A fortnight in January in Cyprus

I decided I would write a blog post each Saturday this year. I managed it once.  I'm not sure what happened last Saturday, but evidently I didn't write anything. I haven't taken many photos this month, either. Rather a contrast to last Summer, when the family were staying and I took several photos on almost every day.  One of the things I've been doing is creating our 2017 photobook on the Photobox site, a few pages at a time. I've reached the end of June, which has almost as many pages as the first five months put together.

Nearly two weeks ago, we had our friend Jacob and his employee Mike back for a few days to do some more repair work on the house. They painted balcony railings, and the spiral staircase we have outside our house, and they 'spritzed' some of the back wall. They made a cover for one of our water tanks, which was - for some strange reason - missing its cover, and they worked with Richard to encase all our external wires in trunking. One of the cables had almost perished in the sun; it should have been encased a long time ago.

We've continued playing board games regularly with our friends, and on Tuesday this week revived an old habit - we played Settlers-by-Facetime with our son Tim, who now lives in the UK.  It took a while to get everything set up and working as we hadn't done this for some years; I think the setup took as long as the game. But it worked well, and was great to have a three-player game, and chat, even if he's two thousand miles away.

On Thursday, we woke to grey skies. Sheila and I went for our walk, although the trail was somewhat muddy and there were a few spots of rain. Within about half an hour of getting home, it started to pour.  Thankfully I had brought in the laundry I did the previous day. In Cyprus, when it does rain, it can be torrential.  There were high winds and hours of rain; the sun came out briefly a couple of times, but mostly the sky was grey. We had a few drips of water through the roof, but mostly it was fine. We had to use our electric water heater to get hot water for showers, as there was no solar heating at all. And it was cold. It had been a mild winter so far, but the house felt very chilly.

Yesterday Richard did the annual UK tax returns. It's not a task he relishes, though I do the bookkeeping through the year so it isn't too hard to get the figures we need to enter. He was quite frustrated by the whole process, as the UK government website seemed to be extremely slow. However, he finished eventually, and in celebration I made his fifteenth cake (out of sixty) for his 60th birthday year. It was a simple microwave chocolate mug cake with Bournville chocolate squares pushed into it; a little dry, but the melted chocolate helped:

It filled the large mug we bought for this purpose, and made two good sized portions:

In the afternoon, the entire Internet seemed to slow down. I don't usually notice when it's a bit slower than usual, but I was trying to print the statements from our two bank accounts and credit card, and I couldn't get some of them to load at all. No problem with the Cyprus bank, but the UK one, which is usually very quick, was unbelievably slow.  

Richard, meanwhile, was trying to download some videos for work, which he had to edit. He was already somewhat frustrated as the work computer had broken down twice in the past couple of weeks. The first time he took it to Nicosia and they cleaned something; the second time, they took it to the Apple dealer, who said it had a hardware fault and they would replace it free of charge... which is fine, but meant Richard was without his main editing computer for several days. So he hooked up his laptop to the system, which wasn't entirely satisfactory... and then the Internet appeared to grind to a halt.

He phoned our Internet provider, and they said that two major cables that connect Cyprus with the rest of the world had been cut.  This news article confirms it. The authorities don't seem to know why... but by this morning, thankfully, it seemed to be much better.  

Ten years in this house - and yet more minor improvements

I'm not very good with dates.

I know all the family's birthdays, but if it weren't for my Google calendar reminding me in advance, I might well forget about them until too late to send a card or gift. I often don't even notice dates that other people celebrate - Valentine's Day, for instance, or Mothering Sunday. Facebook is quite good at letting me know when we, and other nationalities mark an occasion, so I spotted that yesterday was Independence Day in the United States.

But I had entirely forgotten that today, July 5th, is quite an important anniversary for us. Happily, Facebook told me that I'd mentioned it a couple of times in previous years... and so, this blog post is to celebrate that it's ten years today since we bought our house in Cyprus.

I would have been a bit sad if I'd missed it this year, though I'm sure I don't always notice it. That's partly because of it being a round ten years, and partly because in the first six months of this year we've done a great deal to the house, in recognition of our having owned it for ten years. It was looking tired; we had done very little before this year, and some of the paintwork was looking terrible.

I've written at length about the damp proofing system which we had installed back in March.  We won't know how effective it is until next winter, but the guest flat already smells less musty.

Before that, we had employed our teenage friend Jacob to do some painting; many of our window frames had lost all the paint, and some were quite rotten. So he sanded and painted, and repaired, and then painted the places where the damp proof course was installed, and the front of the house downstairs, which spruced it up nicely.

