There are two kinds of people who buy old houses in Spain.
People who know what they’re doing.
And people like us.
When JC and I bought our Catalan masia, I imagined long lunches under the olive trees, a kitchen full of copper pans and perhaps the occasional afternoon spent reading a book in the sunshine.
JC imagined spreadsheets.
I should have paid more attention to the spreadsheets.
Nobody tells you that an old Spanish house is essentially a collection of expensive surprises held together by stone, optimism and somebody’s grandfather’s electrical wiring.
Ours has character. Buckets of it.
Unfortunately, character doesn’t pay the electrician.
The Kitchen Was Supposed to Be the Good Bit
I’m a food writer. The kitchen matters to me.
When we first viewed the house, I stood in the kitchen and immediately began planning my new life. Fresh tomatoes from the market. Homemade bread. Proper Catalan cooking. A large wooden table where friends would gather for wine and something delicious.
I conveniently overlooked the fact that half the cupboards didn’t close and one of the electrical sockets appeared to have been installed by a man who hated electricity.
JC noticed.
“That needs replacing,” he said.
“It’s rustic.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“You’re ruining the atmosphere.”
He was right, obviously. Which was irritating.
We spent months sorting things out. Plaster dust everywhere. Men arriving at seven in the morning to make enormous holes in walls. A kitchen that looked increasingly less like a kitchen and more like the aftermath of a minor military engagement.
And the bills.
Good God, the bills.
I’ve written before about the downside of loving cooking, but renovating the room in which you intend to do all that cooking is a special kind of financial punishment.
At one point I worked out what we’d spent and realised we could probably have eaten in restaurants for the next six years.
Nice restaurants.
With functioning taps.
The Olive Trees Are Completely Innocent
The one thing I refuse to complain about is our olive trees.
They’re magnificent.
They stand there quietly doing their thing, asking for very little and occasionally rewarding us with something genuinely wonderful.
I’ve written about why the olive trees are my favourite part of our masia, and I meant every word.
The house might bankrupt us, but those trees are staying.
There’s something rather lovely about making lunch with olive oil from your own land. A piece of bread, a ripe tomato, a little salt. Nothing complicated.
Of course, the romance fades slightly when you’re eating that lunch while waiting for a plumber who said he’d arrive at ten and has apparently entered another dimension.
But the olive oil is excellent.
Spanish Sunshine Doesn’t Fix Everything
Before moving here, I had a very British understanding of sunshine.
Sunshine was something to be celebrated. Something that happened for approximately eleven minutes in June before everyone rushed outside and took their shirts off.
In Spain, sunshine is a more complicated relationship.
In January, it’s glorious.
In August, it can feel like somebody has parked the house inside a pizza oven.
And old stone houses have their own ideas about temperature. Ours can be wonderfully cool in one room and absolutely bloody freezing in another.
I once complained about being cold indoors while it was sunny outside.
JC looked at me as though I’d failed a basic intelligence test.
“Put a jumper on.”
“I moved to Spain so I wouldn’t have to wear jumpers.”
“That’s not how buildings work.”
Apparently not.
Then there’s the electricity.
Between cooking, working from home, keeping the house comfortable and the general business of running a family, the bills have occasionally made me want to lie down in a darkened room.
Preferably one with no electrical appliances running.
A friend down near Málaga was telling me about looking into solar panels for her house, which sent me off reading about solar installations on the Costa del Sol.
There’s something appealing about the idea of all that Spanish sunshine doing something useful instead of simply turning me into a sweaty, bad-tempered woman who shouts at the fridge.
Whether solar would make sense for our own ancient roof is another question entirely.
JC says we should finish the jobs we’ve already started before investigating new ones.
A reasonable suggestion.
Deeply unwelcome, but reasonable.
Every Repair Reveals Another Repair
This is the bit estate agents don’t put in the brochure.
“Charming original features.”
Translation: nothing is straight.
“Traditional construction.”
Translation: good luck finding out what’s behind that wall.
“Full of potential.”
Translation: bring money. More than that.
We once had a small problem with a tap.
A tiny problem.
The sort of thing that should involve a screwdriver and perhaps fifteen minutes of mild swearing.
Instead, it became the tap that broke me.
That’s the thing about old houses. You start with a dripping tap and somehow end up discussing the condition of the entire plumbing system.
Or you decide to paint a wall and discover damp.
Or you move a cupboard and find a mysterious hole that appears to lead directly into the nineteenth century.
JC approaches these discoveries methodically.
I approach them with wine.
Neither method has proved particularly effective, although mine is more enjoyable.
The House Has Opinions About Dinner
The other evening I was trying to make a perfectly ordinary meal.
Nothing ambitious. Roast vegetables, a little chicken, some potatoes.
Albert was having one of those days when everything needed to happen in exactly the right order, which is fair enough. We all have our systems.
His was simply rather more specific than mine.
The potatoes needed to go on one plate. The chicken on another. And the vegetables were not, under any circumstances, to touch either of them.
Fine.
I can manage that.
What I couldn’t manage was the oven deciding that the temperature I’d selected was merely a suggestion.
Forty minutes later, the potatoes were still pale and the chicken was looking distinctly unenthusiastic.
JC appeared in the doorway.
“Is dinner nearly ready?”
I stared at him.
He retreated.
A wise man.
We eventually ate something resembling dinner at a time normally reserved for going to bed.
Albert got his separate plates.
JC got his chicken.
I got a glass of red wine and fifteen minutes during which nobody asked me where anything was.
An excellent result, under the circumstances.
Would I Buy an Old Spanish House Again?
Yes.
Probably.
Ask me immediately after paying a builder and the answer might be different.
But here’s the thing.
When we bought this place, we weren’t really buying a house. We were buying the idea of a life.
A place where Albert could have space. Where JC could be close to his family. Where I could cook, write and occasionally pretend I was the sort of woman who knew how to grow vegetables.
Some of that has worked out.
Some of it has involved invoices.
Quite a lot of invoices.
But there are evenings when the light falls across the old stone walls and the olive trees turn silver in the breeze. The kitchen smells of garlic and tomatoes. JC opens a bottle of wine. Albert is happy doing his own thing.
And for a little while, the house behaves itself.
No leaks.
No strange noises.
No unexpected financial emergencies.
Just us, having dinner in a home that has taken far more work than we ever imagined.
Then something starts dripping.
Naturally.
I pour another glass.
Welcome to owning an old house in Spain.