Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal

We love having friends over – especially the ones who haven’t been to our place in a while.

“Wow...you’ve done so much! It’s amazing...it’s almost finished,” they all say and we breathe out a little, smile and nod to each other acknowledging the reminder of just how far we have actually come in such a short time.

Blessed by the reassurance we aren’t complete idiots we can relax into a nice lunch and present a little Alentejo tell-and-taste wine story, imagining a day when we’re finished enough to open and do this for strangers.

Then all the worries start flooding back in.

But before I plunge into the long list of sleep-sapping challenges, something else lifted my spirits this week...something that reminded me of the way the building started.

It’s all about the small things, and it first happened when this whole crazy project hung in the balance, when Ana and I took turns telling the other why it was madness and when the loan was about to time out without a single receipt being filed.

Despite having no builder under contract, no construction permit and no deposit paid, a large pile of steel reinforcing rods turned up one day.

They weren’t invited, they weren’t expected, they hadn’t been paid for, but yet they were there – maybe ten thousand euros’ worth – on the bit of flat land that used to be a eucalyptus forest.

That’s when we realised it was going to happen.

This week it wasn’t an arrival which marked a milestone, but it was the departure...of a machine which has fascinated me since it first landed.

The giant red cement mixer on wheels scoops up ratios of sand, gravel and cement by the bulldozer bucket.

It churned out foundations, pillars and beams...and now it’s gone.

Wooden boards, building materials, scaffolding have all slowly been melting away and everything starting to look a bit less like a building site and a bit more like an off-grid eco-luxe countryside lodge.

Maybe we are almost finished?

The heat pumps have finally migrated from sheltering under plastic on the hillside to taking up their positions ready for installation, and our focus has firmly shifted towards the interiors which Ana has been hammering away at for months now.

Malcolm Gladwell argues you need 10,000 hours to attain true expertise in anything and Ana’s not far off when it comes to developing the style of our interiors.

The beds are ready for delivery, the leather sofas and beautiful headboards are here, one kitchen is on its way from Germany, two more are coming from nearby, we have fridges, a stove, cork flooring on order, marble tables being made and are investigating lighting.

We have to find the perfect wine tasting glasses, the right crockery, bedside tables, wardrobes, chairs, patio furniture...the Excel sheet is long and sprawling.

It’s a lot of shopping: sourcing, chasing, finding, thinking, researching, calculating and delving for discounts.

An unexpectedly speedy car service date gave us a day in the Algarve to wander and ponder in shops and factory stores and with the new-found confidence to spot a deal and go with it.

It was an expensive day but a fun day – we found ourselves smiling quite a lot – and it was punctuated by our regular Algarvian sushi lunch.

It’s curiously calming to spend large amounts of borrowed money, knowing that every single thing we buy is one less thing we need to buy.

The receipts are piling up and I’m desperately trying to keep up with the accounting: are we over budget (yes), is it by too much (hopefully not).

Should we have invested in the two stand up paddle boards for guests to rent out? (Probably not). Are they a good addition to the business and what we are offering? (Probably).

Sadly we missed this month’s auction, which is probably best given what we picked up last time around (a fruit machine was not on the Excel sheet).

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This week’s hugely welcome visitors were our pals Richard and Pauline who run a lovely café in the Algarve called Earth and brought visiting Dutch journalist/photographer couple Jaaruen and Eline to see our project.

“Congratulations,” Richard said...which stopped me in my tracks: that’s the kind of thing you say when something’s finished.

The floors are still a mishmash of colours from yellow to greige and our unpolished concrete people have gone very quiet on us since trying a new treatment which failed to solve the problem.

Oh, and the big concrete poop remains a defining feature.

There’s the obvious absence of doors and windows accompanied by builder’s shrug and the concerning ease at which “beginning of March” became “beginning of April.”

Electricity cables loll against walls and the water treatment station is still a work in progress, but “will we get the licence in time?” is still our most common refrain.

It’s not a baseless fear.

Our engineer keeps telling us of another tourist lodge that still hasn’t been licensed more than a year since it was finished...and we have been trying to get paperwork for our guesthouse for almost three years now.

We’ve been throwing everything at it – the surveyor has already been to precisely map out where all the buildings ended up – and we are on the town hall’s fast track programme...but that really depends on the track: dirt roads are a lot slower than tarmac.

Our dirt track has been particularly slow recently because of all the rain, and a gaping cavern had opened which Cassie the Hilux was increasingly struggling to navigate.

I may have passed my Portuguese exam last week, but I still didn’t quite follow the Cow King who I bumped into at the building materials shop a couple of weeks ago when he announced something about rocks.

It was all good, I just didn’t know exactly what he meant, but I did understand his phone conversation with Ana “your husband doesn’t speak much Portuguese” he said, “but I have a load of rocks which you can have to repair the road.”

And so we had a workout, and I think it worked out.

We also have the Cow King to thank for our lunch, along with a failing freezer, which led Ana to reach for the bottom drawer and something meaty from the hunting club.

It’s always worth having a bit of freezer space for when O Rei das Vacas drops by with blood-dripping blue plastic bags of wild boar (wild boar) or venison.

With the clock ticking on the lifespan of my mum & dad’s old John Lewis fridge freezer (which must be at least 25 years old), the javali was released and slow-cooked by Ana to perfection.

Slow cooking also sums up my experience with DHL Express, which is expressing no real urgency in delivering my original birth certificate and a new officially stamped one from the UK so we can take the next bureaucratic step towards Portuguese longevity.

Ana has Portuguese citizenship and now I have my shiny new A2 language qualification we just need some stamped, translated, stamped again, re-officiated, and double-authenticated paperwork and we get new passports.

Toda a gente adora um novo passaporte.

Please keep watching this space...but I do have temporary residency until 2027, so we should be OK.

I thought the whole learning a language thing might be the hardest – and it has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done...and this is just stage one...but hey...just lik…

I don’t remember a week like it. It lasted a month, but was gone in a flash. The emotional rollercoaster was so steep the cars barely stayed on the tracks.

A powerful storm brought thunder-flashes and torrential rain, battered the valley with hailstones and scared Simon the dog so much he bolted from just outside our front door and fled into the darkness on the worst of nights.

We imagined him drowned in a ditch or gored by a wild boar, we searched the land with flashlights, drove the muddy tracks, and barely slept as our little Los Angeles dog had to learn survival in the wild at 12 years old as the storm raged on.

At first light we drove the surrounding countryside shouting his name wondering why he hadn’t come home.

We picked through mudslides and dredged pools hoping not to find his body, we put those awful missing dog posters up around town and asked everyone we know to spread the word in their WhatsApp groups knowing more bad weather was on the way.

Our dam was leaking – in at least three places – the waterlogged clay wall slipping down the steep slope, and we started to think it might actually break and send millions of litres of water and mud sweeping down the valley.

After three months and two attempts to ship an Australian-made dam sealer from The Pond Specialist in the UK and hundreds of euros more spent importing it twice (thanks Brexit) we’d finally scattered the “Damit!” on the lake surface, but honestly didn’t hold out much hope.

Our road out of the valley was blocked by a slipped timber truck, then a vast cavern was carved out by the flood so now it’s only just passable...and I had two Portuguese exams to get to and get through.

