a bit of a history that goes with it and the guy
that did it did subsequently, I believe, go on and build some quite respectable buildings. But this
was his first… his first try, let’s say. And uh yeah, I’m not saying I could do any better but yeah,
it does look like it’s going to need to come down. So our idea at the moment is to split the
rebuild of the ruin into two phases, the first phase to rebuild the main
square two story section in a simple way. We want to use natural building techniques,
but we want to make it simple and square and not do anything too complicated i.e keep
costs down. Our main thought would be to do a straw bale building. We hope that it could
be heated passively by the sun so that we wouldn’t need… Oh my god, Jesus Christ! Right,
it’s because I’m in the fruit cage and this is one of the projects I’ve been working on, putting
these bamboo shade stuff up here, but all the massive carpenter bees have started nesting
in it, which I knew would happen, I don’t mind, it just gave me a bit of a shock. It’s not
funny, Santi! I got a bit scared! I don’t mind the bees, the bees is fine, it’s just it was
very close to my head! I don’t know if they get territorial about their about their cañas!
Anyway, here we are, the fruit cage is looking amazing. Right, maybe I’ll come back in
there later. Anyway, yeah, the main square footprint, hopefully we would have two bedrooms downstairs,
a big open plan living/kitchen area upstairs, there are two kind of entrances to this part of
the ruin, on two levels. There’s the kind of ground floor entrance which you can see here and then
around the back on the other side, on the top floor, is another way in. So I’m thinking that that would
be where we park, probably, and how we get into the ruin… into the kitchen, into the living room
from that side, like the front door… I don’t know. The reason we want to split it into
two builds is so that we can do a portion up front and then we want to leave the option open
for extending it into the area where we have the stone walls. We hope that we can build a big
workshop type area, lots of storage, and on top of that area possibly more bedrooms, any other
kind of rooms that we might want like a office room, a craft room, more storage, you know, that
sort of thing, guest rooms. Maybe we can do it more experimental with different types of natural
building techniques if we’re sort of adding on rooms, as it were. We’d love to have like a
courtyard design where we have like rooms coming off like an inner patio/courtyard. I just really
love that that feel that you get. Anyway, those are all the vague ideas that we have. Obviously working
with an architect we’ll start to get some of those things a lot clearer. You might have noticed
one issue we have is the asbestos roofing. Removing that safely and other demolition work is
a major cost and we’ve already been looking into that and getting some of that done ASAP really
because if we could tidy up the area and have a blank slate-ish to start, then I think we’d feel
a lot better about things. So yeah, what other projects have we been working on? Well you’ve seen
the fruit cage, it’s coming along really nicely, everything is growing really well in there. I’ve
been cutting a lot of caña, drying it and making these shady panels for the roof which seems to
be working really well, the plants are loving the dappled shade. So that’s good. Got a few more
to do. The terrace is almost done. We’ve put the roof on, we’ve put the shade stuff on, we planted a couple
of kiwis up there, Santi’s got a little tent and some play things, we’re almost done. We’ve been doing a
lot of work in the bathroom, in the utilities area. We’ve been pointing! There’s loads of unpointed
wall on the front and the back of the house that we’ve been um pointing in lime, Mauro has been
doing that basically every day lately. We’ve been plastering… I’ve been planting loads of
stuff. We planted 10 little cypress saplings, hopefully they’re going to grow up into a nice
little border wall thing. I just think they look really nice, Italian cypress trees, they look
gorgeous like standing on a hill… I mean we’re not on a hill but I’m sure they’ll still look
nice. Planting stuff in the garden. The summer garden, it’s going to be good, I think. Had loads
of rain. There’s going to be so many olives this year, I think. All the trees just have so many
flowers on them, little olives forming, and yeah, the final piece of news: we are looking for volunteers
for June, July, September, October and November this year. Full details are in our latest newsletter
so I’ll leave a link to that in the description, you can read what we’re looking for, what
we’re offering, how it would work, so yeah. if you would like to come and join us working on whatever
project we happen to be working on, there’s a few ideas listed in the newsletter, we would love
to hear from you. You can find my email address and contact details in the newsletter as well. So
we will say goodbye, got to go make some dinner. Thank you for watching this video and we’ll see you
soon, hopefully with a finished terrace project.
