We are leaving Tábor today to go back to the UK to move out. We are meeting the man with the van at Luton airport tonight, then driving it to Birmingham.

I have sold as many large things as I can on Ebay, and these will be collected at various times over the next 7 days. I think we have done the right thing. I hope that people are pleased with their bargains. I hope that my flatmates don’t mind too much that things will be slowly disappearing over the next few days… a freezer one day, the washing machine the next. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday I (with a great sense of achievement and the help of very kindly Czech officials who spoke some English) managed to get a copy of the official documents which say that the property is ours.  Buying a house in a foreign country is certainly an adventure. You’re at most ever 73 percent sure you have understood correctly – and what you are sure about is very expensive (fluent English lawyers are quite a luxury!).

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I have just finished a lesson with a student who is a wood expert. He has a firm selling timber & so we were discussing wood as he needs to learn wood related vocabulary. I was quizzing him about the house he is building. I love random things like this. Last week we were discussing the Czech economy amongst other things & he told me that in Moravia there is unemployment of 20%, whereas in South Bohemia it is 4.6%.  I asked him about using wood as a roofing material as I had seen what appeared to be wooden tiles on a church close by, I thought this was strange as I’ve never seen such a thing in the UK & was sceptical about whether it could be waterproof & long lasting. As it turns out…

He is using larch wood tiles on the roof of his 500 year old house. They are guaranteed for 70 years, and as they are hand cut larch, they do not need to be treated with insecticides & preservatives. This sounds to me like a brilliantly eco friendly roofing method. It is labour intensive, however the trees grow in a part of the Czech Republic where jobs are needed. I discussed this with M & we have decided to investigate using this material on our roof at Novy Mlyn. I wasn’t happy with the roofing materials which have so far been suggested – a plasticky slate (for some of the reasons discussed in my last post – how do we know how this material will perform in five decades of sunshine? Larch roofs have been used for centuries, it is solid technology) . I don’t want to be shipping genuine slate from China either – the embedded energy costs are too high just to make your house look pretty. I would be very happy to see if a larch roof would work with Novy Mlyn, and promote the craft to the UK.

I told you that teaching English was a really interesting job!

I’ve started researching into damp – and come across an interesting German site:

“Did your audacious restoration…of your historic building change to a disaster? Have you lost all your money and hope?”

It’s been machine translated into English, so the language is a little strange… but clearly passionate. The gist of the site is this: if buildings are to stand for hundreds of years, it is best to use methods that have been tested for hundreds of years. Many new building technologies are now on the market which may have been tested for a year or two, but then go on to fail within years or decades – and additionally, many ‘solutions’ are being sold by cowboys.

So, an interesting (though a little ranty) page about mould: http://www.konrad-fischer-info.de/7mold.htm

Some advice about ‘the fraud of rising damp in old buildings’: http://www.konrad-fischer-info.de/2auffen.htm

ARGH!  Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve made an unfortunate discovery at Novy Mlyn. On the north side of the house there is a hole in the plaster & the bricks underneath are crumbly. Will bricks with the consistency of cheese hold up my house? And what do I do about it? Is it possible to dry them out some how. They are damp now when there has been very little rain over the last 3 months. Better do some research.

We went out to the house on Monday night & stayed over – just like we were planning to (for the last two years!). Yet again I am covered in paint – even after a long bath which did at least remove the dirt. Interestingly, the most effective way of removing oil based paint from skin appears to be baby wipes. Goodness knows what chemicals they have in them … far easier than soap, water & scrubbing. Anyway, 3 fence panels later Mike arrived back from work – and was clearly horrified with how dirty I was – he said I looked like a coal miner/chimney sweep/street urchin.  Least I have the evidence that I did a thorough job. Read the rest of this entry »

At 8am Saturday morning we discovered yet another problem with our car from AAA Auto. This time, another simple problem, the alarm which reminds you that the lights are on is intermittent. We’re not in the habit of using headlights in the day – as is the law here – so we’d left the lights on overnight, hence a flat battery. It was the first day that M would be able to work on the house – so we’d had an early night and got up at the crack of dawn (for us, Czechs normally start work a good 2 or 3 hours earlier than we do!). As a result, I would say M was a tad frustrated. It was lucky everyone was up already & our neighbours don’t understand Saxon English. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve made the ultimate commitment to moving out of the UK – by putting my worldly possessions on Ebay – the auction website (well, the heavy worldly possessions). It feels a bit strange, to be honest.  Environmentally, it has to be better to sell things in Birmingham and then buy here, rather than transporting stuff that would be easily replaceable.  The problem is that I have no idea what things will sell for. The auctions will finish the Sunday before we return to England.

We’ll be back on the Wednesday night – so just a week to pack up & move out – and M will have to work as well.  A lot to organise.  I hope that our remaining possessions will fit in the van!

This week I’ve been able to spend 3 days at Novy Mlyn.  It’s been absolutely great to be there. The countryside is really green now, and the blossom is out on the apple trees in the orchard by the house.

Wet weather over the weekend meant that the water barrel was filled so I was able to put in a day of cleaning – such marvellous things as scrubbing some of the downstairs doors so that we can repaint them – but truly marvellous after having such little available water previously. It feels great! We can’t do any of the big tasks (such as clearing the barns) until we hear about the mortgage, however we’ve decided to concentrate our efforts on improving what we can – so repairing the paintwork where it’s scruffy & tidying up the garden. I’ve spent two working days this week on the main gate, which was looking sorry for itself, and is now looking purple.  Not sure which M prefers. The colour was achieved by mixing red and blue – as purple does not seem to be in vogue at present.   My question today is, who left us in charge?

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It has been an eventful week. We’ve been preparing for our move from Birmingham to Novy Mlyn. Melia died on Tuesday. The vets at Bristol University Feline Centre say that her kidney function collapsed after she was given the Iodine injection. At the moment she is still segregated – in a freezer – as she remains radioactive. It seems a rather undignified end. I’m obviously sad, but it feels awful that I haven’t actually seen her for quite some time. We tried our hardest to make sure that she got the medication she needed to test for kidney function after the thyroid condition was treated but her thyroid levels were never low enough when she was tested at the vets. The vets at the university said that we could deal with any kidney problems if they arose. I had no idea that it could happen so quickly and fatally.

When I was back in the UK she seemed somewhat lethargic while I was there. Now I think it was because she was experiencing kidney problems as her thyroid levels fell. Anyway, this is my last picture of her:

After a lot of thought we decided to buy a more expensive car from a reputable dealer. On Friday, M managed to get his Czech residence card – the paperwork we were lacking when we went to buy the car in Trebic. So, we knew which car we wanted & went to AAA Auto to buy it. It was very nearly very straight forward – I had phoned my credit card in advance so there was a marker on the account to allow the payment, I had phoned AAA Auto to make sure they took credit cards (of course). We had all the paperwork. Again – so close to buying a car! Two and a half months after the time we thought that buying a car would be something we could do the first weekend we arrived. Read the rest of this entry »