Then in April we had our bathroom replaced, something we had talked about for many years, but finally did this year. We did the last few bits and pieces for that in May, and are still extremely pleased with it.

But one thing that Jacob kept putting off was painting the railings on our front patio. We weren't surprised; it's something we kept putting off too. It looked like a very fiddly and time consuming job. However, our good friend Sheila (Jacob's mother) said that she would like to do it for us, so she came over early in the morning several times, and did a great job. I didn't take many 'before' or 'after' photos, but did manage to get this one, right after she had painted one half of the gate:

The difference is stunning.

When it was finished, we realised how very tatty the postbox looked. Like in the United States, people in Cyprus don't have slots in their doors for mail, but have little boxes outside. We have a PO Box at the Post Office where we get most of our mail, but there are vast amounts of junk mail advertisements for shops and eateries which arrive regularly, and it's a legal requirement to have a post box near the street.

This is what the box looked like:

The lock was a bit rusty, and it looked terrible on our newly painted fence. We thought about painting it to match, but it would have been quite a task, and almost impossible to hold the flap and the opening door out of the way while the paint dried. It was held on the fence by ancient pieces of wire.

So when we had to make a trip to the local SuperHome Centre, for a couple of things, I had a look at the mail boxes. There were dozens of them in all kinds of shapes, sizes and colours. I nearly gave up when I spotted a small black one, at a good price, which would meet our needs perfectly. We bought a metallic number to affix, and Richard installed it... with cable ties:

On the same trip to the DIY store, we saw some mosquito netting that could be fitted to the window sections that open at the top of some of our doors. We thought it would be ideal for the one in the dining room, which we like to keep open in Spring and Autumn, but have had to close in the evenings to keep out mosquitoes.

So we bought it, and Richard installed it immediately:

It took a little getting used to, and now the weather is so hot that we mostly keep it closed if we want to be in the room in the evening, so we can use the air conditioning. But it should be very useful in the Autumn.

There are still a few small things that need to be done: the last bit of plastering and painting on the wall outside our bathroom, a new fitting in one of the loos, re-tiling in the guest flat bathroom. Our friendly local builder said he should be able to come some time this week. It will be good to have these last few bits done. There are still other more major jobs that the house needs, but we've had enough of house maintenance for now, and will leave the rest until next year.

Happy anniversary, house!

A Cyprus style damp proof course

When we first moved to Cyprus, someone explained to us that the older houses - and some of the newer ones - suffer from rising damp. Because of their construction, the kind of damp proof treatment that we knew of in the UK was not possible. However, we were assured, it wasn't a huge problem. With the long hot summers, everything dries out nicely, and it's easy enough either to rub down and repaint each year when damp showed in the walls, or to have a kind of hardboard layer in front of the walls to stop it showing.

That was all very well in the house we rented, which we knew would eventually be pulled down. And those were the drought years in Cyprus. But then we bought our own house ten years ago, and there has been more rain. Moreover, since we use our downstairs floor as a guest flat rather than living in it all the time, a musty smell developed in several cupboards. Guests in the warmer months have opened windows and doors and let fresh air in, but those staying in the winter have experienced problems with mould growing on walls of one of the bedrooms, and the bathroom ceiling. It was fairly easy to wash off with some vinegar, but we started talking about what we could do to decrease the damp and condensation.

Doing some research online, we both came across the site of 'Dr Damp'. This is a company who claim to do the only reputable damp-proofing in Cyprus, and to have gained a good reputation across Europe. So, at the end of January, we arranged for them to come and do a survey. Richard went around the guest flat with the guy who came, watching the damp meter and learning about the method they use. We were told that we did have a damp problem: not yet a serious one, but it could become one in the next few decades. The system is guaranteed for twenty years and it sounded entirely reputable, if rather expensive.

Since it's Cyprus we wanted a personal recommendation rather than just affirmations on the website, and a friend remembered that some other friends had had a damp-proof system installed a year or two previously. I got in touch, and we were assured that the Dr Damp team do a great job, and are friendly and professional. It all seemed like a good thing to get done, and we inherited money from my mother a couple of years ago... so we booked the treatment for the second week of February, knowing that the flat was going to be empty from then until almost the end of the month.

Despite the company being based in Paphos, the men arrived fairly early on the Monday morning, and the house reverberated with power tools for several hours as they drilled out the rectangular holes that form the first part of the process for all the external walls.  These are what we saw, all around the outside of the house, by the end of the first day:

They don't go right through to the inside so it's not going to create draughts.