The to-do list was speculative rather than realistic...although everything on it really needs to be done...

But here we sit in a moment of calm on our rollercoaster ride at the top of a hill with clear skies, waiting to see what’s coming next: how many dips and climbs we have to barrel through, how many hoops we need to loop until we get to stop for a bit.

The month-long week all began with a Plasma Party.

Our pillars of stability in this extraordinary week were Alan and Margery Gledson – our great friends for whom nothing is impossible.

Anything that needs to be done can be done...but a missing dog is either alive or dead and there’s nothing anyone can do to help you cross that uncertain canyon until you know which of those it is.

But before that chaos began and with a storm still approaching we’d got straight into the to-do list.

“Container plan” was top of the list and that involved converting our rusted yellow shipping container into a beautiful, functioning new building.

The 12m long metal beast will be the water treatment plant, a winter-storage area for furniture, and potentially a place to put a couple of chest freezers...once the proper power network is done.

I’d bought two off-the-shelf PVC windows, to fit along with the €20 one bought at the Wheel of Fortune auction, and neighbour Daniel had donated his old basement door.

Alan had ground off the rust, we had sandpaper, large pots of paint, the ever-willing Ray Morison in town to help us out...and we had Niels:  Prince of the Plasma Gun.

And we had a plan for how to make it work this time.

Our first attempt to plasma-cut a couple of slots in the container for the water pipes to pass through had ended in disappointment and the use of a backup angle grinder.

The chain of power cable extensions running from a dodgy socket through a series of muddy puddles wasn’t going to cut it...or cut anything with a power-hungry 10,000C plasma gun and its compressor in crime.

For Plasma Party part two, Alan and I hauled the generator into the back of Cassie the Hilux and up the hill.

Once the first hole was measured, marked and prepped we realised it wasn’t going to be all smooth cutting...old and dirty fuel was probably the cause of the stuttering start.

Only when we split power consumption with the dodgy power cable did we start to get somewhere, and while Niels gave me a 101 in generator maintenance the rest of the gang were furiously painting.

Niels accurately cut small metal tabs which could be drilled and bent back to secure the wooden frames made from recycled planks from Joep and Vera’s now-finished and fabulous-looking building site. Great job guys!

Two days later the door and windows were in, the gaps were sealed and the job was nearly done.

Next up will be jamming together a wooden frame on the inside walls to fill insulation and investing in some sandwich panel roofing to handle the heat of the summer sun...oh, and repainting the white walls washed away by the weather.

At least Alan & Marge had made it to the beach a couple of times before the storm hit – we were inland on a wine podcast recording trip at the remarkable Adega Mayor winery and stayed overnight in a pousada in an old monastery we’d not been to before in Vila Viçosa.

I’ll be writing all about our time with CEO Rita Nabeiro and winemaker Carlos Rodrigues on the wine blog The Big Portuguese Wine Adventure, and featuring the trip in our upcoming podcast series on Alentejo.

While we’d been living it up in the interior, it had been a terrible night back in the valley – Garfie had been outside barking at the thunder and lightning (to keep it away) all night...right outside the guesthouse door...and Simon had been shaking under Alan & Margery’s covers.

When we got home nobody had slept and there was more weather on the way – but “dig out plants and clear up behind the house” was on the ta-da list with huge thanks to Ray and the Gledsons.

Our fire was lit, the weather had arrived and Simon popped out for a quick pee when suddenly a huge clap of thunder struck and spooked him so much he raced off into the dark...in a second he was gone.

I returned from my second Portuguese exam of the week to join the search party but after hours of looking we came inside hoping he would be strong enough to make it through the night.

Simon’s a city dog – born in Los Angeles – he’s travelled the world with us for more than 12 years but has never spent a night outside on his own.

When I met and married Ana I was lucky enough to become Oda’s stepdad and we decided not to have any more kids. Nine months after our first wedding Simon arrived.

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I’d suggested a cat, but the girls found a little dog called Simon in a rescue place in LA called Bark ‘n’ B*****s.

(It’s how we are related to Drew Barrymore...she adopted her dog from there the following day, so we can say with full confidence that our dog has sniffed the butt of Drew Barrymore’s dog).

The “Dog Dad” hat that Daniel gave me certainly fits even when I don’t wear it.

Simon’s been a part of our life every step of the way, from LA to Nairobi, to San Francisco (via Sweden) and here to Portugal where countryside living has grown on him.

Garfie’s the guard dog, Simon’s the lap dog getting grumpier and more assertive as he ages gracefully.

I’ve been preparing for the day when he will no longer be with us...and I know just how hard that is going to be...but both of us felt this wasn’t his time just yet.

We used the hours before the incoming storm to do everything we could to find him...and then did something we had done once before in …

It was my first live auction and despite being online it was still very exciting.

Exciting enough for me to keep on asking Ana if she was sure she didn’t want to bid on that too-small corner cupboard or a dining room table which she’d already dismissed as being not our style.

We’re trying to find unique pieces of furniture and create our own interior décor, and so agreed to bid on a few bedside tables, a Chinese cabinet, a “possible dresser”, three camel seats and some candlesticks...oh, and a fruit machine.

We had started the online bidding for these a few days before – along with an old framed map of Portugal, a Japanese painting, some clay pots and a patio furniture set.

But a flurry of emails informed us we’d been outbid on pretty much all of them by the time the live auction began.

Being an Auction House in the Algarve, it’s a long way from us in the Alentejo, and so we opted for the live streaming option from home rather than being in the room.

The next four hours were spent watching the lots come and go while learning phrases like “fair warning” which was usually said before the gavel was finally swung.

It was addictive and it was fun and Ana mostly protected me from myself.

We began with the very best of intentions, but when the final lot was sold and the fantasy world of the bidding bubble burst, we were the proud new owners of a box of brass candlesticks, two Thai coffee pots, a second-hand PVC window...and an Italian Job movie-themed fruit machine.

What a bargain.

Candlesticks aside, flashing minis and Michael Caine in full cockney are a must-have for any self-respecting Portuguese wine-themed eco-luxe lodge. Aren’t they?

Ana’s excitement over the slot machine quickly faded when she realised it wasn’t a pinball machine...and then there was the small matter of transporting it from the Algarve.

Having checked it was OK to move the thing horizontally, I attached the trailer to Cassie the Hilux and Simon the dog and I headed to Faro for a little adventure.

On arrival, the auctioneer overruled his colleague and advised we went vertical...with early 2000s electronics and no guarantee it would make it home in good working order.

A full hour of faffing later and the fruit machine was riding the Toyota like a 50-cal gunner on a Somali Technical battle car – strapped upright to the cab, head poking over the top – and the hardtop was bouncing around in the back of the trailer...along with the PVC window.

Avoiding motorways and low bridges Simon and I slowly wound our way back up to the Alentejo and despite a light shower we all made it home in good working order.

As soon as Ana and I had managed to extract the thing from the truck and hauled it inside, Michael Caine started shouting about “it’s a big job lads” and chastising us for doing more than blowing bloody doors off while lights flashed and Rule Britannia blared out of the back.

Cor blimey. Take i’ fro’ me lads, ‘e aint arf laird.

