We’ve been in our new house for three weeks now, and in Palamartsa for five. We think we’ve done really well getting the house sorted out and liveable, especially with the hectic social life we’ve had since we moved into our new home! We’ve met most of our immediate neighbours, been to four evening meals,…
Read more
Ivgeni, our milkman
Ivgeni has three cows, which he walks around the village every day, grazing them. He has one wayward cow that apparently doesn’t listen to anything he says and just wanders about. It has a bell, so you can always hear where it is. He stops outside our house for a rest every evening, so we…
Read more
Unexpected visitors
We have always said we don’t want any animals until next year, so imagine our surprise when we ended up playing host to a volunteer, two goats, two horses and a dog! A friend we had met earlier in Bulgaria needed help with temporarily housing some animals she was looking after. It’s a long and complicated…
Read more
Starting the bathroom
Having initially decided we didn’t want to do any major construction work on the house until next year, our plans have changed. We need to keep a bathroom going over winter. Our initial plan was to use the outhouse as a bathroom; it already has a wood-fired boiler, shower and running water. Unfortunately, we think…
Read more
Clearing the house out
It has taken us a week to get the house cleared out, but it’s finally done, or as near to done as it’s likely to get this year! The contents of the house were amazing; loads of old clothes, thick woolly stuff for winter, blankets, thick mattresses and duvets. More furniture than you could shake…
Read more
Wood delivery
On only our second day in our house we met a friendly bloke called Ivan (nearly all the men are called Ivan, apparently. They have nicknames so people can tell them apart!), who offered to organise our wood for us. It duly arrived the next day and was dropped off in our driveway. The price…
Read moreProject plan
Having moved into our new house our first task is to decide how we are going to tackle this project. It’s likely to be the work of a lifetime, but we do need some kind of plan as to what our priorities are, and how we are going to do them. Our first priority is…
Read more
We’ve got a house!
After hunting for weeks, and looking at loads of properties in the area, we’ve finally found our dream house! It’s an old, but not too old, house on the outskirts of the village. It used to belong to a doctor, and has obviously been well kept, compared to a lot of other buildings we’ve seen….
Read more