Our kitchen was showing some cracks. That’s just how it is in old buildings, I thought. The bathhouse is over a hundred years old, and the extensions certainly date from before 1953.
Before that date, you could be renovating whatever you wanted
Nobody batted an eye. Before 1953, it wasn’t mandatory in Portugal to have architectural drawings made, to hire engineers, to register the paperwork with the municipality, and they certainly didn’t have to give permission for renovating.
Construction was in full swing. And according to good old Portuguese tradition: you start with a basic house with a kitchen and a few rooms, and when you’ve saved up a bit, you add a room onto it. This way, you can have a core with extensions on all sides, each with its own purpose and history.
That’s precisely how the core of our village came into being: the bathhouse. It all began a very long time ago with a wooden house and wooden bathtubs, but that’s around 1711. That’s when a certain Doutor Fonseca wrote a treatise on treating skin diseases with this water. At the end of the 19th century, Dom Henriques Foja Oliveira commissioned the construction of a sturdy stone building with thick walls, 16 bathrooms, and a large hall, with a foundation where the water was ingeniously supplied and drained through a system of masonry walls.
Things went well, and after a while, a main entrance was added, with a doctor’s treatment room, and on the other side of the building, another extension, which included an indoor fishpond. In 1969, he added a second floor, and soon after, three roof peaks were added.
We now do our laundry in the doctor’s room, and on the other side of the fishpond is the mosaic studio, after serving fo years as “the Little Café” (closed because of the C-risis), and the rest became our main entrance with the adjacent kitchen. When eldest son Fausto came to visit, the first thing he exclaimed was: “Geez, you really need to do something about that kitchen! Look, that corner’s cracking, and the other side isn’t much better!”
That means seriously renovating …
Oi. Well, when you’re right, you’re right. I’d seen those cracks, of course, but I’d put it off … it’ll happen someday, it won’t get that bad, thick walls, I’ve seen worse. But then I couldn’t ignore it anymore. That meant finding a contractor who could handle it. We can do a lot ourselves, but this is too much. You need experience, muscle, good tools, but experience especially is important.
You have to know your limits, as I learned during the previous renovation
The front door played a major role in that, and let me tell you: making a good front door isn’t easy. (But it can be done!)
Luckily, I found these champions. Father and son Simões, plus an employee who’s worked with them his whole life. They have plenty of stuff, muscles too, and the father’s experienced eye quickly saw how we could best solve this. No beating around the bush, no nasty rip-offs taking advantage of your ignorance or incompetence, just solid craftsmanship.
(Disclaimer: I’m a bit tired of the keyword stuff and Google’s dictatorship. So here they are, and I’m also hoping for the cleverness of AI in this matter that it will still be found and read, but that I don’t have to force myself to use the right terms in the title and headings.#renovating #constructor #Portugal )
We moved here in 2000 from Rotterdam, the Netherlands, to the Termas-da-Azenha, Portugal. We started to rebuild one of portugals cultural heirlooms: Termas-da-Azenha, an old spa.
You’ll find mosaics and paintings everywhere.
Since Covid we rent the houses for a longer period of time, not as holiday houses anymore.
Each week a little blog about what is happening around us. An easy read. A few minutes in another world. A little about what it going on in Portugal. If you plan your holiday to Portugal, it might be a nice preparation.
In the weekend we publish it on Bluesky, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.