A while back, I set ourselves the challenge of renovating our upstairs bathroom for less than £500 – excluding labour. Labour is a whole lot less expensive out here, but I’m not mad, as there’s no way we could do a whole renovation of a bathroom, including labour, for that price. So, the initial plan […]
It seems like only last week that we were enjoying long days of unbroken sunshine and at times, quite searing heat. Having to actually escape indoors, to sit in front of a fan. And knowing that largely every day, throughout the summer, would be like this… But, half way through November – how did that […]
This is going to be an experiment, so bear with me. I’m trying to document what we get up to on our travels and on our new adventure in Istria but sometimes I’m aware that I can’t do a blog about everything we do. However, I do want to have a record – you never […]
We’ve just said goodbye to our second set of friends who’ve been staying with us for a few days. Amanda and Steve had a few days in Italy first – they flew to Venice Marco Polo from Manchester and then spent a couple of days 30km north of Venice, in Treviso and then took the […]
We are very excited that visits out here are being planned already for 2018 by family and friends. If you’d like to come out to Istria, here’s where we are currently: 18th – 22nd April – booked 22nd – 29th May – booked 29th May – 5th June TBC 30th June – 4th July – […]
You know when things go really smoothly and you get lulled into a false sense of security, that this is how it will always be? Well, that happened to us very recently… We had arranged with the people we’d bought the house from, that while everything else they had left in the house could be […]
So, here’s what happens when you get a bit cocky on your travels. This is a salutory tale, and if you ever come to visit us, we hope you avoid the rooky errors we made… We’d had two glorious days and nights in Venice, experiencing the festival and were due to collect a hire car […]
So, we decided to take flights out to Istria and try and find the house we’d spotted online, but were getting still no responses from the sellers to our calls and emails. Bonkers? Yes, of course. But sometimes, you just get that feeling… Summer flights from Manchester to Pula were stupidly inexpensive – £60 return […]
It’s been a while since I posted about the new adventure that is the house in Istria. In fact, the last post just showed a photo of the keys and a glass of fizz… Yes, on Monday 5th December 2016, we signed all of the official paperwork, made the payment, and that was it. The […]