Thankfully the sellers were thoughtful enough to include a bag of old one pound coins and 50p pieces, and once again we found ourselves spinning the wheel of fortune.

Please indulge me for extending the metaphor, but everything we’re doing here for our building project does feel like a bit of a gamble even though we’re still backing ourselves with reasonable odds of success.

The to-do list is so long it often paralyses me when I try and work out where to start.

I sometimes fall back on digging weeds out of the gravel, or pulling up tall and woody esteva rock rose plants (a fire risk best dealt with by uprooting when the soil is soaked)...simply to see progress and feel like I’m doing something.

There’s obviously a secret to getting everything in line – whether it be cherries or water infrastructure – but just like my new relationship with Michael Caine...it’s probably going to be a while before we hit the jackpot.

There are just so many tricks to learn: knowing when to go high when the odds say you should go low and guessing when to hold or what to nudge first.

The answer to that is the plumber...who still hasn’t replaced all the 90 degree bends in the water pipes emerging from the buildings.

The great thing about owning the keys to a fruit machine is you can’t lose...and that’s where the reel life/real life parallel ends.

We have a lot to lose – we’ve ploughed all our savings into this crazy off-grid project and it’s reaching a crucial stage.

And that’s why today – in my 125th despatch from the Valley of the Stars – more than three years into this off-grid adventure, I’m asking you to help us to do what we need doing right now...if you can.

If you don’t have the time to volunteer, but think you know someone who can, please share this post

This blog isn’t just personal therapy, it’s an amazing support group, it’s the source of comforting messages, of advice and assistance.

But with just a few months to go before we need to get our place open, now is the time to act: come and stay, roll up your sleeves and help us get it over the line.

I’ve been having recurring landslide nightmares – mostly because we have had a real life landslide nightmare where the heavy rain and our post-fire extreme bulldozer gardening to shore up the dam caused a pretty dramatic collapse, but it’s also perhaps a deeper metaphor for our precarious project.

According to our contract, the building should be finished this month, but amid additions and delays our pursuit of fixed timelines for the various threads of jobs have been brushed off with a nasty case of builder’s shrug.

We don’t know when the PVC people will come and throw the bloody doors in but we’re told it’ll be soon and then we’ll have space for volunteers to stay.

I realised just how important it is to get help when I received a phone call from Northumberland which gave me a rare moment of calm – it was Alan Gledson and Marge offering to come out again for ten days and help us out.

They are a force of nature. We need forces of nature to inspire us, encourage us, motivate us and work with us.

So if you are strong and active, up for a challenge, have a week free and can get over here, we can offer you free lodgings and time to explore Europe’s last wild coast in exchange for donating time and experience to us.

We need help with the following:

* Aggressive tree planting

* Digging and seeding land so it’s green by May

* Painting walls

* Reconstructing a footpath

* Building things with wood and concrete

* Transforming a shipping container into storage rooms and water filtration station: insulated, painted, en-roofed

* Creating a car park with grow-through concrete bricks and sand

* Landscaping gravel and wood chips

* Turning a concrete box into a wine cellar

This crazy schedule isn’t for everyone, and of course the alternative to grafting is coming here to relax once we’re open and supporting us by staying in our lodge!

If you’d like to come and see us please drop us a line but also fill out this form...we’ll get an idea of what you have experience doing and when you might be available.

Thank you so much...I’m sorry to ask, but it would really help us right now.

And if you come we’ll provide free access to the fruit machine...once I’ve found the volu…

Like most of us, I’m glad January’s over...but not for the usual reasons.

There wasn’t anything particularly dry about it...neither in terms of rainfall nor alcohol (but it is my birthday month and so the no booze thing never really works out to be honest).

I can’t really blame the cold darkness either...there’s been bright sunshine for the last two weeks, we’ve had a couple of unseasonably warm days over 20C (sorry)...and we even went to the beach for a dip and a clifftop fondue party.

But the stress caused by challenges on the building site, boring bureaucracy and a particular pipe intervention have made it one of the worst few weeks of off-grid living so far.

And that’s despite the fantastic birthday celebrations, which were extremely cheesy, cakey, sandwich-y and soaked in sunlight, sauvignon blanc and single malt.

So what am I complaining about?

The heavy rain not only ground everything to a halt around our three new buildings, it also created even more work...and messy work at that.

The flooded holes and trenches gave a classic “First World War movie set” vibe and the overwhelming sense it was going to take a very long time to get everything finished.

The newly repaired submersible pump (with thanks to German Paul) was working hard to empty the trenches and holes in the clay, so pipes and cables could be laid.

But the whole place was a mud bath, with grumpy builders swearing out hundreds of metres of pipes and rolls of heavy electrical cables.

Nudges from our engineer about another newly-built tourist lodge nearby whose owners have been “waiting more than a year for a license to open” didn’t help our growing sense of doom and January gloom.

José’s intention was to warn us that not prioritising bureaucracy could cost us dearly.

But with a relatively simple part of the process already trapped in the town hall, it sent us into a spiral of negative thinking: “if we can’t open, how do we start paying back our loan...”

I discovered another landslide on the hill in front of our house courtesy of the heavy rain, and our biological treatment plant remained a pile of upturned tanks languishing in a hardening mass of mud, while we waited our turn for bulldozer time.

Various workmen were occasionally dropping into the site and thanks to some good advice from friends, we discovered the plumbing outside our buildings had not been done to code.

All the out-coming water pipes had 90 degree bends in them – meaning that if they were ever blocked we would never be able to clean them and the floors would flood until we could dig everything up.

Thank you for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Normally the maximum angle of a bend in a pipe should be 45 degrees, so that a drain cleaning wire can be pushed through and any blockage cleared.

Our contractor Sr Manuel didn’t think there was any need to change them, despite us pointing this out.

But our water consultant Rui was due on site to plan the tank refit and so we thought we’d ask his opinion.

An opinion which was very much in line with ours, but one expressed surprisingly aggressively...by shouting down the phone, grabbing his angle grinder and cutting through all the pipes so they would have to be replaced.

This was our first major diplomatic incident in the Valley of the Stars!

Although Rui made the point, there were no doubt going to be consequences and so that led to sleepless nights of searching for the appropriate paragraph in the building code to be prepared for a confrontation.

The 15 working day town hall deadline was also ticking down for us to submit an unknown document signed by we weren’t sure who...something else to lie awake worrying about once Ana found the right section of official drainpipe building code and discovered we were right.

And when I did eventually get to sleep it was only to enjoy the recurring nightmare of me having forgotten about something in the infrastructure plan (one which may still come true!)

All of this came alongside a lack of water flowing from the canal into the new 200,000 litre pillow tank, silence from the unpolished concrete people and our continuing inability to find where the current electrical cable enters the original guesthouse...to integrate it into the new system.

So it was a great relief to see our architect Gonçalo on site to talk documents, and hear about his plan to start applying for permission to use the buildings well ahead of them being finished.

Individual frustrations piled up on each other, but the daily ups and downs translated into a weekly line graph heading kind of up and to the right.

Our friends once again stepped in to help advise us and keep us sane.

Vera & Joep with advice on pipe angles, Ola on how to diplomatically approach the builder (“is it worth upsetting him?”) and Niels and Sybille through a 1980s metal detector, a pan of Swiss cheese bubbling on a clifftop, and a tide clock which tells us the best time to visit the beach.

