Living off the grid involves a lot of tinkering. When things go wrong, there’s no electricity company, water board or gas man to call up and call out.
We’ve been doing a lot of learning by doing, and while we do have the experts who installed the panels, pumps and pipes, most things that go wrong can be resolved with a good understanding of the system.
I was never very good at DIY – Do It Yourself – but I’ve spent the last few years trying to move towards the Oxford English dictionary’s definition of handyman: “a person able or employed to do occasional domestic repairs and minor renovations.”
My father was an engineer and was initially quite disappointed when I opted for journalism, and at least I’ve been trying to emulate the “Mr Fixit” label my mum gave him when I was growing up.
But my recent attitude towards our tourism project is making me reconsider.
Hours of tutorials on building a deck or how to fill cork oak plank cracks with epoxy resin are only a mouse-click away, but I haven’t got the patience, and they edit out the bits where the wood warps or the resin seeps through the sticky tape and creates shiny permanent puddles everywhere.
So now I think I identify more as “unhandy man” or a “Mr Fixit-NOT”.
I am so totally done with D-I-Why. I’m so over it. I don’t want to Do It Myself anymore. I’d like someone else to do it.
Hours spent trying to work out how to do stuff has allowed me to ponder the alternative meanings of this TLA (Three Letter Acronym):
Drilling Incomplete. Yawn.
Dammit. Idiot. You!
Done? Isn’t Yet.
Daily Incompetence? Yes.
Don’t I Yearn…to do something else? Darn It, Yes.
Hopefully this is just a passing phase, given the amount of time I’ll have to spend tinkering just to keep the power on, our drinking water flowing and the whole show on the road once we open.
But right now, I really wish I didn’t have to put up any more lights, filli the remaining gaps between the skirting boards and the wall, or faff about with wood and hinges.
Lists of things to “just finish off” take me hours – many of which are spent walking from one building to another searching for missing tools or drill bits which I’m sure I left somewhere.
I make almost daily trips to the nearby agricultural supplies store and the hardware place because I haven’t bought enough nails or the right sized pipe or the correct tap.
“Four years I’ve been doing this,” I told the cashier, “and I’m still rubbish at it,” as she worriedly explained (as if to a five-year-old) how careful I needed to be with a 30-litre drum of chlorine.
Of course, most of what we need involves a day trip from Odemira to the Algarve and to
Leroy Merlin – brilliantly pronounced in Portuguese with that odd French accent: Leh-roh Mare-lahn.
Now I’m comfortable just calling him Leroy – not even Senhor Merlin, or O Leroy – we’ve spent so much time together, we are definitely on first-name terms and happily converse in the tu form.
I almost know what all the different silicones are for, what kind of paint you use on what and where everything is in most stores.
I even felt let down when one of his people refused to let me buy an air conditioning unit for the adega (wine cellar) because I didn’t have the name, licence number, date of birth, mother’s maiden name and inside leg measurement of the person who was going to install it.
It’s the law apparently…presumably thanks to a well-connected and strongly lobbying AC Fitters’ Union, whatever that acronym might be.
The car happily drives itself the hour and a quarter cross-country to visit the Holy Trinity of IKEA, Leroy and Makro.
I’ve overdosed on Swedish meatballs and hotdogs and burned hours pondering different sized parafusos (screws…up there on my list of favourite Portuguese words with rodapé, or skirting boards).
We’ve bought so many flat-pack things which need assembling, that we have spent hours just putting waste cardboard into recycling bins.
Our place is looking great – and every day it gets a little closer to being “finished” – a technical definition indicating “the placement of essentials allowing the rooms to be habitable” while other things are gradually added and finessed over time.
Of course, to be officially habitable, we need the illusive licence … and little happens here in August.
We’re going to make wine tasting and the wine stories of Alentejo the heart of what we are doing, and sommelier Candace Olsen dropped by with some special choices to sit alongside some of our favourite wines.
I hadn’t tried a 1978 wine before … certainly not in this millennium … and it was a great adventure.
Friends and visitors are generous with their praise for what we’ve achieved in the four years since we arrived here in the Valley of the Stars.
That’s quite an important number for me, because throughout all the years spent bouncing from country to country as a foreign correspondent, I have never lived in one place for more than four years since the 1980s when I left school in Newcastle.
Breaking an adult-lifelong nomadic habit hasn’t been as hard as I might have thought, probably because we’re so busy.
But despite my current spat with the gods of D-I-Y, I am happily settled in the place where we have settled and am looking forward to the next four, by which time I hope we will be running a successful business … i.e., one that brings in more money than it spends (very much against the current trend).
We have achieved a huge amount against the odds: our lack of experience of building, of Portuguese bureaucracy, of knowing how to do things, of being rubbish at DIY … but we are so nearly there.
So, for now, I suppose I need to haul myself up the hill, gather all the possible tools I could need today into one shopping bag and try to spend more time doing it myself than looking for my missing tools.
ALASTAIR LEITHEAD is a former BBC foreign correspondent now living off the grid in rural Alentejo. We writes the blog “Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal” here and produces the podcast Ana & Al’s Big Portuguese Wine Adventure on all the usual platforms.