By the end of the second day, the special system was in place - here's a different part of the wall, showing how they had to cut away some of the paintwork to install each one.

The men were indeed very friendly - even helping to rescue our cat Alexander when he got stuck up a neighbour's tree - and cleaned up all the mess they had made, roughly plastering over the worst of the bits of wall they had hacked away.

There were some internal walls that were damp too, and they had to be treated with chemicals, so we had to move everything out of the way so they could do that:

If you think that really doesn't look too bad, this is what the guest flat kitchen/dining room looked like by the time furniture and various other things had been moved to enable the damp proofing:

After three days the Dr Damp guys left, and we paid our teenage friend Jacob to do the plastering and repainting, and some other painting that was long overdue.

Here's the first stage, around the new system. Of course it was important not to fill in the holes around the triangular stone things: that's where the airflow, in and out, removes damp from the walls.

Unfortunately, in rubbing down and sanding some of the exterior paintwork and plaster, more pieces fell off, showing that the damp had indeed taken a hold in places. So Jacob worked rather more hours than we had anticipated, but did an excellent job.  By the time he had finished, the damp proof system looked more like this:

Once the sanding and necessary inside painting was complete, we had quite a job to clean the guest flat, which by that stage was covered with a fine layer of dust. So we removed and dusted all the books (only about a thousand of them, but still... quite a task), and I washed every single piece of bedding that I could find, and all the towels and curtains too.  The washing machine was in use at least a couple of times every day - thankfully it was good drying weather - and I also used our carpet shampooing machine to clean all the mattresses.

We swept and dusted and mopped several times, and I also sorted some of the kitchen cupboards, cleaning away any mould that had grown, washing all the things inside, and getting rid of some bits and pieces that had evidently never been used.

And, at last, the living room was back to its usual self, albeit rather cleaner than it has been for a while, in preparation for our end-of-February visitors:

The kitchen, too, was clean and sparkling, the windows freshly washed, the floor reflecting the sunlight:

We were told that it could take two or three months before the damp smells vanished entirely, but the bathroom cupboard - which was very bad - smelled fresher within about a week, and the kitchen cupboards are a great deal less musty than they were, although not yet perfect.

This won't entirely solve the condensation problem: however, Richard is going to install an extractor fan in the bathroom, and we hope that the reduction of damp in general will make the master bedroom less likely to grow mould on the walls too. 

Magnolia paint, beloved by Cypriots

Today, I painted a room. Not one of ours, but a bedroom in the flat which some friends have been renting for a few years. As happens in Cyprus, people come for a year or two, stay a while longer, and then very often decide to return from whence they came. For various reasons, this family is soon returning to the UK.

Was the room really messy after their stay? Not at all. But they had painted it pale yellow when they arrived. A rather pleasant colour, I thought. It brightened the room considerably. But for some reason, Cypriots like their houses painted magnolia. Everywhere. When we move to the house we bought, the first thing we did was to paint the rooms, anything BUT magnolia. The problem with rental houses, however, is that they have to be returned to the landlord for someone else to rent. And when that happens, if anywhere has been painted, it must be covered over in magnolia once more. Even if the next renters would have preferred yellow.

So I had quite a pleasant walk - it's around a mile to our friends' apartment, I suppose, or a little more - and it only took me about an hour and a half to repaint the room. They had already done the edges, so I just used a roller. Since I can paint walls with my left hand almost as well as with my right, I get along fairly fast. I don't have to move ladders as frequently as single-handed painters, nor do I have to rest quite so often since I simply switch hands when one starts to get tired.

By the time I was home again, after the walk back, I was pretty tired. My feet were aching, too. That's because although I took my painting tee-shirt and jeans with me, to change into once I got there (not wishing to walk the streets of Larnaka wearing heavily paint-splattered clothes) I walked there and back in an old pair of trainers which are also designated for painting. Unfortunately, the heel has pretty much gone in one of them.

I was very glad that the weather broke in the last week. Painting when it's around 22C is considerably pleasanter than it would have been at 32C.

Re-painting in our guest flat

We finished painting our ground floor guest flat a little over two years ago. Mostly in pastel shades of cream/peach/light brown - whatever we happened to have in, mostly.

In the last couple of years, we had more guests than we expected - mostly family and friends from the UK, but also some friends of friends. This year, so far, the flat has been booked almost constantly. We're really pleased about this; we hoped it would be well used, and it certainly is.

However, with only short gaps between visitors, I've been washing bedding and towels, quickly checking kitchen supplies, making up beds.. and not really doing anything else in the flat. Our guests usually leave it clean, so I've barely needed to do any dusting or mopping.

