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well its was 34C in the shade and so about 50C in the sun but still they broke the  rocks and built the wall. the idea is to have a retaining wall then bulldoze some extra soil in to make an area to park the car…stone is slightly different colour but it will all fade to grey/beige after a while..meanwhile the house is being tested for child friendliness. which is a good if steep learning curve. first thing is the pool which is used to the occasional                                                                      swim gets full on massive                                         child attack and turns milky and also has much of its contents spread far and wide.. so budget for more pool refilling and also to higher chlorine level when children imminent in the future…

thing is with pools you spend more time cleaning them than you do in them….

well i built the pool with a staircase rather than a ladder  so our furry friends can find their way out should the happen to fall in.. but i didnt reckon on hedgehogs taking time for a dip. This little spiky one was doing a fine breast stroke this morning but needed to be fished out in a net. i will now have to find another way to provide a safety exit..maybe a plastic slide!meanwhile i have just finished cleaning off the remnants of stubborn algae that survived the chlorine shock treatment so i had to spend a day underwater with a wire brush which was fun and now the stone has arrived to do the dry stone walling part 2! 

well got the pool furniture assembled and once again wished i had watched blue peter when i was a kid i am not a diy person.. then on to the kitchen shelves which unfortunately didnt come with wall screws and of course today is holy trinty day and also the day when you have to wash your feet in the sea for good luck! so the shops were shut as everyone presumably has salty foot day off. so the kitchen remains un-shelved and tomorrow is another day!

swallows are all well and good outside swooping about eating bugs and being wonderful.. but inside they are somewhat of a pain..i dont mind the geko’s that live up the chimney.they dont make much noise..occasional squeak and only come out at night to snack on insects.. but this swallow keeps getting stuck in the living room..swooping about in semi panicky way and adorning my floor with partly digested mozzies.. 2 hours i have been trying to persuade the thing to leave but to no avail.. now working on a recipe  for swallow souvlaki.. well here animal rights aren’t quite the same.. one of my neighbours told me that when his friend shot one of the elanora’s falcons its stomach was full of bees! i couldnt understand the reason given for the shooting but in england he would have a vegan encampment outside his house by now throwing petrol bombs …things are different here…!

  so the cultivated flowers are doing almost as well as the wild ones in the garden and as far as wildlife goes at last i got a snap of the strangely crested hoopoe bird.. next will be the quest to get it with crest en flagrent…and this i think is a geko called kotschkis geko or something similar, the one that lives in the chimney is  i think a turkish geko and is the colour of elastoplast…i will try and photograph its nocturnal hunts..

Slowly doing the detailing inside..still more to do but here is where its at at the moment starting with downstairs bedroom/bathroom.the bathrooms are both the same appart from the ceiling height and are made from polished plaster. cementacornia in greek which is made with river sand and choosing which river decides on the shade of the finish. The waterproofing is done with some fiendishly expensive stuff which originates in texas and doesnt change the colour at all.. The room is heated when necessary by a 6ft high stainless steel radiator/towel rail which you can see reflected in the mirror and the sink is carved out of  a block of marble.Hot water is from a large solar paneled tank on the roof but there is a backup immersion for cloudy days.the bedrooom,as with all the house and the front terraces, is floored with water blasted marble and has french windows leading on to a small terrace and the garden.the pathway leads straight to the pool terrace. The bed was made in the uk from reclaimed timber- the large wardrobe is aluminium and glass and there is an antique washstand and mirror.There is also an armchair which folds out into a bed for extra accommodation if required.The view from the bed is stunning and the coastline above the beaches provides an endlessly changing panorama. as does the neighbouring island of Alonissos which seems to change shape as the light moves over it during the day. next upstairs!yes the upstairs bathroom differs from the downstairs mainly in being higher up! and a little smaller………the upstairs bedroom ,however, differs from its downstairs equivilant as it has a beautiful open beamed chestnut ceiling -an overanging wooden balcony and a private roof terrace.. but more of that later…

The hills as usual are covered with flowers..this is probably the nicest time of year-warm but not hot- everything so green and of course very quiet. Starting to get the house ready for summer and painting, detailing and doing some outside works drives -patio’s -walls etc…its amaqzing how much time and money the outside stuff takes .its something i never imagined when i was budgeting .. I know you arent supposed to pick wild flowers but there are literally hundreds of acres of them here and what is so nice is to see the original plants which have been transmogrified  into the awful gawdy things we see in suburban gardens and flower shops..here are some beautiful wild gladioli in the living room and some wild white iris in the downstairs bedroom..

A quick trip to the island having been delayed by various matters in the uk to do some painting…unfortunate that the beautiful weather that made the november there into summer ended just as i arrived..so it became inside painting rather than the outside which was my intended target. Two difficulties ,one is painting white onto white plaster is very frustrating and secondly the rough scarred finish tradition in the islands is very hard to pain into for the first time .Still managed to do the living room area -first time i havent enjoyed its roomy dimensions- and it looks a lot better - i realize the difference isnt noticable on here but it is when you are there.still on the last couple of days a mighty storm came in and eventually i managed to get off the island and battle my way through to the airport..having got back to the uk the normal thing haopened and its spring again there and here its minus freezing….

the swallows whom nested in the downstairs bedroom last year returned and re-nested in the basement-as the presence of doors and windows thwarted their return,so as we started with 2 birds we now have an entire flock- between 20-25 of them difficult to count as they fly so quickly. Every evening they perform around the pool an amazing acrobatic show which includes them sipping from the pool in the manner of firebrigade planes collecting water from the sea.not sure what drinking chlorinated water does for them but they seem to like it,and they also reduce the mozzie population as the dip and dive around the house. not to many mozzies around-maybe thats why- the young ones arent always as adept as their parents though -i suppose its a training flight -and as they dip for water they sometimes get it wrong and crash!I will try and take some more photos before they leave but they are so fast i am shooting at 8000th of a second and still getting movement on some of them.Sometimes the sky above the pool is full of birds like swallow wallpaper-will try and capture it.