Buying rural property and working remotely in central Portugal - part II
Written by Imelda on June 3, 2022, 4:05 p.m.
How to (or not) renovate old doors?
But do not assume that we were spending all our time with our new little friends. We were still working full time in our jobs and also, we were continuing to renovate our home. With all the necessary furniture in place, we started thinking about more major changes that we wanted to make. One of which was to change the paint of our doors. They were old wooden doors but if we decided to replace them with new doors, that could get quite expensive and we were not quite sure we wanted to get rid of them… they were still fully functional, they just looked old and dingy. In addition to the doors, there was another major renovation we wanted to do and that was our garage. Both the doors and the garage were our major projects for the house.
The most difficult part of our project with the doors was removing the old paint. It was an oily, sticky paint almost impossible to remove. Removing the old paint took many evenings and a lot of hard (and dirty) work. It also took some research to understand which was the best way to paint our now paint-less doors. After some struggles and trials and errors, we finally found the appropriate primers and paint. We painted all our doors white as created a good contrast with the light yellow of the walls and made the home even more brightness.
Whilst they did not come out perfect and they are still old doors, they look so much better and we feel more attached to them because they were a fruit of our own work. And in general, we think it goes well with the vibe of our house, that is far from perfection but very much functional and beautiful at least in our own eyes!
Garage before and after renovations
In all this adventure, I think my favorite project was the renovation of our garage. Maybe because it was the part of our house that needed the renovation the most and our work is more visible. The first step we took was to deep clean our garage. There were all sorts of things stored there: old furniture, dust, rotten wood and old clothes. We used the furniture and the wood for our fire place and we cleaned everything so that we could start painting the walls.
It took many hands and a lot of primer and paint for the walls to finally look great and we were very satisfied with it. Next step, it was the floor. The original floor of the garage was concrete but with a lot of cracks and unlevelled. The general idea of garage floors in Portugal is to cover it in tiles. My boyfriend was very against that idea since we want the garage to be a place where you can work, fix your bikes, fix your car, work out or even play some pool. Tiles would prevent you from working comfortably as they can break easily if we drop something heavy. After some research, we decided that we would actually like to use epoxy for our floor. It seemed to be very popular in the UK and an option that satisfied both our requirements of looking clean and having high functionally. And as a side benefit, it actually looked very cool and satisfying to apply it (go ahead, watch a video on Youtube and you’ll know what I mean). Unfortunately, by this time, we had already spent 4 months in Portugal, since when we bought the house and it was time for me to go to my home country, Albania to visit my friends and family. But my boyfriend continued the project with our garage and he had the satisfaction of spreading an epoxy-like paint. Nevertheless, the outcome was just amazing!
Making our house attractive for other nomads – the final steps
As we saw our little house taking the form and the shape we wanted, it was time to make it comfortable for potential travelers that wanted to live there, so that our mission to bring people to remote and rural areas could be achieved. On my way to Porto, to fly to Albania, my home country, we had a little stop at Ikea again where we purchased the last items that we thought were necessary for our home: a dinner table, a carpet, curtains, shoe storage etc.
One last thing that we were still concerned about was the heating system at our place. Our house was definitely not properly isolated and the fire place would not be enough to warm up the house during winter. Similarly, because the house has windows on all sides, it may get too hot in summer. After a lot of consideration of different alternatives, we decided that air conditioning would be the best option for regulating the inside temperature both during cold winters and hot summers. Through some connections with professionals involved in grant applications for developing rural areas, during our vacation times in Albania, my boyfriend was fully working on finishing the grant application, providing all the necessary documents and applying for a subvention for installing air conditioning at our place. All his work was paid off in the end because we managed to get the subvention and soon after, our home was equipped with two air conditioners that increased the utility of our home.
In the end, we had so much fun
Since then, exactly one year has passed and we have continued our respective works in Sweden and we have travelled around the world with our work projects, but our pandemic project continues to flourish, and it is like a spot of light in a village in Central Portugal. More than ten visitors have stayed for short and long term at our place and we have had the chance to meet amazing people for different parts of the world. Our neighbor, Paula, with whom we became very good friends soon after the incident with the water, helps us manage and welcome our guests. Not only she takes care of our place, but she takes care that our guests really enjoy their stay. And it is just amazing how sometimes language barriers do not stand in the way of people becoming friends. Even though the majority of our guests had little knowledge of Portuguese language, our neighbors connect with them and they enjoy meeting new people every now and then.
And just like the saying goes by, when life gives you lemons, you just make lemonade, I think we managed to make a damn good lemonade out of our share of lemons during the Pandemic!
Chek the results here and let us know what you think in the comments!
Published on June 3, 2022, 4:05 p.m. by Imelda
