Home Improvements

Progress is slow but steady on the house. Early in the autumn, we had the ground floor walls rendered (with a sand-cement mix rather than the more expensive fine plaster the first floor is finished with). Since then, we've painted most of the walls and also completed the ceiling of our future dance/yoga studio in pine.

The studio is not that large (for a studio), but still much larger than most ordinary rooms. It is also well over 3 metres from floor to ceiling. The almost 40 square meters of pine, plus the battens to support it and a layer of insulation, were quite an effort to fit.

With the studio coming along (we just have to clean a bit more of the stone walling and lay the floor) it was about time I got to work on the stairs leading down there from the main part of the house.

So we are getting there... Slowly....

The studio floor is going to be sprung; a proper dance floor. Getting the special foam pads I need for that was bit of a saga! I sourced the system in the US as a cheap and easy to install sprung floor. Unfortunately, Portuguese customs had other ideas -- and I ended up paying more for shipping and duty as for the parts. The pain was worse because half of the original cost was a kind of intellectual property -- the book of instructions. The total weight was just 3kg; I felt like I paid for this weight in gold!

Anyway, we have the bits we need. Now all I have to do is source the engineered bamboo flooring that we want to finish the studio with. I'm hoping we can get on with this within a few weeks...