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The surprise birthday clifftop cheese fondue picnic accompanied by Portuguese Brut and Niels’ hand-crafted sauvignon blanc made for a fabulous day which blended seamlessly into an entertaining night with new friends Tim & Trish.

Just like me, Tim used to run around with a camera getting shot at for a living...but he would spend months embedding with rebel troops or the under-reported sides to a story, freelancing for all the big news networks.

An American, he decompressed in New York State through wood & metal working and boat building before meeting and marrying Trish and deciding to move to Alentejo.

They’ve bought a place not too far away from us, sensibly On the grid, and are looking forward to moving in very soon after months of house hunting and living out of a suitcase.

The detectorist intervention came as Niels and I tried to find the centimetre thick cable linking the solar control room to our guesthouse which is buried up to a metre deep.

Some old Northern rugby club friends in a “Banality” WhatsApp group made many suggestions, including turning to Twitching Justino or one of his ilk – the guys who found us water – for more divining inspiration, but I think we’re going to take the classic prop-forward “route one” and search for a cable with a bulldozer.

A line traced out by the feint hum of a metal detector and some creative thinking has given us the best-guess place to try, and what could possibly go wrong?

I shall report back...and yes, I’ll make sure the power’s off before letting Justo go mad with a large metal bucket.

But with a large intake of breath while taking a couple of days away from the madness, things went pretty well in the end.

The expected confrontation over sawn off pipes fizzled into brought agreement, the carpenters put in the hours to install the pergolas, the electrician started drilling boxes to everything and the pipes and cables were buried with sand and clay.

The war is over and the trenches are covered and levelled – it all looks sooooo much better – and while I’m sure there are other minefields ahead, in one big bulldozer day we managed to remove, clean up, refit and bury the bio-treatment tanks ready for the …

“Why didn’t I think of that?” is a question I’ve beaten myself up asking many times in this odd new life when the latest thing to go wrong has gone wrong.

And it’s one I ponder while looking at a landslide, a flood and a jumble of upturned tanks on the hill below our building site which just before the storm was an almost-finished water treatment system.

I make a lot of mistakes by rushing into things, not preparing properly and thinking stuff can be done in an impossible period of time...but I can’t take the blame for everything.

In 2002 the then US Secretary of Defence, Ronald Rumsfeld, explained the lack of evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in a speech referring to “known-knowns, known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns.”

Like Secretary Rumsfeld, and given my lack of experience living in this self-reliant way, it’s the unknown-unknowns which often get me.

“If only I’d thought about that thing I didn’t know might happen, before it did,” makes me feel better when I say it out loud, but it doesn’t mean the whole water treatment tanks aren’t now trashed.

It wasn’t always like that: in my job as a BBC foreign correspondent, I learned to make risks rather than take risks and do a pretty good assessment about whether or not they were worth the reward.

“Flying into Ebola and active insurgency-land in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?”

Yes, it was worth it, but it took me ages to persuade the bosses back in London I wasn’t insane, and to apologise to Ana afterwards for not telling her I was going.

I’ve learned a lot about how to do stuff off the grid, but I often get really frustrated when my own stupidity or lack of properly thinking things through means I not only fail to achieve the thing I set out to do, but actually make it worse: more difficult and more expensive to rectify.

This happens a lot.

I was never terribly good at DIY before, so why should that change with practice? (it really should change with practice, shouldn’t it?)

The “unstoppable force vs immovable object” approach I took in my previous job for getting that interview, that access to a place to tell a story and then get it on air doesn’t work with installing a solar water pump kit without instructions.

I mounted the solar panels onto the aluminium rack ahead of installing the pump (having received the missing parts), but the whole insanely heavy thing somehow flipped over in the gale force winds in this week’s storm.

Force of some wind vs badly secured object.

It doesn’t look like the panels were smashed, as they toppled into a pile of sand, but we’ll see if it still works when it all gets connected up.

If only...I’d secured the struts, or weighed it down with rocks, or left it face down to start with...given the high winds forecast.

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

As a reporter for a big organisation it was a lot easier getting hold of people who want to get on the telly and have their perspective heard than it is being the annoyingly pushy foreigner in rural Portugal who should know by now that things take time.

The energy and tenacity to push to the point of obsession (or destruction) – whether it be in South Sudan or post-earthquake or hurricane - once led an editor to nickname me “the Duracell Bunny” for my persistence and determination, but that approach clearly isn’t working with one of our key people.

He’s harder to speak to than some African presidents.

We’ve had a lot of rain recently – our lake has never been so full – but the combination of large amounts of surface water on clay and the presence of newly dug trenches for our pipes and cables is not, it turns out, a good one.

I wrote last week about the giant mole holes for the infrastructure which have turned into swimming pools and waterlogged trenches.

Our building site currently looks more like a First World War movie than our vision of an eco-luxe lodge.

Thank you for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal. This post is public so feel free to share it.

But things took a turn for the worse this week in the absence of our builder and what I would have expected to have been a “known-known” to him.

We’ve placed the water treatment station on the hillside – a sealed large three tank system, followed by two open tanks for reed bed biological cleaning and then a final tank so that every drop of recycled water is used for irrigation up on the future vineyard.

The holes were dug to precise specifications, sand was bought, delivered and then levelled by our good selves before the bulldozer carefully lowered them into place.

We were just waiting for the digger to return, load the reed-bed tanks with gravel and backfill everything – job done – but the wet conditions haven’t been ideal.

While waiting and to protect the system from rain I cut a couple of channels to divert water around the tanks to stop them from being inundated, overturned and generally trashed...but sadly that is exactly what has now happened.

The deluge, combined with the new trenches not being diverted into the lake, created a landslide which has flipped and buried the biggest tank in wet mud and clay, floated another up out of a 3m deep hole and smashed all the pipes linking the system together.

It’s a total mess – it’s going to cost more to undo and then redo than it cost to do it in the first place and the work will eat up vital time. It was the worst of a series of setbacks we suffered this week.

Angry letters from the town hall about unsubmitted documents, continuing fighting over the unpolished concrete people and the unrequited pursuit of our African president.

We should of course “be careful what you wish for” – even if more rain is what this region really needed.

I’ve covered enough massive storms to know there’s not much you can do about big weather in big nature...but I wish I’d thought about diverting the trenches...and I wish our builders had as well.

When the downhill trench to our solar house was finished earlier in the week and I realised it bisected a stream and a swale that usually bring a lot of water to our lake, it got me thinking.

In the absence of our contractor on site we took things into our own hands and pushed reluctant builder Justo to block his new trench and lower some ground to encourage the water towards the lake.

If we’d left it, the solar house would have been flooded and all our solar batteries would have been destroyed. That’s a known-known.

If only he – and we – had thought about the impact of the other long-drop trench on the other side of the hill...directing thousands of litres of water into our thousands of euros worth of tanks.

The rain has stopped, but the rivers and streams continue heading into our lake which is almost overflowing – as is our downstream neighbour Daniel’s.

I’ve cleared the overflow pipes, placed some rocks and boulders to slow down the flow and we will wait to see where the deluge goes...we’ve warned friends further down the valley, but the rain may have stopped just in time.

