Saturday, June 21, 2008

Not to be put off 2

The Spanish people who bought the house next door to us have had a lot of work done on their property. First they had the pool finished, then they had the whole plot concreted. A fence with a gate was erected to prevent children from entering the pool unsupervised. They also built an outdoor kitchen with a chimenea style BBQ.

More recently they had a a roof built over the outdoor kitchen following which they started an L shaped extension of three rooms on their plot. That was way too close to the boundary lines of their plot so, following a complaint from a neighbour, they had to knock it all down.

They've now built a lean to extension on the side of their house which, we are reliably informed, is still illegal but is not as much 'in your face' as their first attempt. It is the cheapest form of building though. The walls have been built directly on the concrete without proper foundations and it is only tied into the existing wall at one point each side and then only by a couple of inches if that.

In my opinion, it really is only suitable for storage. If that is what it is for, then a decent shed would have been better and more to the point would have been legal.

So, if you are wondering what all the banging and clattering is about; it isn't Pam beating me about the head for doing something wrong, it's the builders next door.

PS I am told that it is impossible to obtain legal permission to extend your property here at Villas Andrea. That leaves people with two choices: they can either bribe the mayor or some other official who will then ignore what they have done or, they build in the hope that nobody will complain. 

That is all well and good but does mean that a lot of construction work is unregulated i.e; nobody officially monitors the work to ensure that it meets proper building standards. Folks are left having to  trust the builder to do a proper job.

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