And I haven't really looked at it.

I had noticed, however, that the walls by the stairs in the main part of the house were looking rather grubby. Like this:


and this:

and had been thinking for a while that I needed to touch up the paintwork. (Colours aren't accurate in these pictures. The paintwork is actually a very pale apricot.)

This week, for the first time in months, we had a five-day gap between visitors in the guest flat. So I had more leisure to wash the bedding, and sat down for a moment in the main bedroom. I was a bit startled to notice that one of the walls looked something like this:

further along it looked like this:

.. and another wall looked like this:

I have no idea how long they have been like that. Perhaps a year or more. Maybe the marks were more visible due to bright sunshine, or maybe I was just feeling more observant. We remembered that we only painted three of the walls, so some of those marks may have been there for over two years. Maybe some of them are due to old marks creeping through the paint.

Anyway. Since we're about to enter another phase of back-to-back guests (so to speak) until around mid-June, I thought I'd better do something about these walls during this gap.

I procrastinated.

On Friday, knowing that the next person to stay was due Sunday evening, I decided - tired though I was - that I'd better get around to it. So I looked for the list I had made of all the colours we used when painting the house.

I found the list... of all the rooms in the main part of the house. The hall and stairs are the same as the living room and my study, in a shade called 'Warm Apricot 1' . I'd made a note of the paint shade for the kitchen in the guest flat, too. But there was no record of what colours we'd used in the guest flat living room or bedrooms.

Oops.

So Richard looked in our paint cupboard, and found four cans with paint that looked approximately right, although there was no Warm Apricot for the stairs. We took them downstairs. He found an inconspicuous part of the guest bedroom wall, and tried the two that looked closest.

I sat there, watching paint dry. It wasn't very interesting, but I was much too tired to do anything else. Alas, neither of the colours was correct.

So.

No left-over paint for the room, and no idea what colour it was.

Then we remembered that we had used some leftover paint just to make it acceptable for our earliest visitors, intending to re-do it at some point. Only.. that was nearly two-and-a-half years ago. So we had to options: (1) leave it (2) buy some new paint and do the whole room. It was certainly tempting to choose option (1) but although our last visitors must have coped with the strange marks on the walls, if they noticed them, I didn't feel comfortable leaving them for the next few occupants. And I definitely didn't want to think about painting towards the end of June, which is the next time the flat is likely to be empty for more than a day.

Friday was Eastern Good Friday. I'm sure when we first came to Cyprus, it was a public holiday with everywhere closed. Sure enough, the banks and Post Office were shut.. but all the shops appeared to be operating with normal opening hours. So we went to see if our favourite paint shop was open, and it was.

We decided that, rather than choosing yet another shade, we'd buy a biggish can of 'Warm Apricot 1'. We thought it would look good in the guest flat master bedroom, and we could then also use it for the marks by the stairs.

I then spent a couple of hours in the afternoon doing the first two walls of the bedroom. Once I'd started, of course, I knew we'd have to finish. Richard took over for an hour or so, doing some tricky patches around the air conditioner:

.. then I finished it. I was worried it might need a second coat, but by the time we'd washed the brushes it was 10pm and I was SO tired I could barely keep my eyes open.

Yesterday morning, Richard went out sailing for the day. He left about 8.30am, which is quite early for him. I decided to get the guest bedroom sorted out in the morning. Thankfully the paint had dried evenly, and although it's not perfect it's MUCH better than it was. Well worth doing.

The floor was very dirty, particularly the area which is usually behind the bed, and impossible to get at. So I cleaned that. I scraped scraps of paint from the light and power switches. I even managed to push the bed and bedside cabinets back, and put the curtain pelmet up.

Because of the sunlight, the camera didn't use flash for that, and the colour is close to correct in that picture.

Then I decided that, as it was a lovely sunny day, I might as well wash all the curtains from the room, since they hadn't been done for over two years and were probably very dusty. Sure enough, they dried in a couple of house, and thankfully didn't need ironing. Meanwhile, I cleaned the rest of the guest flat, including doing the bedroom windows, which of course looked extremely dirty with the curtains gone!

By late afternoon, I had the curtains back and the bed made up for our next visitor:

There was still a slight smell of paint by mid-afternoon, despite having several windows open, so I put half a cut onion in a saucer of water to absorb it. By this morning, I could barely smell paint at all.

We still haven't done anything about the marks on the wall by the staircase, which - if anything - are worse than the ones in the guest bedroom. But we can do those any time.

Whether or not we will actually get around to them remains to be seen...

