So my brother and I (well, mostly him, with my support) bought this little place in Slovenia. Tiny house, 4 500 square meters of wine grapes, nice view, nice people, low cost (not kidding) of living…
Except it needs a bit of work. For rather large values of “a bit”. And since we needed to be there to sort out banking nonsense anyway, and with Ethiopian offering R7500 return flights to Vienna, off we went.
First thing to know is, you don’t hire a car in Austria. Actually, you don’t do anything involving money in Austria. The place is expensive. So we caught a bus from the airport to Maribor.
Austria is very scenic.
We enjoyed looking at the scenery…
Got to Maribor, hired a car, did some shopping (this is a recurring theme), drove to Globoka.
Now the main problem is that the little house is tiny. It was built as a “summer getaway” in the eighties, when a whole lot of this kind of thing apparently happened. But now, the people who built them are passing on and their children have no interest, so they go on the market for not a whole lot of money.
But we got basically a bachelors with a toilet, no bath or shower. I make it about 28 square meters, all in.
Fortunately there’s a lot of space in the roof, so armed with our newly-bought ladder (from Hofer) I climbed up there and started throwing out junk.
Lots of junk.
The attic space is quite roomy, but the cross beams were too low for us 6’4″ types. In the picture you will see I’ve moved the second beam from the wall up to give about 6’5″ clearance. I did this to all the cross beams except the first and last one, which are not in the way.
In the mean time, of course, we did quite a bit of shopping, eating and drinking (routine was, work until 11 or so when the roofspace got too hot, go shopping in the afternoon).
The next task was to install the loft ladder (bought from Jager, and featuring prominently at supper).
Serendipitously, the “rustic” (not my word) floor planking had been installed in such a way to make it easy to install the ladder where we wanted it, even though we had decided on the spot before inspecting the roof. This…. rarely happens. We saw it as a good omen.
The jigsaw and battery drill came from home. Everything else (electric drill, electric saw, hammer, crowbar…) we bought there.
And after more shopping to get the štirideset little screws I needed, I could screw the planks I removed back on to the cover for a neat-ish finish. Later we went shopping and got some cover strips to cover the gap.
In the mean time Pieter had cleaned the kitchen, so we proceeded to drink and cook and in general un-tidy things again.
Then we went shopping again (I didn’t keep notes, but I am pretty sure of this).
A roll of plastic and a cheap staplegun, to keep most of the dust out (we hope).
What did we do on the 24th? Well, we went shopping… but we also braaied. Sausages and chicken, since the closest thing to steak we could find looked too much like silverside so we passed on that.
And braaibroodjies, of course!
It was a beautiful day.
We have also figured out how to add a shower (it involves moving the toilet and basin), now we have to do just that. And we also need to put in a septic tank (the place currently has a holding tank which needs to be pumped every now and then, which would have been OK if it didn’t smell like the devil’s armpit) and Lohra wants a sliding door and maybe we need a larger window upstairs and and and… guess it won’t be long before we’re in Slovenia again.