No more rain is forecast for a week, once it’s drier we can bring back the machines, dig everything out and start all over again.

We have a mole problem – a big mole problem.

I went up on site the other day and the monsters had eaten their way through our whole building site.

Not just a few little hills here and there, but trenches...metre after metre of them...and some of them really deep.

I mean check this out...

I suspect the Mole in Chief to be Justo – maestro of the machines and digger of the ditches – but in truth, I’m delighted to see his little valleys criss-crossing their way between our buildings and up and down our hills.

Operation Infrastructure is now well underway and the emphasis is firmly on me to come up with a creative way of helping our contractor Sr Manuel understand the design of our complicated water system and place all the right pipes in the same trenches as the electrical cables.

I’m not sure what qualifies me to make such bold decisions, but I suppose I have spent far too much time over the last year or so playing with coloured pencils.

(I knew that Geography degree would come in handy one day).

I do claim to be something of an expert in such things if you listen to the BBC World Service: the two radio pieces I made went out on Business Daily on January 1st and January 2nd.

And I even turned my hand to Instagram and The Facebook for a vertical version of our off-grid story (do check it out...if it gets liked enough the Beeb might ask for another one...apparently off-grid posts are popular these days!)

Back on the building site Sr Manuel asked again: “so it’s three different types of water into each building?” with the roll of his eyes, as I unravelled the latest iteration: a large A1 sized electrical map layered with acetate sheets stuck together with tape and coloured scrawl.

“The blue is the 40mm pipes and the green is the 32...” and as I began, I realised my Portuguese wasn’t up to it...and even if it was, this wasn’t really going to help.

Being the water-bore that I am, I will hold myself back by summarising for new readers that we have tried to future-proof our supply by accommodating different qualities of treated water (toilet, showers, drinking water) in case we have shortages ten years down the line.

Outside on the building site in the chilly dew of the morning, wasn’t really the time or the place to show off my artwork, and anyway I need Water Rui to approve it all before the pipes started being rolled out, cut and connected.

“Let’s try it again over coffee at the meeting tomorrow,” I added. The words cafezinho (little coffee...I love the diminutive form) and amanhã de manhã (tomorrow morning) were greeted with a nod which was unusually clear (for Sr Manuel) by way of indicating his agreement.

It’s been a long journey reaching the point where we not only know where our water is going to come from, but where it’s going to be treated and how it’s going to get there.

It takes a complex system of tanks, pipes, pumps and treatment scattered across the property and I often wonder if it’s actually going to work.

We’ve already used a couple of kilometres of the 6.2km of pipes we bought and hopefully we’ll have enough to get it all flowing.

But for now it’s all about the logistics of getting the moles to dig the right holes and get the right pipes and cables into the right places and all covered up before more rain comes along to flood them again.

The problem with clay is that after a big downpour the water doesn’t go anywhere fast, and so the much-larger-than-needed hole for one of the tanks (our fault apparently!) was transformed.

I commended Sr Manuel on a nossa nova piscina as we finally had a swimming pool deep enough to jump into...and weeks before we expected it!

At least the lake benefitted from all the water being pumped out and down the hill – we are getting some good rain this winter, interspaced with nice sunny days.

But as I write the rain is falling again and the moles have knocked it on the head for the day…or maybe the week.

I can’t possibly wish for less rain…only that it falls on days when we’re not digging massive trenches!

It’s the interiors which are taking most of our time right now – trying to decide on the right sofas, furniture and finishings for all the rooms.

We’re thinking of something along the lines of this new place which has opened up in Alentejo a little north of us:

The houses aren’t sealed yet as our almighty row with the unpolished concrete company continues.

They asked us to pay, we asked them to come out and explain how they’re going to sort out our “50 shades of yellow” floor issue. Watch this space.

Doors and windows will only arrive when they are finished...whenever that may be...but I suppose it’s better than them arriving un-finished.

I’m imagining Santa’s little helpers already bored with dry January and trying to recreate the adrenaline of the rush before Christmas by offering to help put them all together while singing jolly songs.

It may be a different scenario at the PVC place in Cercal, but that’s what I will keep imagining for now.

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

We had a whistle-stop trip to Lagos in the Algarve to visit the IKEA design studio in a supermarket and finally pin down the apartment kitchens.

I’m not saying we’ve been there a lot, but Adriana the very patient and helpful designer recognised us and our project straight away.

We tried to design the restaurant kitchen at IKEA as well, but rules suggest we will need everything to be in stainless steel – or Inox as it’s known here – and IKEA only have limited choices.

Our pals Richard and Pauline run a fantastic restaurant in Carvoeiro called Earth Shop & Café and have been advising us.

One of their best suggestions so far is a German company that delivers stainless steel kitchenware for half the price we can buy it second-hand in Portugal (why is it so expensive here?).

So we’re shopping online for extractor hoods, ovens, sinks and inox furniture...trying desperately to keep control of the budget.

As the moles will soon (hopefully) be heading down the hill towards us, I’d like to renew our appeal for help to get everything finished this Spring.

We’ve already had a few folk fill in the form expressing an interest in lending a hand in exchange for a bed and digestibles.

But if you know anyone who might be able to help at some point in February, March or April, we have some specific projects which will need some willing and able hands.

Thank you for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal. We need help, so please share it.

Top of the list are a shipping container conversion, an entrance wall, a bit of click flooring and a load of landscaping.

Please spread the word (and the love). Here’s the link to the Google Form. Thanks!

While I’m not really the New Year’s resolution type, I do like using the ticking over of another number to reflect on the 12 months past and ponder the year that’s yet to come.

I’ve scattered the last despatch of 2023 with some of the most viewed posts of the year for some tough - and some not so tough - reflection.

In the words of this blog from exactly a year ago:

“We will plant our trees, landscape our valley, launch our wines podcast, design and finish our interiors, build our water and power infrastructure and finally (hopefully) understand heatpumps.”

Not so many of those have made it to the ta-da list.

All the very best for 2024! Thanks so much for supporting us and please share this blog with a friend.

We planted 46 olive trees in hardened clay (thanks Dom) and nurtured them through the summer with fiddly drip irrigation, then after the rain planted 200 more in a vast hedge in half the time.

We struck water, but it was salty water; but then we struck lucky and scored a connection to an irrigation canal and something to dilute our salty water with.

There were highs and there were lows: the blog Hitting the Wall prompted a huge response and so many wonderful and kind words…and it led a week later to a reflection entitled Don’t stop this train. Thanks to you all.

We have been blessed by so many fabulous friends visiting us this year...thank you all for your support, your enthusiasm for what we’re doing, and for helping us to dream big...come again soon!

Stress levels peaked and troughed roughly in line with the appearance or otherwise of our largely unpolished concrete people.

The infrastructure is a work in progress, heat pumps remain a mystery, but above all we took big steps towards finishing our construction work largely on time and only slightly over budget.

And with the help of a Christmas surge, the podcast is progressing well and we are planning the 2024 roll-out of episodes very soon. You’ll find it here.

Here’s a piece I did for Monocle Radio on a show called The Entrepreneurs which features a favourite story...the trend of talha, or amphora wines in Alentejo.

