Bye Bye, Bar, Bench

The walk-out terrace is probably the best feature of the house: it's spacious, got good views, a breeze, it's quiet... It came with a built-in bar and bench mounted to the horizontal slat wall. Unfortunately, the bar sagged and took up space we could use for a dining table, and the dramatically angled bench was uncomfortable in the extreme. With barely 2 weeks living here, and no adequate tools, we decided to take them both out this weekend.

First the bar. It seemed like it should be easy. There were no brackets, somehow the bar platform must have been attached to the railing wall.  Oh... my... Yup: 5-inch sometimes-stainless screws into 2-inch blocks, lots of them, I mean, like three per block: the metal of the screws was being used as structural members, like a pin reinforcing a broken bone. And we found that almost everything was also glued with at least 3 different types of adhesive. We couldn't get to the screw heads on the opposite side of the railing with any ease. And we didn't want to brute force things too much because we'd gouge or break the attractive horizontal wood of the railing.

But we persevered, over two half-days, and got it out, with only one small crack to one of the railing boards by yours truly.  

Those blocking struts that supported the bar had to go. But the screws that held them in were screwed in from the outside of the fence, and mostly hidden by the window boxes they built as part of the railing fence. I could barely reach them from the terrace if I leaned way over, but I couldn't even see the screw heads. If I really grunted, I could locate them with a screwdriver. But if I dropped the tool, it would fall 9 floors to the roof of the parking garage in the ex-courtyard below. We didn't have any string, so Irene gave me the off-cut selvedge of a curtain she just hemmed so I could tie the screwdriver to my wrist. It got tangled after a few turns but worked fine. We finished up by stacking all the wood so we could take it down and put it in the bins.

The next day, we went for the bench. Every time we tried to sit on it, we complained. It had finger holes in the bench boards where you could (sometimes) lift up the seat boards and store things like potting soil and garden tools. But it wasn't water tight so tools rusted, snails found their way into various nooks, and all the "structural" wood -- a maze of 2x2-inch sticks, ranging from 3-inch long to 6-feet long -- was rotting away. The flower box slats sat directly on the stone floor and were turning into soil itself. Lots of creepy crawly bugs scurried as we removed board after board, block after block. 

There was also electrical wiring going to a junction box and then to a double outlet. I took care of that, and learned some more about Spanish wiring and how their modular outlet boxes work (I have to say: I rather like them, compared to US standard electrical boxes).

After a full day of work, we'd removed the entire bench and flower box and had a ton of debris wood on the terrace we had to get rid of. 

On the street corner are a set of mini-dumpsters categorized for various recyclables and true garbage where we could put the wood. Almost all our wood had embedded 2- to 5-inch screws, and some of the wood was 3 meters long so it wouldn't fit.  We didn't have a saw, so I just drilled through these long boards with a pattern of 3 holes to emulate a cut, then snapped the rails with our weight: using a drill bit in place of a saw blade is a gross hack, but it worked. 

We've got a few more days to lug this dangerous stuff down our mini-elevators to the refuse dumpsters, but we'll get there.

We've gained a huge amount of usable space which will allow us a lot more flexibility. We've already ordered some comfortable outdoor chairs, and are in the process of ordering a couple outdoor tables to match. A 80x120cm table will go in the space where the bar used to be -- a perfect size for a dining table and chairs. Another 80x80cm table and chairs will go in the larger space where we play hide-and-seek with the sun: we'll move a smaller table around in the shade of the morning and of the large umbrella.

Demolishing parts of a house means it's yours, reinventing it for your personal needs. This is our house. Esta es nuestra casa.

Magnifico Frigerífico

It's always about hot and cold, heating and cooling. We're taking cold showers, waiting for a new water heater to be delivered and installed, but realized that we just couldn't live with a dead freezer: no ice for our vermut! :-(

Our kitchen is a totally "built-in" [US] or "integrable" [Spain]: Death Star black cabinets hide everything, in a Euro-standard 60cm cabinet width layout. Our left-most cabinet has a separate congelador (freezer) and on a shelf above, a frigerífico (fridge).  The congelador was dead, dead, dead. Simple, right? Order a new one, "integrable", and move on. Nope. The way the cabinet door mounts to the freezer has the  cabinet door hinged as usual and connected to the freezer door by a clever/complex/stupid sliding mechanism; the new style (you see this in the US too) is to mount the door panel to the appliance, which means its hinges have to support the weight -- totally different mechanism, we might have to get a carpenter into re-cut the cabinet door to fit. 

