We got back from Spain last weekend, having driven down and back to avoid the uncertainty of flying while Eyjafjallajökull was still erupting. We broke the journey into 3 roughly equal-sized stretches, and overnighted in Chalon-sur-Saône and Perpignan in both directions. We have found nice restaurants in both towns, and try to always break our journeys there – we are creatures of habit!
The trip was to sign powers of attorney for our lawyer to deal with applying for planning permission for the house and also for him to deal with our tax affairs in Spain. We have to pay council tax each year for the plot of land. In Spain if you don’t pay on time, you immediately get penalty fees added to the tax, and if you continue not to pay, the property can be compulsorily sold to pay the back-taxes, so we wanted to make sure everything is handled correctly and on time.
We also had three meetings with our architect in Valencia and made good progress on the design of the house. We had assumed that it would be a lot cheaper to build a two-story house and had asked him to make sure that when we get older and have mobility problems, a lift or ramps could be added. And that all the important rooms (including the main bedroom) were on the ground floor. He contacted us just before we left, suggesting that a bungalow would hardly be any more expensive, and asking if he should also make proposals for having everything on one level, which we agreed to.
So we actually had several proposals to look at, and have settled on one of his bungalow proposals. We are combining a traditional appearance from the outside with a very open-plan layout inside. The outer walls will be dry-stone walls, like the walls you see in fields, where the stones are piled on top of each other without any mortar holding them together. To ensure good insulation, there will be an inner lining of a conventional brick wall, then insulation and finally plasterboard on the inside. The roof lining will also be well insulated – we will be using a sandwich board construction with a thick layer of insulation between two layers of veneered plywood. The boards look like oversized parquet floor boards and slot together with a tongue-and-groove system, also like the parquet systems.
The main part of the house will between 12 and 10m wide by 16m long having the lounge/dining area down one side, and an office and studio area down the other side. The roof is a simple gable roof having quite a shallow slope to it (1 in 4). In the middle between the rooms along the outside walls will be a bathroom and storage rooms, which will not have walls reaching right up into the apex of the roof, but which will have flat ceilings at the conventional height, leaving the outside rooms (lounge, office etc.) with a view up into the top of the roof. We really liked this idea, which should make for a very light and airy design. The bedrooms will be at the wider end of the house, and will have conventional walls going right up into the roof. At the other end is the kitchen, garage and a partially covered courtyard.
We were able to finalize the layout of the house in our three meetings and now have to define where we want the light and power sockets.