In the year ahead our biggest fear is bureaucracy and the damage long delays to licensing could cause.

We need money coming in and so our top priority is to stay ahead of the curve, sort the paperwork early and get everything submitted as soon as we can. The big digging continues, starting as it did with The Rise of the Machines in September.

Landscaping is also going to be a challenge...once the building ends we will have large areas to plant and pimp up.

And as we accelerate towards opening, we have to budget everything extremely carefully as we invest in interiors and exteriors but keep a close eye on not running out of money!

Pondering the year ahead, there are a lot of things I didn’t expect to be doing in my life, and I expect that list is only going to grow in 2024. Here are a few of them:

1. I never intended to be an expert on off-grid living. I say “expert,” but the proof of the power will be in the heating.

Too many heat pumps can most certainly spoil the plot.

The nerve-wracking moment will be when all the buildings are finished, the appliances are all plugged in and we find out whether my Excel sheet of estimated electrical demand is matched by the actual supply of solar power.

Until that proves (as it most likely will) to be terrifyingly mismatched, I am peddling myself as an expert – at least for the purposes of a two-part radio series on the BBC World Service.

Please tune in on New Year’s Day to hear our neighbours Daniel, Medronho Jorge and Ola & Merete explaining why they decided to off-grid in Portugal.

(Thanks so much for being willing victims guys!)

And on Tuesday 2nd you’ll hear from Water Rui and Solar Iain – folks that regular readers will already know – as we ponder the challenges of scaling up an off-grid system to a higher-end eco-luxe lodge.

(Do you like that? “Eco-Luxe” – Ana came up with it and I think it’s brilliant).

And given that we’ll all probably be doing something else at 8am GMT on January 1st it’ll all be on the Business Daily podcast once it’s broadcast.

And I’ll be spending the first couple of days of 2024 with a clutch of colourful Sharpies and some acetate sheets creating layers of electrical wire and water pipe maps to superimpose on a landscape map to help the builder get the right things connected in the right places.

2. I never intended to have three cats and three dogs – it is clearly excessive – but I still don’t feel we’ve reached peak animal.

Albert (aka Albie, aka LB, aka LBD, aka Little Black Dog) – the stray with half a tail who rocked up on the building site one day and never looked back – seems to be settling nicely into his place at the bottom of the pack.

Suitably curtailed into roll-over submission every time Garfie harrumphs, he’s been accepted into the circle of canine trust even though he still doesn’t dare enter the house.

We do need to spend some time in 2024 training him up.

The kittens are neutered and fears of exponential feline growth have now abated.

Val Kilmer’s five new February arrivals sadly, but quickly were reduced to four and then down to two as we found a good home for Batcat and Jim Morrison at Quinta Camarena where they now happily harass dogs and humans in equal measure at our friends’ rural tourism lodge.

Inspired by our Christmas retreat in suitably snowy Sweden at Ana’s parent’s farm surrounded sheep – either busy in the barn, languishing in the freezer or lazing flat on the floor – we are leaning towards some ovine assistance for weed clearance and fire protection.

Ana likes the idea of donkeys, and I still dream of Vasco the Llama, but perhaps one new breed at a time is best...and maybe we should begin some paltry poultry.

Our neighbour Daniel has been master of the menagerie while we have been recharging our batteries (mostly in the dark), and I get the feeling he’s looking forward to us getting home...and that we may need to find an alternative zoo keeper for the next level of animal ownership.

3. I never thought I’d own a shipping container. I’ve rented a few as we relocated around the world in our previous lives, but owning one was never really a consideration.

Turning the yellow metal mass into an elegant water filtration station/store room/garden centre is another item on the growing to-do list of things we need help with.

It currently includes:

* Paint and insulate container

* Build roof over container

* Install doors, windows and electricity in container

* (wonder why we bought a container...because it was a lot cheaper than building a small house)

* Building an “entrance wall” to the property out of cement and stone

* Planting trees & hedges & plants

* Landscaping by spreading ground cover

* Laying cork click floors

* Building a pétanque court

And that’s without considering the usual Spring Strimming weight-loss programme, installing the water tanks and gutters and keeping the construction show on the road.

So while you ponder how much you ate and drank over the holidays and make resolutions to be more active and do things outside...please consider coming to the Valley of the Stars and helping us with some of the heavy lifting.

We have had a few volunteers stay over the last couple of years, but as we accelerate towards getting the place open enough to accept guests, February, March and April are a crucial time for us and we could really do with some help.

Ideally we need strong and willing hands, and those with experience of building, landscaping, painting, planting...all that sort of thing...so please, please, please get in touch if you’d like a workout in the Winter sun...or know anyone who might.

With any luck we should have more rooms available...and tho…

Hasn’t that last week before Christmas been such a rush to get things done?

Writing cards, last minute shopping, bulldozing holes, lowering septic tanks and digging pipe ditches.

It’s just one thing after another, eh?

That familiar shovelling of freshly fallen sand to make sure the tanks are level, spaying a few kittens, and writing letters to Santa asking him to bring us doors and windows for the new buildings as soon as he possibly can after the festive rush...please...that kind of thing.

But the typical Christmas morning scene of a dad struggling to construct that amazing but flat-packed gift before the kids get bored with it, came early for me this year with a solar water pump kit.

It was an exciting present to unwrap: there was a wooden box to prize open – with a cardboard box inside – and lots of solar panels and metal struts to play with...and loads of strange looking pieces.

Thank you for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Imagine Ikea meeting Meccano with the extra excitement of live electricity...but with no instructions. What could possibly go wrong?

Despite the common grumble “there’s obviously a piece missing” there were actually a couple of pieces missing.

That’s one thing to kick off my Christmas list and into the long grass until the remaining aluminium struts make it here from Spain some time in 2024.

It’s a stressful time for everyone, but I think we hit peak stress on the shortest day of the year...or perhaps I should call it the longest night.

Last week’s Bad Day rolled into a week and seemingly unresolvable problems started piling up.

Bureaucracy, a bloody-minded builder and the continuing saga of the unpolished concrete people (and their poop) generated the majority of the hassle, but there were plenty of other things besides.

We had grand plans to take the black plastic covers off the Big Bar on the hill and serve mulled wine to the neighbours while talking them through our building project, but we had to bail out of that one as our Christmas to-do list overtook everything else.

Getting the kittens done was a high priority because there are a lot of storks around here (if you know what I’m saying) and we had the jitters about two new litters courtesy of Senhor S. Claus and his delivery.

We took them down to the Algarve where that kind of thing is a lot cheaper, but then achieved very little during our race around the shops except for a nice lunch and for Ana to lose spectacularly at Wham-ageddon (I mean it was a particularly tough year to get through the whole festive season without hearing Last Christmas at least once).

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

We did manage to pick up a few gifts for our favourite workers and the best present ever for our neighbour Daniel.

Daniel loves wine in a box – and there are some great box wines in Portugal – but none of us had ever seen anything like this before.

It was a TWENTY LITRE box of Amália red (named after Amália Rodrigues, the famous Portuguese fado singer), and as Daniel’s eyes widened, we insisted this wasn’t some sort of Christmas challenge.

Sr Manuel the contractor received a bottle of Comendador (meaning commander...we felt it was appropriate).