It also meant there was precisely ONE model of congelador on the market that could even be integrated inside a 60cm (exterior width) standard European cabinet. And it cost about 700€, ouch!  I noticed we had to run our refrigerator, a separate unit with the same cabinet-mounted sliding mechanism, at about the max cooling -- clearly this was an old, tired, and inefficient unit; what would it cost to replace it too, in maybe a year?  

Next door to our apartment building -- I mean, literally next door -- is the Milar Catalá electrodomésticos shop where we ordered our water heater. Dani at the shop and Irene both persuaded me to give up on the Darth Vader integrated look and go with a free standing fridge, a stainless "combi" with freezer and refrigerator. There were hundreds of models available, in all price ranges, efficiencies, and finishes. After my usual ADHD analysis, spreadsheets, and such, we narrowed it to one unit based primarily on energy efficiency. The cost of power isn't going down any time soon; we know the price of gas/petrol in Spain is at least 2x that in the US, so expect electricity to be at least double what we paid in Arlington. 

All appliances (and our apartment!) have an energy efficiency rating, between A (excellent) and G (expensive). We focused on biggest 60cm unit that would fit, with the highest efficiency available, "B". When we compared it to another model we really liked (black crystal finish!), it cost less than half to run!  Easy to amortize this over a year or two. And with prices rising in Europe due to the Ukraine/Russia war, it's a good choice. 

It wasn't hard bruting out the old freezer and fridge, but we had to disassemble the cabinetry. It's all 60cm European standard stuff, but custom built on prem. After hacksawing pins and dowels on a similar cabinet, we came up with a plan for the fridge cabinet. We "scienced the shit out of it" and realized that if we pulled out a filler panel, we'd gain 2cm, which we hoped would be enough to remove the left panel from its internal pins, then pull the old freezer/fridge shelf, then disassemble the cabinet, leaving a princely 2cm left to slide in the new fridge. 

Dani, our dealer with Milar downstairs, verified our measurements, and around 5pm we put our money down and ordered the LG fridge, a 2.03 meter behemoth.

Only one problem: would it fit in the tiny elevator we have in our building? We are on the top floor, 9th floor, over a hundred steps up. I measured the elevator doors, and it was gonna be close, really close. There's something magical about living here that we never would have expected: Dani came over to our apartment, and measured the elevator, and sent the dimensions to the transport company, as part of the service -- can you imagine that in the US?? The inside doors were under 200cm tall, and the inside of the elevator itself was 212cm max: we were not even sure the fridge could be tilted in, as the elevator's about the size of a Clark Kent phone booth! I could not imagine the cost to pay hulks to walk this up the 9 narrow flights of stairs! 

But wouldn't you know: the delivery guys came, and ever... so... carefully... angled the naked fridge into the tiny elevator, where it had a couple millimeters of clearance to the back and ceiling. It's funny, Dani said "They usually send a small guy and a big guy", and I asked, "What's the small one do?", to which he replied, "Stay inside the elevator to push the button." And that's exactly what happened! :-) They slotted it into the space we created by removing the cabinet, with about 1cm to spare.

Amazing! It had been under 16 hours since we placed our order and had it -- very carefully -- installed. Finally, we'd have ice for our Vermut and Gin Tonics! :-)

We let it cool down and walked to the grocery store to stock up, then Irene cooked a nice dinner of pork chops, potatoes, and asparagus on the grill on the terrace while the sun set. A rather pleasant 5€ bottle of wine and a finish with an even cheaper Cava for dessert after dark.

Only one problem: the door came hinged on the right, and we need it to swing from the left. But an LG technician is arriving Monday to swap the door; dunno why they have to send someone out, for 59€, but if we do it ourselves we void the warrantee. Fine.

Time for a cold breakfast beer from Montseny, a local craft brewery.

Life is feeling pretty good, now that we're back to our old rhythm of cooking and eating. We're loving the quality of service we're getting from shops around here, it's really refreshing.

Now we just need some hot water for a shower... just a few days to wait, we're told, so close...