Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

I haven’t posted anything for a while, but that doesn’t mean nothing happened.

We imported our car. Having finally gotten our Certificado de empradonamiento (see previous blog), we were now able to get our gestoría to do her thing. She told us she would app us by the end of the week when the papers would be ready. That surprised us, because we were given the impression by people we know, who have lived here for a while, that it would take two to three months to import a car. We figured that by the end of the week we would hear what the next step is. She sent us a message the next Monday that the papers were ready. It turned out there were no more steps. We were done and could go get our Spanish plates. We quickly found a garage that could get the plates made. Three hours later, they were fitted.

We have no idea why the car was imported so quickly (in seven days) and so cheaply (hundreds of euros less than expected), but we’re not complaining.

We met the neighbors. We had decided that when we would go meet the three other neighbors further up the hill, when we had time to make them something nice. When that time came, Mirjam created three small lime cheesecakes and the next day we went to say hi. First, we went to the sheep farmer. A very nice Spanish man who lives alone at the farm, while his wife and daughter are living with his mother in law, who is old and weak and needs assistance. His sons work with him on the farm, but go to their own homes at the end of the day.

Then we went to his next-door neighbor, a Belgian lady who lives there with her 13-year-old daughter. They are from Antwerp orignally, so we could speak Dutch with them. They were surprised to find two Dutch-speakers on their doorstep, especially because they hadn’t realized the house at the bottom of the hill had new owners. They invited us to stay for coffee and we shared the cheesecake, out on the patio in the sun.

The third neighbor wasn’t in, but we caught him home the next day. He is from England, but has lived here for some 20 years. He has a small house and is building a larger one on his property. He has spent the last 17 years building it and agreed with us, that at some point he has to decide that it is finished.  

We let the cats out. Cats need a period of time to adjust to a new home. If you let them out of the house too soon, you run the risk of them running away and not coming back. How long the adjustment period is differs per cat, but 4 to 6 weeks is recommended. We had been in the new house 3 weeks now and we had already given them access to the porch through a cat door that I installed in the kitchen door.

Now they were ready for the next step, which was to be able to get off the porch and into the garden.

The cats are very happy to be able to come and go as they please. We are equally happy that they like the house as much as we do and they spend more time with us in the house than outside.

Earlier, I posted some videos of their first day out.

We had breakfast outside. Lucky as we are, we had been having very nice weather those first weeks. In fact it was so nice that we decided to have breakfast on the porch on February 19^th.

We put up lights over the table on the porch. This may not sound like big deal, but to us, it was. We had bought the lamps in Holland and had generated a computer image to see what they would look like. We knew it came close to what the end result would be. But it turns out, the end result is better!

We love the way the porch looks now, but are not entirely done with it yet.

We bought paint. The house is perfect as it is, but there are just a few walls we wanted to paint a different color. We found a paint store that could mix the exact colors we had selected in Holland: a petrol blue for the master bedroom and a few borders and other accents on the outside of the house and a taupe for various walls in other rooms. The next day we painted the living room and are thrilled with the result. It is pretty much exactly as we had envisioned it.

We rested. “… but on the seventh day, thou shalt rest.” We had been on the go constantly, from a week before moving out of the house in Breda until well into the 4^th week in Spain, working down our to-do lists. So far, we had had 1 day that we decided not to do anything but relax. We have both lost a lot of weight because of all the work and the distances we walk in this big house. And our bodies are telling us that we should remember to rest every now and then.