There’s this one, just around the corner. Facade is onto a street (very not busy street) and then the long courtyard to the back entreance on the road around the edge of the village (also v not busy). No real garden but. Also, common walls both sides. But 5 bedrooms for under a quarter mil? 90 minutes (an agreesive 90 minutes, to be fair) to Faro Airport?
Incredibly brown. Had a cortijo up in the Alpujarras tiled out like that. Managed to be depressing both summer & winter. Reckon Wednesday would love the single bed. A few rusty chains for added decoration & Thing perched on the head…board(?)
I had a look at the pictures. Hmm, there seemed to be a number of missing light fittings, with electrical cable hanging out of the wall. Was the pool completed or is it still just a few concrete blocks in a hole? And the oven is in a shed?
@PST
Maybe the owners are German. For some reason they do that. Leave, taking all the electrical fittings with them. FK’s what for. Hardly worth the trouble. Weird people, Krauts.
And the oven is in a shed?
Not uncommon in some countries. Summer & winter kitchens. Common in Romania.
Here too. Rather more one for cooking lunch in and another for prep work. Mashing olives and pitting lemons or whatever is done to these ag things….
Problem with buying anything in Iberia is the locals aren’t capable of building anything more complicated than a garage. One can guarantee that place has no damp courses or the roof soakers or flashings or any permenant ventilation. However it has been known to rain, more than lightly & occasionally. So be prepared to be living with damp at least half of the year.
At least they put the bog seat down for the photos I suppose…
Looks like an Abandoned Project…
All the floor tiles show all the signs of a very hasty cleanup after a quick round of whitewashing, so I’d have a *real* good look at what the walls are actually doing, after checking the roof for freshly patched tiles.
Tells you which walls to look *really hard* at…
The paint on the woodwork is shot beyond salvation, so besides having to do that, I’d check for rot, especially dry rot in the doors and window frames.
No picture of the fusebox, which state and age is extremely indicative of the state of the wiring inside the house.
It’s not as *bad* as Addams Family Mainsion on the Hill from last time, but it takes a decent inspection to spot what they’re not telling you, and a fair amount of money/effort to get it to a state where mrs. Big would accept Things.
Failed and abandoned project for sale, nightmare problems included.
Convenient for the little pharmacy should BiG fancy a local hobby business.
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You got one of the very few detached places with space around in the village, Tim. The middle patch immediately north of the house you’re pointing BiG at has some prospective building plots; already some nice places been put in there. I do like the fancy 1920s villa on R. Dr. Sousa Branco (no. 18?) – could be good with plenty of money for repairs (some ongoing). Looks like you’ve been busy too, big fir tree gone and plenty of improvements around. Lawn and pool look inviting.
If anyone could invent render and paint that actually stick to walls through heat and rain, regular Portugal could be tidy and pretty.
You’d probably fail to get planning up there. The usual process here is buy a ruin – they, by definition, have planning.
18 T de S is lovely – but require a total rebuild. Roof, lintels things like that gone, Gaping cracks in walls. Lovely sized garden with outbuildings etc.
Wasn’t a fir tree. not sure what species but more like an invasive weed. Cut that out and it’s the olive tree you can see now.
Crikey, there are at least six dogs in that place. Which might explain some of the small objects scattered about.
Looking back through the fotos, there seems to be hardly any steel gone into that pool. There should be two pairs of risers up through every potblock with another horizontal pair tying them together in every course. Makes one wonder what went into the floor. Normal practise would be two spaced layers of 6″mesh tied into the side steel then the floor concrete poured & laid. Potblocks laid on top, then the pots filled with concrete, vibrated as the fill rises. Basically, a good pool, you should be able to lift the whole thing out of the ground without it breaking its back. A pool’s a boat with the water inside. There’s a lot of lateral pressure in a pool when it’s full & equal from the groundwater when it’s empty. Doesn’t take much to get cracks.
From looking at that one, I’d be inclined to dig it out whilst it still isn’t a major operation to do so & if you must have a pool, do it properly. Get one of my pools out would require a compressor & heavy breakers & oxy-acetelene & a JCB to handle the chunks.