Last year we gave our builder Justo a bottle of good red wine and he thanked us, saying he didn’t really like red wine and preferred to drink medronho, the powerful locally-made firewater.

This year we got him some whisky for a change. He thanked us, saying he didn’t really like whisky, but loved medronho.

Next year I suppose we’ll get him some medronho, but then he probably only really likes his own medronho.

Ana explained it was my dad’s favourite tipple and we suggested he try it with water com or sem gas, but it’ll probably go in the cupboard with last year’s red wine.

With everything very much getting on top of us and time fast running out, we were delighted to accept a lunch invitation from friends Niels and Sybille to deliver some of Mauro and Rita’s amazing wine we’d agreed to carrier-pigeon for them from Lisbon.

It was a “quick lunch” but what an amazing lunch. Wild boar cured ham followed by pulled wild boar sandwiches with homemade sauces, home-brewed beer and hand-crafted wine were just the antidotes we needed to survive the shortest day and prepare us for the longest night.

We’ve slipped into the annual pattern of heading early to bed with the darkness closing in, and early to rise with some spectacular sunrises.

(Although I must say we are lucky in southern Europe to have more sunshine than those up here in the north).

Exercise has taken a bit of a back seat, which also contributes to the stress of course...but we did manage a walk to see this year’s display of daisies.

We had far more luck getting Simon the Hollywood dog to pose among them than we did with Garfunkel, who just didn’t understand that we wanted to feature him on our Christmas greetings card.

Herding the cats was never going to work, so we decided it wouldn’t be fair on the others for Simon to take all the glory, so this is what we decided on...

Yes, that’s blue sky; yes, it’s been 17 or 18C (and perhaps a little more) all week; and yes, this is the nearest we’ll get to a white Christmas in the Valley of the Stars.

But in Sweden to see Ana’s family and for more...erm...cosier times...amid the darkness, the cold and the crisp, shiny white snow…for now at least.

It’ll be a nice change to enjoy a northern European winter and we’ll be back soon enough to relieve Daniel of his animal sitting duties and to see in the New Year with some sunshine.

The shortest day/longest night was probably the lowest point of our year, but it’s only going to get lighter from here on in...and that’s a lovely thought to ponder over some pickled herring, as the building site falls silent and the digging machines all go to sleep.

I do hope Father Christmas brings you what you asked for – whether it’s doors & windows or a build your own solar pump with instructions manuals in clearer Spanish.

We’ve certainly got large enough chimneys for the big fella to climb down next year, but for now:

May your days be merry and bright,

And may all your water tanks be right…

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

AND FINALLY...with a nod towards Shane McGowan (RIP), here’s the Portuguese version of the Pogues song Fiesta...courtesy of Despe e siga from 1994.

For those non-Portuguese-speaking listeners, Casal Garcia is a well-known brand of affordable vinho verde wine...

Sitting on the sofa chatting through the best place we could build a car park, we knew it was going to be a crazy day.

But after slurping down a mug of coffee and heading up the hill a little after 8.15am we had no idea of the level chaos that was already enveloping our building site.

We arrived to find a shipping container semi-suspended from the bucket of a huge bulldozer, one end pile-driven into the ground, the other scraping the edge of the mountain of dried cement known locally as the concrete poop.

I immediately went into “I told you so” mode.

Having spent the last week trying to get someone from the digger company to come out first to have a look and plan what to do I immediately went for our engineer José: “I knew this would happen – it’s like a slow motion car crash,” I wailed.

He shrugged, heads were scratched and a plan was hatched.

“They’ll find a solution,” he said calmly. “Things are done differently in Portugal from what you’re used to.”

I’m not really used to anything, having never built any houses, moved any large metal boxes or guided any diggers, I just thought planning was the right thing to do...but José is usually right and watches our back.

I was frantic, stressed and manic. Ana was the voice of calm.

Just as we were fretting about the container – and the increasing cost of unplanned machine hours – a cement mixer arrived and had to squeeze past the bulldozer.

It was the final day of the Nightmare Polished Concrete Floor Job Before Christmas...and at least the mixer had arrived and had the confidence to drive through the mud.

The polished concrete guys have been anything but polished, and immediately started shouting about how they had to work the night before in the dark because there was no electricity.

There is power, they just didn’t ask where the socket was...but at least that provided an explanation for how wrongly they’d coloured the floors: they had done it in the dark.

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

They started work on November 7th, got stuck in the mud reversing the cement mixer too close to the house to save them wheeling it, and then had an industrial dispute with management which culminated in dumping about 30 tonnes of cement on our land (the aforementioned concrete poop).

Then the company ghosted us for a fortnight, dropped by for one day only to do a couple of floors before disappearing again amid excuses about a national concrete shortage.

They were never seen again until this week when we pointed out the Fifty Shades of Yellow that now covered our supposedly uniform “gr-eige” floors – each relating to a different team using a different percentage of colour on a different occasion.

But then we had to travel to Lisbon for a bank meeting and they were left unaccompanied on the building site.

We’d missed the sight of the large concrete pump arriving and doing all the outside decks in one day (why couldn’t they have done that weeks ago?), and apart from the different colours it seemed to have generally gone OK.

As we watched them shovelling concrete on top of the metal reinforcing grids (rather than placing the grids inside the hardening mass) and we fretted about whether they’d remembered to add the underfloor heating liquid, the doors and windows guy arrived.

He was wanting final confirmation of every PVC unit and I was battling to understand his Portuguese.

On the other side of the building site the bulldozer was now moving concrete slabs, lifting the workers’ cabin and having another go at placing the 40 foot shipping container on the four concrete feet built for the purpose.

We’d stopped it just before the tracked monster had taken a short cut across the “future vineyard” which we had seeded and turned over at great cost and effort a few weeks ago and had been delighted to see the green shoots now emerging.

Then the leader of the Un-polished Pratts started shouting at José for something else as his phone kept ringing.

Amid the madness Ana was preoccupied on her phone desperately trying to give directions to a delivery truck driver bringing us a solar pump kit from Spain.

I didn’t know where to turn. Everything was out of control, everything was happening at once and then Ana said I had to drop everything and drive to the main road to meet the delivery van and guide him in.

I got into the car, shut the door and enjoyed a precious moment of calm.

Google maps take delivery drivers up impossible hills – which is why we have a series of signposts guiding visitors to our door – but meeting at the road is the best way to guarantee they don’t give up and tell the office “they weren’t in.”

The only way the 200kg pallet of solar panels, metal frames and a powerful water pump will make it down the valley is on the back of our trailer slowly towed behind the 4x4, so I helped the guy deliver it directly onto the trailer.

All went smoothly, and while I had been preoccupied the container had been placed and the bulldozer had started task two: levelling ground and digging holes for the water treatment tanks and reed beds.

Thank you for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal. This post is public so feel free to share it.

As I headed back up towards the chaos on the building site and looked across the valley I saw the excavator excavating in the wrong place...and raced up the hill to try and stop them.

Much as we’d like to make a point about how all our water waste is recycled we really don’t want the reed bed septic tank to be the first thing people look at when they walk onto their balcony and take in the view.

It was too high up on the hill, which was strange because we’d walked it and talked it with Sr Manuel and Rui the water guy – and even pegged out the place with wooden stakes.

