The general blog area for the site. Articles which do not fall into a specific category will appear here.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
The house buying process has taken a turn for the better. Things are looking very hopeful as the sellers have all agreed and accepted our offer to buy. The price is good, although there is lots of work to do before we can actually move in. We are maxed out on our budget so there will be lean times ahead for the next year or two.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
After many aborted attempts to find a house or farm to buy and live in, or at least buy and renovate, we are currently at the offer stage for a property in Vale de Prazeres (the valley of pleasure!) near Fundão.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
Frustration is not a strong enough word for it. Over the past few months we have been looking for a property to buy so we can move away from a top floor apartment and out of the city.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
Chapter 2 begins just one week after the previous failure.
Arriving promptly at 9:30 the obligatory cup of tea and chat began and it was after 10am before any work began.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
It is now approaching two years since I did any real work, except of course for the effort of fixing up our house in Macclesfield just before we left.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
Once again, a big delay for an updated post here, but there has been little to report.
We still await confirmation that we can actually purchase the house that we have been trying to secure for the past 10 weeks. We are still hoping.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
Says it all really. Having found a house with most of the requirements for our forever home and then making a formal offer which seems fair, especially considering the amount of work needed to make the house habitable, we were advised by the estate agents that the offer was accepted; great news.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
We had a couple of weeks when Spring was blooming in the countryside around. Nice warm weather and sunny days.
Following my sister's visit the weather changed, much colder, more cloud and a whole new snowfall covering on the mountain.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
No, not some exotic avian creature with feathers, but the storks have arrived and are nesting. My sister travelled from Halifax, UK to pay us a visit during the past week.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
After a long break from the site I decided it is time to make some more progress. We found a property that matches our requirements, mostly!
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- Written by: Rick Nason
After much searching we may have located a house that we can afford to buy and which gives us all the things that we would like as a potential final home. We will need to have a staircase installed though!
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- Written by: Rick Nason
It's been a while since the last post, a few things have changed.
The new cameras are now working fine, unfortunately the system only allows two to be in use at any time (this wasn't advertised in the software so I'm a bit peeved).
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- Written by: Rick Nason
After a hectic trip to England over the Christmas season ... Which consisted of: A flight to Heathrow, two tube journeys and a train ride to Crayford all with 3 huge suitcases and 3 smaller suitcases, a fairly relaxing Christmas with Janet's mum and Christmas dinner at Janet's sister's house. Then a worrying car hire experience
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- Written by: Rick Nason
After spending some time looking for a sensible way to make the site multi-lingual I hit upon a semi-automated plugin to help me with the task. After all, now we are in Portugal and would like to stay it seems only polite to try and communicate with our neighbours in the native language. We're making good progress with the spoken language and can order goods in shops and cafés with a little more confidence now. Still a long way to go though. So, now you can switch between English and Portuguese on the web-site.
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- Written by: Rick Nason
Having tried a number of photo album plugin modules to display our photos it became apparent that none were really suitable. They all required that every image had to be copied to the web server with images converted to numerous 'thumbnails' so that the system could display them on the browser.