BEFORE and AFTER
Pictures of Our House
Here are the pictures of our house in
(The trash was included in the "As Is" price.)
The After pictures were taken a day or so after the contractors left. So, the pictures of the Living room doesn't have any furniture. (The furniture is there now, but I put them in a different posting.)
They worked for 7 months -- January to August -- to do the renovation "big jobs." Now that they are finished, Jordi and I will have to do the rest -- such as:
-- cleaning and treating the exposed beams in all of the rooms-- painting the ceilings and the plastered walls
-- put a sealer on the exposed stone walls to eliminate the cement dust from falling on the floors, etc.
We lived in the house while the renovations were taking place -- actually, it was not "living," it was more like "existing." The contractors attacked this place on all 4 levels. Our bedroom was the only room that was "off-limits." I NEVER WANT TO DO THROUGH THAT AGAIN!!
So, now we are "house poor" but happy with the results. We tried to keep it rustic, yet have some creature comforts.
This is a picture of our village. It sits on top of a high hill overlooking a wide valley.
If you click on the picture and enlarge it, our house is located at the base of the church's bell tower.
We usually have a breeze year-round, but sometimes it turns into gale-force winds.
A picture of the front of our house and the old facade.
We were told the reason so many people paint all or part of their house with the blue paint is because it contains something that keeps away mosquitoes. (I thought they must have gotten it on sale!)
You will notice in this picture the small window and small door on the ground level. The small door was the "official" front door to the house and the large door was for the animals to enter the corral. We changed that.
This is the new facade.
You will notice that the small window and small door has been made into one large window. We decided to use the big door as our "official" front door.
The house is over 400 years old. Hopefully, with the renovations, it will last for another 400 years!!
This is a close-up of the small window and front door. The front door had not been used for so long that it had swollen and became one with the stone.
We thought by eliminating the front door and enlarging the window, we would get more light on the ground level.
As you can see from the picture of the front of our house, we have neighbors on both sides of us and also in the rear.
So, the only light we get into the house is from this front side.
Notice the hole in the stone near the bottom of the window.
It was made to tie your animal - horse, cow, calf, sheep, dog, etc. while you went into the house.
This is the balcony on the outside of the dining room.
We added the tile trim around the bottom edge of the balcony and also the two iron balls on the two corners of the railing.
When Jordi first saw the house, he noticed the old arch. It had been bricked up. The upper part (where we knocked out some of the bricks) was used as a hay loft.
Jordi believes the arch is actually older than the house.
The bottom door was the entrance into the corral. Because people in the villages didn't have a yard or pasture to keep their animals, the large 4-legged animals were kept in the corral on the ground floor of the house.
Chickens, rabbits, etc. were kept on the attic level. And the people lived on the floors in-between.
Jordi said that he has known the people that lived in this house for the past 30 years or more and they never had any animals in the house.
We removed the beams for the hay loft and this gave the living room a lot of height. It's about 14 or 15 feet tall.
The ceiling in the living room was really bad between the beams, so we had a false ceiling put in.
The carpenter did a really good job. The new beams help support the old beams (which supports the floor where the kitchen, dining room and guest rooms are.
A view of the new ceiling through the arch.
This is what the old wine cellar looked like.
The people that owned this house before us made wine and put it in barrels here on the logs in the "bodega" (wine cellar).
During the 30+ years Jordi knew the family that owned this house, the people sold wine, fish and meat - at different times.
We decided to keep the bodega as the wine cellar and put in some "wine bricks." I think we can store about 144 bottles of wine. But we only have about 50 bottles right now.
This is what the corral looked like when we bought the house - including the trash.
The long board is over a pit that's about 5 feet deep. This is where the people crushed the grapes to make the wine they sold.
We decided to keep the pit because it was part of the history of the house.
We filled it with dirt and put floor tiles across the top. Now instead of a conversation pit, we have a conversation platform.
This picture is a little hard to understand, with all the trash. But along the left side of the picture is the feed troughs where the animals were fed.
The upper part of the troughs were just made out of bricks cemented together, but they sat on a old stone platform.
So, we knocked down the bricks and kept the stone platform to be used as either a bench for extra seating, or it can be used as a buffet for a party.
A brighter picture of the stone platform.
As you leave the ground level and go up to the 1st floor, you go up these steps. The door on the right at the top of the stairs opens into the dining room.
We go up and down these stairs every day and never noticed how they slanted - until I took this picture!
These steps are made of stones, so we kept them the way they were.
This is the "Before" picture of the Dining Room. The doors that open to the balcony didn't let much light in, so we changed them.
You can see the new doors. They are all glass with a wood frame. We changed all the doors on the front of the house to doors like these.
They really give a lot more light.
The kitchen needed a little work. It only had a cold water spigot and the counter tops were less than 3 feet from the floor.
We kept the fireplace, but added a ceramic top stove, electric oven, hot and cold faucets and a dishwasher.
We also bought a cast iron wood stove for the fire place. When you heat that baby up, it will warm the whole 1st floor.
The second floor is where our bedroom is located, plus the TV, Office, and CD-DVD-Video rooms.
Jordi is standing in the Master Bedroom. On the other side of the door is the TV room.
The half-brick wall above him is the attic.
For some reason, somebody cut off half of the attic - the taller part where you could walk standing up - making our bedroom close to 20 feet tall. This is great during the summer because it makes the room cool -- but in the winter, the room is so cold, you could hang meat in it!
We removed the half-brick wall and put in iron railings. We think it looks better.
This is at the other end of the Master Bedroom from the door. Although you can't see the roof, Jordi still looks lost in this room.
This is a picture of the same corner where Jodi was standing after the stones were cleaned and cement was put between them.
This is the TV room.
You can see the door by Jordi. The little window didn't give ANY light into the room when the door was closed.
The open doorway is now the office where the computer is.
Here you can see the new glass door we had installed.
We also had screens installed on all of the doors. Before we had the screens, the flys and mosquitoes ruled the house! Now they stay outside where they belong.
This is the sofa in TV room and a painting I bought in Malta.
This is a picture of Jordi standing up in the attic. Once you move to the right of him, you have to start bending down.
Jordi said the attic was probably cut off the way it is so the the people could say that the attic was not "living space" and they wouldn't have to pay taxes on it. (I'm not sure if that's true or not, but it sounds good.)
This is how it looks now with the iron railings. You can see the bright spot in the ceiling in the upper left corner of the picture. That is a skylight we had installed when the new tile roof was put on.
The old roof leaked a lot, so the contractor put on a new roof with insulation (there was no insulation before), put on new tiles, then put the old tiles on top of the new tiles so it still looks old.
This is a shot looking down into the Master Bedroom from the attic.
These are two of the contractors we had working on the house.
Sergi has on the yellow shirt (he is from the Ukraine), and Jaime has on a white shirt (he's Spanish).
These two showed up almost every day.
And this is the rest of the group.
Stephan is in the green shirt (He is Romanian), Next to Stephan is Francisco, he's the boss (He's Spanish). Then it's Jaime and Sergi.
