Long time no blog - again. Well, I have been very busy and it is now very hot here, although that hardly counts as an excuse for not sitting down for an hour or so and typing up a progress report.
Much has happened in the flat. I now have a proper, functioning, grown-up and CLEAN kitchen.
It took a lot of hard graft and a little hair-pulling but of course now that is behind me, it no longer matters. I can cook. I can sit here happily without looking over my shoulder and under my feet for cockroaches. In fact I haven’t seen a cockroach for over a month, which is surprising as the summer is definitely here.
Some of this was probably already in train last time I wrote so I may repeat myself a little and I will try to stick to the highlights. I had all the ceramic tiles ripped off the kitchen floor to reveal the original granite tiles. Then I went out and bought an angle-grinder and spent a couple of filthy dusty days grinding the filth off the surface to see how they would come up. They are a bit damaged in places and there remains a difference in colour in the places where there had been furniture before but on the whole I am happy with it. It still needs a last fine abrasion and to be grouted and polished but there was not time to do that before fitting the units.
The units are solid wood and were custom-built by a carpenter, then delivered already assembled, which was a surprise to me. The plumber and his lad had to carry them up to the fourth floor, on the way knocking off a fire extinguisher and inhaling most of its contents. The worktop was built by some fancy kitchen company and is lovely stainless steel with a double sink in the middle. In fact, the carpenter had forgotten about the sink when he built the base unit and for some reason placed the drawer section underneath where it would be. Luckily, I noticed that before paying the balance and got him to dismantle it partly and move the drawers over to the side.
The ceiling, which had been covered up by a suspended tongue-and-groove ceiling that served as a penthouse for the cockroaches, also took a lot of work to put right. The old plaster was uneven, full of holes and in places had several layers of gloss paint. All around the edges had been gauged away to remove the corner mouldings so that the philistines could fit the wretched wood. So the paint had to be chipped off and it had to be plastered and filled to come flat again. It isn’t wedding cake perfect but it is OK to be a little rustic with the wooden kitchen.
It is hard to believe that all that work and all that time have passed and I can sum it up so briefly!
What else? The plumber has also changed the yucky plastic basin in the bathroom for a nice cleanable ceramic one, which makes washing a much more relaxing experience. I no longer look at the thing and wonder what is lurking in the cracks!
He has also ripped out the old laundry and put in a new sink - an interesting item that has a built-in wash-board in case I ever need to scrub anything by hand. Hmmm, sure the cleaner will enjoy that. Next to that is the other new marvel - a washing machine. No more bagging up my laundry and lugging it down the street to the incredibly rude woman who then boils the bejesus out of it and won’t give it back for a couple of days. Yay! At the rented flat I was in before, there was a nice service nearby who came and collected my laundry and brought it back to the door - but still boiled the bejesus out of it in the meanwhile, which is not ideal when most of your clothes are bright colours or black.
Next to my new laundry is a spiral staircase which goes up to the maid’s room, which was always a bit ropey at the bottom. Ha ha, “a bit ropey” - it turned out that it was largely held together with old bits of carpet (that amazing glue again) and supported on a pile of bricks! How lucky am I that none of the people I have traipsed around showing off my flat went through the rusted steps and sued me for every last tile on the cupola!
Anyway, that has been fixed by a friend who just happened to have a giant soldering machine from a past life fixing cars. What with that and the angle-grinder (how I love power tools!), he has made a pretty good job of making it all sound again. It is now painted English Green and holds hefty humans without wobbling.
Up the stairs is the maid’s room and a WC to which the water supply has been cut. I am not planning on fixing either of those up the til some time in the future. I have half a notion to knock a big new window in the wall which I could use as a door to the roof terrace. I doubt the building will let me do that though. They won’t let me have a barbecue up there in case I damage the impermeable membrane that protects my ceilings from the weather, so I doubt I will be allowed a door.