I am frankly, after over a decade of neighbour from hell, looking for something with no one within shot. I leave it to the reader’s imagination with what to prefix “shot”. A large property, even one with an ambiguous boundary so long as boundary is far away from anywhere on said property I might spend much time. No utilities in common, no party walls, no nothing. Fuck the human race, I’m done with it. Merkel’s Millions have destroyed the cities, the country in Germany is practically unlivable, and the inbetweens are plagued with Little Shitlers constantly vexatiously instigating bureaucratic attention.
It’s like living in Brave New Mad Max Miss Marple. 1984.
What a time to be both English and German.
Depends on budget really. This one is overpriced – been a yoga retreat or summat. Ervidel, the local village, is a shithole. But you’re well outside that and you’d not shop there anyway, no shops in it. https://www.idealista.pt/imovel/34236139/ The lake, on the other hand, that’s great.
This is definitely rural: https://www.idealista.pt/imovel/34290738/ This one has neighbours – they’re not offering the outbuildings ith it. Expensive, even though Santana’s pretty nice for a small place. https://www.idealista.pt/imovel/32524939/ In the hills between Algarve and Alentejo.
Proper, this, but not notably cheap: https://www.idealista.pt/imovel/34270377/ This one is land more than anything – 30 acres? Serpa’s OK but you’re getting v dry and rural over toward Spanish border.https://www.idealista.pt/imovel/33900081/ Not bad here: https://www.idealista.pt/imovel/34448480/
This one is fairly cracking actually, but you’d need to work the land. It’s also right, right, rural. I mean not just rural itself, but the whole area is rural. https://www.idealista.pt/imovel/32682584/
It looks even worse than the ones they do on the BBC. Maybe pay 20k for it, raze it to the ground and get your friend Bob in to fix it up. The electrics probably don’t connect to the mains. The sewage goes where? The water comes from where? The swimming pool is shocking. Maybe it would take another 20k to fix it up. But nothing in that building looks worth keeping. Surely you would want aircon in some rooms?
It looks even worse than the ones they do on the BBC.
Long time since I’ve watched one of these BBC “do your house up” programmes. Mainly because there was never anything there worth watching. Lot of attractive wrapping paper but very little of the technical solutions any construction project requires lies beneath it. What you put on for an audience wants to be entertained, not for anyone seriously tackling a project.
Unfortunately that sums up the people in the construction industry down here in Iberia. Very light on technical competence. They really don’t know what they’re doing.
I know someone, who is Portuguese, who has built a house in Portugal. Other end of the country from Timmy.
Or rather, started building a house in Portugal. Three years ago.
It is now, at least, liveable in.
Look, a couple of technical things as examples:
First the pool. Those potblocks are not intended to be structural. They’re actually a form of shuttering for the reinforced concrete pour which will form the structure of the pool. I don’t even understand what those vertical steels are supposed to be doing. By the look of it, they’ve put them in first, then laid blocks up to them with some bits & pieces to bridge the gap. Decorative? When that pool’s full of water there’ll be 150 -200 pound pressure pushing on each of those blocks. It’ll just push them over. Maybe the backfill behind the blocks might help. But that’d need to be a lean concrete pour. Not use the void as rubbish dump which is what they seem to have done.
And one from the house of an acquaintance. The builders had put a Velux type window through a pitched tile roof. Those windows come with a soaker & flashing kit in the box with the window. Presumably the builder didn’t know what it did & threw it away. He certainly didn’t use it. What he did do was fix the window frame in the roof & cement it in. Inevitably differential expansion & contraction opened a gap between the frame & the cement & in came the rain. So he returned & bogged it with mastic. Which lasted a couple of years & we’re back to indoor rain.
Roofers know roofs move. They make roofs to move. The soakers channel the water away from the window & direct it on to the top of the next course of tiles down. You fit from the bottom going up so each component channels the water onto the top of the component below. Finally the flashings go on to cover the gaps, again always channeling down & away. I’ve seen roofs done like this are dry as a bone after 250 years. How I solved my friend’s leak. I made up the flashings & soakers I bought from an English builders merchants here. Dagos don’t seem to stock rolls of 6″code 3. Nor tin which would be the alternative. But it took ripping out everything the dagos had done but the window & stripping the tiles off to the ridge & replacing. They’re useless cvnts.