A Cautionary Tale

Since our first visitors of the year are arriving this weekend, we decided to paint the last unpainted room in our guest flat last night - the second bedroom. We couldn't decide on a colour, but thought that any of the paint we'd used anywhere else in the house would be fine, and we knew there was plenty left over. So Richard found a paint-can that felt reasonably full, and we could see a kind of light peach colour around the lid. It looked like the paint we used for our living room upstairs, the study, and the stairs and landing.

We started painting. It went on very smoothly and took not much more than an hour. It didn't even look too streaky. When we'd finished, there was a little bit of paint left in the tray, as often happens. We discussed the fact that along the stairs, even though we only painted them six months ago, a few finger marks have started appearing. I've tried wiping them off, but either nothing happens or the paint itself starts getting paler. The Cyprus paint range is better than it used to be, but doesn't seem to include washable matt paint.

So we had a good idea. I'd use what was left in the paint tray to go over the marks on the wall of the stairs. I did worry that the colour might have faded, or that it could be a slightly different batch, and was a little reluctant... but then the finger marks really didn't look very nice. So I got started, and - as you do - discovered several other marks before I'd used up the remaining paint. In fact I painted patches on just about every bit of wall there was. It did concern me that the paint looked rather darker than what was there before, but then paint always does look different when it's still wet... doesn't it?

When I got up this morning, I was not impressed. Everywhere I looked were patches of paint that looked completely different from the rest of the wall. Ugh. If anything, it looked worse than the finger marks. My first thought was that we would need to spend this evening re-painting the entire stairs and landing... and it wasn't an easy job, as some of the higher spots are very difficult to reach. But it really seemed as if the old paint had faded, or the newer paint hadn't mixed in properly.

As I gradually woke up, I started wondering if by mistake we'd used the paint from Tim's room, because it didn't even look like a slightly different shade. The new paint looked significantly darker. I couldn't remember what any of the paint names were, but I did remember that the living room etc and Tim's room actually had the same basic colour, with the difference being that the living room was shade '1' (ie very pale) and Tim's room shade 3.

So I found the paint we had used last night. Was it 1 or 3, I wondered?

I was mystified to find it wasn't either. It had a code number on it, but no name (and I know there was a name somewhere...) and nothing else.

Then I had an 'aha' moment. The paint in our cupboard isn't ONLY the paint from this house. It also has some of the left-over paint from our old house. Tim's room there was also in a peachy kind of shade... maybe THAT was what we had used on the downstairs bedroom.

I hunted around and found a tin SND 1. Yes, that must be the one we wanted. So all we had to do was go over the wrong paint with that, and everything would be fine. I went and told Richard (who was still in bed) and he said he'd do it first thing.

As I was about to go out to mother-and-toddler group (where I help in the kitchen) I thought about the dangers of making assumptions. We had assumed, last night, that the paint we were using was the one matching our stairs. It wasn't. I was now assuming that SND 1 was what we needed, but was I sure....?

At the last moment, I remembered that I wrote down the names of the colours we used, when we bought them. Impressive, I thought at the time. I even filed them away in our 'new house' folder. So I got it out, and found the paperwork. And there I saw that SND 1 was actually the colour we used in our kitchen and dining room. SND stands for SunDown. The colour we wanted was Warm Apricot.

So, back I went to the paint cupboard. And there I found, right at the back, a tin of WA 3. WA - Warm Apricot. That's what we used in Tim's room here. So far so good.

I couldn't find WA 1 anywhere. Although I did find one large can that had the label obscured by paint, and a colour around the lid that looked right. Surely it had to be that...

I went and told Richard again. I left the can in the kitchen. I told him to check carefully rather than just painting wildly like I did last night....

And, thankfully, it did turn out to be the right shade. He went over my attempts, and it now looks fine.

Moral of this story: never make assumptions about colours of paint. Particularly if you're painting after dark, by artificial light. It's dangerous.

Painting the guest flat living room

Yesterday evening we painted the guest flat living room. Alas, it wasn't quite as quick as the kitchen. The paint is a rather nice light brown, much more interesting than the grubby off-white that was there previously:


Unfortunately it looked patchy even when it was drying, and this morning it still didn't look great. So another coat is definitely needed. Oh well. At least the colour looks good.

Richard and Tim have hardly any paint on their clothes. And their hands kept pretty clean too. Whereas I always seem to get in an amazing mess when painting...

I have to thank Tim for taking one of the least flattering photos of me that I've ever seen. I did ask him to take a picture of my paint-covered trousers, but didn't expect the angle to be quite so strange: