It's been a while since the last post. We've been working most weekends at the apartment of a friend in a village near Alem do Rio in the North towards Porto. The place has been gutted and we have been helping with the re-decoration and building Ikea furniture.
Interesting lessons learned about Portuguese construction and accuracy. Attention to detail seems to be very low on the scope of what matters. We're getting very used to 'not setting expectations too high' with anything that might crop up and work done by contractors.
Getting especially used to expecting the unexpected - for example, the main water supply to the apartment just appears from the floor inside a wall in the middle of the floor, it was concealled inside a wall that was taken down as pat of the works !!
Taking the doors off to prepare and paint? Definitely make sure to label the hinges because no two are the same apparently. Everything is painted in dark woodstain or varnish, why? When you start to paint all the wood a nice clean white colour it becomes obvious why this is; gaps, cracks, split wood, it's all there hidden by the darkness.
The newly tiled floor does not align to any part of the wall or furniture, making the new kitchen look weird. Well it's been an adventure, and it's not finished yet.
The electrician has upgraded the circuit for the cooking island, 4mm² solid core cables. The devices are 1 x 3.6kW oven, 1 x 4.6kW induction hob, 2 x 16A socket outlets. I wonder what sort of diversity is applied to the calculations to get that onto a 20A circuit breaker ? Oh happy days ...