News from our farmstead #29

We're home!

I had to take a quick look at our last issue to remember where I left you because a month feels like a lifetime ago! At the end of September we were awaiting the news that Santi could come home after over 2+ months in the hospital and although we had to wait a few days longer than we expected (for bureaucratic reasons, typical Spain!) on the 6th October he was finally discharged.

No more hospital onesies! Although it turns out they were THE most practically designed items of baby clothing in existence.

Honestly, the day itself was nothing how I’d expected it to be. Calling it “anticlimactic” sounds bad, but I think it’s often the case that when you await something so eagerly and have so many expectations, it never goes exactly how you expect. Not that anything went badly - it’s just that I realised that the event itself, of bringing him home, wasn’t the sudden, dramatic change I’d expected. After the birth, with Santi being taken to the NICU immediately, I kept thinking that the day we brought him home would be the day we finally felt like real parents. But it turned out we’d slowly been turning into parents over the last 11 weeks after all. I thought that I’d be an emotional mess the whole day; actually, those emotions had already found their outlet previously and I felt calm and prepared. I expected it to be the weirdest, most surreal experience finally having him with us all the time, being able to feed him when he wanted and not on a schedule, being able to respond to him 24/7; actually we’d been more and more hands-on over the weeks as his health improved in the hospital and it felt totally normal. I imagined I’d be terrified to be totally responsible for a little fragile life; in reality, entrusting him to the care of other people had been scarier and I felt totally confident in our ability to give him what he needed. Walking out of the hospital with him felt strangely normal. I don’t know what I expected - the clouds to part and a host of angels to start playing dramatic trumpets or something - but nothing happened. The whole hospital didn’t come to a standstill and start clapping and cheering. Or come running after me accusing me of stealing an infant. I carried him out to where Mauro was waiting with the car, strapped him in and he slept the whole way home (Santi, that is).

Baby wearing

So now it’s been three weeks. Three weeks which have absolutely flown by, and which have been even lovelier than I could have expected. There’s not much of the day when Santi’s not being held or carried by either one of us and he seems to be thriving and content. Although having a baby is of course a huge change in our lives, it honestly feels like he’s always been with us. And both practically and emotionally, it’s a much smaller and easier change than the months he was in the hospital so I think that’s given us a bit of a soft landing. When Mauro goes back to work, after the world’s longest paternity leave ever (16 weeks plus 74 days extra from Santi’s hospital admission), we’ll see how easy I find things on my own! But still many more months before I have to worry about that!

So this saga more or less comes to a close - although Santi is of course the centre of our lives, the hospital era can take a back seat, at least until he has his final surgery some time next year, and now we can maybe enjoy the “normal” homestead family life we dreamed of when we thought it would be a nice idea to have a baby!

Although, “normal” homestead life is not quite the situation we have right now on the farm. This month, further momentous and pretty disruptive changes have occurred/are occurring. After Mauro’s paternity payments for the last 3 months all suddenly came through at once (again, Spanish bureaucracy and maybe only a tiny bit of tardiness on our part…), and after a pretty frugal few months where our only significant spending was on diesel to take us back and forth from the hospital, we suddenly had cash to drop on a few big house improvements.

I’m almost reluctant to tell you about these changes because I’m excited to put together the “big reveal” video, but you lot are special so I’m going to tell you and I hope you can join us in our celebrations.

No explanation needed

Yes, that’s a fancy new glass door where the ugly metal barn door used to be!! Yes, that’s actual daylight streaming into our previously cave-like living room! And not only that, but we replaced the old wooden door (door? 3m off the ground? Yes, that’s correct) in the bedroom with a glass window, another amazing lighting improvement. Now this actually is an example of life changing from one day to the next. I’m not sure why it took us nearly three years to do this - actually, I do know. Money. But wow, we should have considered selling some organs years ago to get this done sooner because let me tell you, in case you were in any doubt - windows really are great.