The building is governed by a consortium of the owners of each flat. We each own a percentage of the whole thing according to the square metres in each property. It may be cubic metres actually but I’m sure you don’t care about that if I don’t! We had an annual meeting a short while back, so I dutifully moved my regular appointment with Romina and went along. Yikes! As it happened, the meeting was not quorate, so could not officially take place. Nonetheless, there was a lot of heated debate on a couple of topics, chief among them the supply of electricity, which needs upgrading to take account of everybody’s electrodomesticos. I have noticed that the lights tend to flicker when the fridge resets itself and am also a little surprised that the lights and the power all run off the same single circuit, so I was aware that I’d need to rewire here.
Yes, I know that should have happened before the decorating but it was not feasible.
Still, my needs apparently are not the problem. It is the people who like to close themselves in with air conditioning who are spoiling it for the rest of us. Now, apparently something similar happened with the gas supply some years ago and at that point all the neighbours fell out. It transpired that the people who had earlier worked hard to renovate the building and make it as lovely as it now is, also changed the bylaws in a way that was neither legal nor fair. So huge arguments erupted and some suing was undertaken and the result now is a lot of politics I will never be able to get to grips with. On one side is a woman who speaks English and on the other a man who doesn’t and who gets angry very quickly and then talks incredibly fast. Guess which side gets my sympathy!
The non-meeting turned into an explosion of argument in Spanish, which I clearly had no chance of following. So when the meeting was reconvened a couple of weeks later, I kept my regular appointment with Romina and signed over my vote to the neighbour on my floor; thereby making an enemy of the angry man, who actually wagged his finger in my face as he told me off a couple of days later! Lovely.
Anyway, still no resolution with the electrics but I gather that the management company are getting some figures together and then we have to make some sort of decision. Whatever it will be, it will be expensive to get a new, heavier supply into the building and then run cable up to the 4th floor. Then after that, I can get the place re-wired. So not happening any time soon I hope.
Things already seem to be winding down a bit for the hot months and at 36 degrees who can argue? Apparently January is a lot hotter so everybody goes to the seaside.
I think I will add a link to the BBC 5-day forecast for Buenos Aires. At the weekend there was a Chelsea-Arsenal match on one of the sports channels, which I didn’t watch for long (obviously!) but which was interesting for the crowd shots - all woolly hats and big winter jackets and cold, miserable faces.
Happily, this building is really well-designed and all I have to do is open a few strategic windows and there is a delightful through-drought which means the flat never gets unbearably hot. Some afternoons I close the shutters in the front to stop the sun beating in and so far I have not even needed to buy a fan. Quite a relief as I loathe air conditioning and would hate it if that was really the only answer.
But what else has happened here apart from the kitchen and the laundry?
Well the mundane stuff is that most of the decorating is done. In a day or two it will all be spick and span, apart from my bedroom where the only thing that has been decorated is the insides of my wardrobes, which I had a bit of an obsession with having clean early on.
A couple of gorgeous young men with some heavy machinery spent a couple of days this week working on the wooden floors in the two spare bedrooms. They have sanded off all the crap and varnished. They have come up absolutely beautiful. It is hard to imagine the cat-stinky carpets in there now.
Yesterday I assembled the single bed I had bought earlier in the week in one room, and in the afternoon some chaps arrived with the double bed and put that together in the other spare room. So all I need is mattresses and light fittings and those bedrooms are up and running.
I went back to the antiques & flea market district to look for more stuff the other day and only came back with a brace of wall lamps. For some reason, people who had been helpful before seemed to be taking the piss a bit with their prices, which annoyed me. I enjoyed the flea market though and had some nice chats with some of the sellers.
One of the chief things I was after was my perfect chandelier for the living room - it is so difficult to choose. Since I was quite little, I have wanted a chandelier and I always thought it would be big, dripping with crystal and definitely not brass - but when you actually go out and look at a thousand different chandeliers, it is really hard to fix on one that will do the trick. In the end I got down to two in the flea market that I liked, both silver, both tall and curvy, both adorned with crystal petals. The difference was in the layout of the bulbs. Anyway, it was hot and I was tired, so I memorised as well as I could what they looked like and determined to go back in the week and get one or the other. So of course, when I got home and sat looking up at the space where it would live, I realised that silver just would not do and I really needed something warmer with the white walls.