29 Comments
Oh I love this skirt on preview!
It’s really big.
This seems to be an asbestos fiber roof. If so you need to hire a specialized company to remove it…
Te hemos echado de menos. ❤
Puede que me equivoque, pero en mi pueblo toda la vida se ha colgado las matanzas (chorizos, morcillas, jamones…) del techo para curarlos. De esa manera, duraban todo el año. Mi abuela me explicaba que por aquella época quien tenía un cerdo tenía un tesoro, y eran capaces de alimentarse del mismo durante más de un año haciendo este tipo de técnicas de conservación.
ostras, la ruina es inmensa espero que el arquitecto os de buenas noticias y pronto pueda ser, al menos, un espacio seguro y a medio plazo un hogar maravilloso.
I remember someone mentioning on a video that sometimes, when property had been divided between family members, they would put up a building for their equipment/animals/feed that also included a kitchenette type of space where they could sit and eat or rest out of the weather when they took a break from working the land. That way they didn't need to go back and forth between the inherited land and their own home/farm for lunch or tools. Sometimes they did eventually get converted into homes for family members, adding on as needed.💕💕
I'd love to come and help, sadly I have balance issues which was caused by chemo and radiotherapy for head and neck cancer. And have no strength. I just love you 3. You work so hard. Santi is just wonderful. Thank you for sharing ❤❤❤
It was not unusual for people to live in the same structure as the farm animals in the past, so I would guess that was happening in that old building.
🇺🇾❤❤❤🥰🥰🥰🥰
First you have to get rid of the mess the former owner left! I couldn't do that! Awful really!
The inside of the ruin is quite scary 😲
I always get shocked about those carpenter bees 🐝 when they appear out of the blue but I'm happy to have them in my garden 🤗
Harriet, thank you so much for sharing this bonus episode more widely! The ruin has absolutely amazing potential; your idea for a courtyard-centered structure (in the 2nd phase) is a great one. I loved the glimpses of the terrace and bathroom projects, and as ever your garden looks sumptuous and bountiful.
So much potential! So much rubbish😂
You have some great ideas, the inner courtyard one is a wonderful design, especially in that climate. Great potential for the future and doing it in stages makes sense. I really enjoyed Santi's giggle with the carpenter bees lol, very cute.😂❤
You are very courageous to take on that project. It will take a lot of work and time, but I'm sure it will be beautiful!
Male and female carpenter bees emerge in the spring (April and early May) and mate. Territorial males hover nearby as mated females begin nesting activities. Because gallery construction is a time- and energy-consuming process, the female preferentially refurbishes an old nest rather than creating a new one. She may reuse an existing gallery, lengthen an existing gallery, or excavate a new gallery from an existing entrance hole. Only males are capable of stinging, but they seldom do. They will attempt to bluff you by flying near you and hanging close to you. As long as you calm and not swatting at them, they are not a problem. I've been staying at a friend's house which has a LOT of them, and it might be disconcerting to some people, but I enjoy them.
Earth bags would be an interesting build.
Some great ideas for the ruin!
Recommendation #1: clean up that teeny tiny chair for Santi ❤️
Happy Mother's Day Harriet! 🌻
Appreciate the tour of the ruin. I think disposing of the asbestos panels (are you sure they contain asbestos?), removing the trash and staging any recyclable building products is a great idea. You want to start with a clean idea of what is stable and eligible for restoration.
In the meantime, you can use the lower level as a barn for all of your animals in winter. 🌞✅
Interesting ruin. It looks like a very lot of work.
I just read your blog and am sorry that govt regs are so impactful on your small business. At the same time, I'm glad they have freed you to do what you want to do with the videos and maybe enjoy the creative process more. Good luck with it all!
So happy to hear of your future projects. We missed you !❤
I applaud your enthusiasm, I have no joy in these endeavours.
Interesting ruins.
Ah Santi you are a dote Mama loves you with a sweet little kiss on the head .
The original building may have been quaint. It’s a pity you can’t get a photo.
Wow that’s an amazing building. I am so looking forward on seeing it come back to life.