Santi’s not bothered about the window :(

So now we’ve got windows and a door in the kitchen, a new front door, and a window in the bedroom, and there’s just one more entrance point to the house to turn our attention to before we can say the it’s completely sealed. This final door (if you can call it a door) is very small and easily overlooked, but for such a small door it’s a surprisingly big source of debris, wind, critters and general unwelcome intrusions. We have been in two minds what to do about this door because it’s so short it’s practically a health hazard. Many a visitor have come a cropper crouching through the frame only to hit their heads or backs on the overhanging roof tiles directly outside. We considered getting a full-height dormer window installed (I think that’s what they’re called) but since the entire roof is so low, it would look super weird (if it could even be done) and be really expensive. We considered saving up and adding an additional room on top of the terrace to provide a second bedroom and re-doing the roof completely to encompass the new space, but in the end we decided it would be better to put the time and money into the ruin (eventually) instead of do anything so major on this house. So whilst we measured up and ordered all the other doors, we tactfully ignored this one and decided we’d come back to it…. another day.

Well, that day has come. As if October wasn’t exciting enough already - tomorrow work starts on replacing our entire roof, and with it, the final door. Although we haven’t actually sourced the door yet, so I guess it’ll actually be a sheet of plywood or something for the time being. But anyway, the roof. I bet you weren’t expecting us to take the roof off the house we’d just (almost) finished lovingly renovating and decorating inside - nor were we! Conventionally, you renovate from the top down, but of course we didn’t do that. We figured the roof was too big of an issue to tackle until we absolutely needed to, and we thought we probably had a good 5 years in it. But this last year the leaks have been worse and worse and we worried about what all that water was doing to the inside structure. When it rains, water now pours in through the side of the chimney (luckily in a steady stream so it’s easy to catch in a big bucket) and in many other places which are less easy to catch. The thing is, most of the time it’s not raining so it’s really easy to forget about this problem and then it rains again and you have a horrible time firefighting (water fighting?) drips and trying to protect all your stuff and you tell yourself you’re definitely going to get the roof looked at soon.

Roof inspection results: inadequate

What pushed us over the edge, though, was not a rainy day. In fact, it was the realisation that if we didn’t do the roof now, whilst Mauro was on paternity leave, it would be very hard to face the weeks-long disruption. The work is going to cause a fair amount of dust (and general chaos as we empty out the upstairs room and attempt to cover everything with plastic) so Santi and I are staying at a friend’s holiday cottage, very kindly lent to us for the occasion, whilst Mauro remains on site. Our decision to act now was confirmed when the builders came round to give us a quote and began digging away under the roof tiles and layers of broken mud mortar and found nothing more than a layer of completely rotten canes at the bottom layer, holding everything up. “A miracle”, apparently, that it hasn’t completely caved in already.

Oh, and did I mention that we finally installed our stove again, this time with the pipe exposed? This was the culmination of months of on-off work which started on the day Santi was born, when the builders arrived (great timing, everyone!) to knock out the old chimneys and level all our floors. Mauro then picked up the rest of the work to clean up the old chimney area, cement and plaster the walls, build a new plinth and seal between the upstairs and downstairs room. Finally we were ready to put the stove back in, with a new, attractive black pipe which emits a lot of heat into the house - heat that was previously lost up the chimney. I can’t emphasise enough what a difference this change makes.

Cosy and warm. A project well worth the effort!

With all these changes we’ve made on the house starting to stack up, and the kitchen feeling more like our dream kitchen every week, it’s finally starting to feel like we live in a “real” house - a place that feels comfortable, homely, cosy… that we’re not fighting to keep habitable on a daily basis… that we love spending time in, in all seasons, rather than simply tolerate. I had kind of forgotten what it feels like to have a space like that, and I’m not sure I even expected it from this house. But here we are, and it feels even better knowing that we’ve got it to this point mostly ourselves.

Anyway that’s it for this month. As with every other task, this newsletter got written in 5 minute snatches of time over the last week, whenever my hands were miraculously not full with a baby, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am so aware how quickly this time is going and how fast he’s growing (300g a week?!) and how special every day with him is. So thanks for reading and see you next month when hopefully we’ll all be enjoying our nice new watertight roof!

Harriet 🌻