So back to square one with the chandelier!
The other revelation to me that day was that I really didn’t want a 3-piece suite in the Louise XV style to go with the other furniture. I sat on lots of them and imagined them in the living room and I liked them less and less. Then in the evening, there was an advert for something on TV, during which there is a brief glimpse of a huge modern fuchsia pink sofa and my heart was filled with joy at the realisation that I knew what I wanted to sit on….
I know, but it’s my house!
So the next morning, I set off down Belgrano Avenue to walk back up, looking in the furniture shops for my sofa. As it happened, I got off the bus right by a great big junk shop, so I had to take a look in there first. An hour later, I came out having spent two hundred pounds on the following:
A pretty wooden single bed;
Two cute bedside tables;
A gorgeous little whiskeria, which is the perfect size for my TV, stereo AND has a bottle rack for the vodka etc;
A low, solid oak round side-table with a glass top;
A 1.9m wide, three-panelled mirror to hang above the sideboard;
My chandelier!
I was ready to pay a lot more than that just for a chandelier if I could only find one, so I was a happy girl. There’s a coffee table in that shop too that I may go back for but I do not want to end up cluttering the place up with furniture.
Then I went on to Av Belgrano, thinking I had probably had enough luck for one day, so que sera sera with the sofa quest. The first shop I went into was one I had seen from the bus several times before and always had a feeling there was something in there for me. (I usually go into new shops on that kind of hunch and very often it is entirely wrong but for some reason I still do it!) Anyway, this time I was right and although I was disappointed in my fuchsia pink vision by the hopelessly dreary fabric options, they had something actually far more suitable; a giant modern corner sofa covered in sort of moss green chenille which will go with everything. There was some pissing abut with my Visa card, then some pissing about with the dollars I offered instead, but eventually they let me buy the wretched thing and it was delivered the next day.
That night, I dismantled the chandelier and washed all the crystals, then actually got in the bath with the metal frame to get all the dust and grime off it - well I knew it would have plenty of time to dry out before it would come into contact with the electricity supply and that really was the only way to get the whole thing clean without doing my back in. I had to count out all the crystals and all the holes and rearrange them so it all looked even again. Like a big maths puzzle. My fingers are scratched to hell by fixing all the wire links but it looks superb. I was going to put it on a dimmer switch, but it turned out it has two settings that allow you to have bright or soft lighting anyway, so there was no need to do that. I love it! Twinkle, twinkle, big old chandelier!
Once again I am going into too much detail but at least it isn’t all bout dead cockroaches!
The result now is that the flat is furnished and looks fabulous.
Apart from all that, my social life and dancing excursions have been very low key indeed. So much so that I have a whole load of catching up to do with people I haven’t seen for weeks. Often I seem to have stuck to my minimum - which is the milonga at Club Espanol on a Thursday. Last week was especially super-duper; it was one of those when I just danced like a demon and had to stare fervently at the floor to sit out a couple of tandas and rest my poor feet. Dreamy.
The latest highlight though was a flying visit by Michael and Oswaldo who dropped in on their way to Brazil. How fantastic is that? It was so exciting to see them here and we went out and ate steak three evenings in a row before they flew off again. They wanted to see a show, so we went and looked at the places in San Telmo but found they were such a huge rip-off that we just went to Bar Seddon and ate instead. They also wanted to see me dance, so I took them to Confiteria Ideal which they just loved. None of *my* men were there, so the dancing wasn’t the best but enough for them to get the general idea.
More people come and see me, please!
It has been such a long time, there is so much else to say but I am going to post this now and try to adorn it with photos.
TTFN, Raquelita.