By the time we arrived to redirect the digger we already had a 3m x 20m chunk taken out of the hillside.

As both the focus of attention and the digger moved down the hill, we pondered the possibilities of an accidentally created new hillside deck and seating area.

We watched nervously as Sr Manuel referred to a printed-out scan of dimensions and Joaquim the 76 year old builder was jumping in and out of the holes with a tape measure and a spirit level making sure the depths were correct as the giant bucket swung soil between pine trees.

Suddenly the bulldozer engine cut, work stopped and the cheerful guy at the wheel shouted almoçar and everything went quiet for lunch.

Somehow we had made it through the morning.

After inhaling a couple of fried eggs we picked up our recently-returned neighbour Daniel –to show him where his water is now supposed to come from and to try and work out why it wasn’t coming from there anymore and had stopped filling our new pillow tank.

Turning a few taps on and off, way down the valley, somehow did the trick.

With after lunch work stopped by a faulty hydraulic pipe on the digger and concrete polishing proceeding apace, we felt comfortable enough to abandon the site and head to the town hall to submit some documents and then travel out to the PVC guy’s workshop just to go over all the things he’d said earlier in the day which we hadn’t really understood amid the chaos.

When we got back the bulldozer was still stranded with one final job remaining, Carlos the landscaper had brought his small digger ready for a pipe burying job the next day. And I had a beer.

Ana and I made for the sofa, put on a film and tried to reconnect with Garfunkel – the big…

With a thousand and one things to do, a deadline always helps sort the wheat from the chaff – or the wheat from the oats as it would turn out.

An incoming Atlantic storm to break the sunshine of St Martin’s Summer provided the necessary motivation to get us out onto the land and tick things off before it all turned to a thick claggy clay mud.

We knew rain would come and there were certain things that needed to be done before it did, but it was only when our weather app started giving us some meaty millimetre rainfall predictions that we snapped into action.

Two weeks of warm and sunny weather had dried out our building site beautifully – the perfect time for our shipping container and would-be water filtration house to be delivered and the cement mixers to return so the polished concrete floor guys could finish the job they had dramatically stopped by way of a large concrete poop.

But of course they waited until the weather was upon us before making an albeit fleeting appearance: “roll up, roll up: get yer concrete while it lasts – one day only.”

It was nice of them to drop by, but the problem with doing six indoor floors and six outside decks in small batches is the inconsistency in the amount of colour they spread and therefore the finished hue.

And doing shower areas and bathrooms separately – with weeks in between – does inevitably result in multicoloured floors...which really weren’t as advertised in the brochure.

We’ll work around it, but it’s very frustrating.

Ana came up with a new version of the three letter acronym “AWA” which some readers may recognise and relate to. It’s: “Alentejo Wins Again.”

Whatever you do, however you prepare, however you balance pushing not to hard or too softly, Alentejo is going to win...it’s just a matter of understanding that and going with the flow...which is sometimes easier said than done.

We’re lucky that our building work is not being delayed by their absence, which is apparently due to a shortage of cement in southern Portugal...for reasons so far unexplained.

Our contractor Sr Manuel and his fabulous builders Justo and Joaquim are just cracking on and getting stuff done while the window guy and the carpenter work tirelessly (presumably) on preparing all our fittings for fitting.

This week they’ve been doing a load of digging – cutting the first of three cross-property trenches to move water, waste and electricity between the houses and to where it needs to be.

We’ll be collecting all our rainwater runoff to store in a 200,000 litre pillow tank, and have ordered the biological waste water treatment system, and so the guys have been using levelling lasers to dig a trench at the correct angle to bring everything down the hill.

They added some French drains to soak up some of the surface water which will sink through the gravel around the houses, but sitting as we are on a hilltop of clay, we will need even more creative ways of helping the water run off during high rainfall winters.

Thanks for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

With landscaping a top priority we had to take advantage of this year’s last opportunity to get things into the ground before we (hopefully) open.

We’ll have one more chance to pretty things up in February/March, but the perfect time to plant cover crops is after one big rain has soaked into the ground nicely and another one is on the way.

With storm clouds forecast we headed for the hills – of Monchique mountain in the Algarve – to buy some more olive trees to plant.

“How many would you like?” asked the nice chap at our favourite nursery Viveiro Dinis.

“How many can we get in the trailer?” Ana replied, expecting that we’d need a couple of trips to transport the 200 olive saplings we’d decided to plant as a hedge to surround our land.

It turns out he could have packed 500 in there, and so we bounced the trailer back to the Valley with the whole batch of 200 small trees and a load of work ahead of us.

It’s more difficult than you might think to find a load of old s**t on social media – especially nearby manure or estrume as it’s known here – but after many hours of searching, Ana stumbled upon a large local stash of 18 month old horse dung ready to help our olive hedge establish itself.

Another trailer trip later and we had everything we needed to start digging holes and planting the trees about a metre or so apart.

If we thought that was backbreaking work it had nothing on the cover-crop seeding of the area referred to as “the future vineyard.”

We’ve had a couple of fantastic viticulturist consultants come and visit and spoke to Dorina Lindemann who runs Plansel, selling and preparing grapevine plants and making wine.

We visited her for the soon-to-be-released wine podcast and I wrote an article about the process of grafting grape varietals onto root stock...and why you do it.

We’re hoping to plant in March 2025 as there’s just too much else going on right now to have the headspace for the research we need to do, but we can plant a mix of cereals and legumes to provide some organic material and fix some nitrogen in the soil.

With some help we ordered seed from the local agricultural supplies shop and had to mix the wheat with the oats...and everything else. This is what we ended up with:

Trigo and aveia forrageiro (fodder wheat and oats), ervilhaca granel (bulk vetch), tremocilha raiada (striped lupin), trevo subterrâneo dalkeith (clover), sementa relva prado florido (flowering grass seed) and tremoço reginal (local lupins).

As a student studying Irish historical geography I obsessed over one particularly down-beat film called The Field starring Richard Harris.

His character Bull McCabe has a deep attachment to the patch of land in the title: “which his family has cultivated and improved, from barren to now very productive, over a number of generations.”

I remembered his obsession with removing all the rocks and carrying seaweed over the mountain to make it the most wonderfully lush green field you could imagine.

I was channelling my inner Bull McCabe as I dug rocks out of the soft clay and hurled them into piles – imagining how wonderful our field could be one day.

Our topsoil is mostly good, but we turned over quite a bit of clay in some sections while burying the old eucalyptus roots and I’m concerned little will grow there.

Ana praised my dedication and ambition to hoe and dig out rocks from a third of a hectare of land, but firmly questioned the timeline, my blind stubbornness and the mismatch between intention and reality...the rain was approaching and the seeds needed to be sewn that day.

I suppose the rocks (let alone the seaweed) will have to wait...it was another day of tough and backbreaking spadework.

We also needed to bury the first of our water tanks in the bottom of the valley. Carlos the landscaper had kindly dug the 2.6m deep hole, but had work elsewhere so we had to lower it by hand, get it level and then backfill many cubic metres of soil.

With the help of long straps, the car and the friendly Moldovans building our neighbour Daniel’s new patio, we managed to get the tank into the hole, but there was much more to b…