British Expats - Cornish Maid

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Cornish Maid - Update!

I have just received the following E-Mail from Sally and subsequently spoken to her, and She has asked me to copy and paste it onto here!
Tim

Right, where do I start? I suppose with the rented house. It was the worst accommodation possible. In the first week of being in there, we had a burst water pipe in the kitchen, which flooded the place, blockages in the pipes to the septic tank which continually smelt and almost daily spewed raw sewage onto the bathroom floor. The gas boiler in the kitchen wasn’t vented, and must have been years old. It only supplied lukewarm water and the kitchen filled with noxious fumes whenever the boiler was running. We stayed there for 6 weeks, four of which I spent mopping and disinfecting floors after clearing raw sewage. We all were desperate to get thehouse sale through and move to more comfortable accommodation, I can tell you!

Right, onto the house sale. The guy selling was the biggest liar, cheat I have ever met in my life. He and his wife couldn’t speak a sentence without there being a lie in it somewhere. Right up until a couple of days before completion, he played mind games with us. We were onto his games and managed to remain relatively sane throughout. Then the day before completion, he rang in the evening to say the deal was off....again, (...how many times we had heard that phrase). A 2 hour telephone conversation later we had placated him sufficiently to get him to agree to attend the Notary the following morning.

When we turned up, all seemed to be going ok, and then he and his wife started screaming and shouting at our legal representative. His wife said she was out of there, and promptly left the room! I began to doubt we were going to complete. Nearly 3 hours after our appointment time we finally completed. He told us he would call round the following day to start organising the building work for the casita for MIL. (The week before he had taken all of us to a supplier for MIL to choose all the tiles, kitchen and bathroom fitments for the casita. We already had our doubts as to whether he was going to be trustworthy enough to do it.)

When we got to the house, every window was open, and there was the most awful sell of sewage in every room. Each room had a plug in air freshener. Oh god thought I, here we go again, I’ve had 6 weeks of this already. The oven didn’t work, and the ADSL Broadband landline he had advertised as part of the sale, turns out to be a radio phone with no broadband facility. Our beautiful en-suite bathroom had no hot water connection to it, and it wasn’t till a few days had passed that we discovered that the toilet in there wasn’t even connected to the septic tank...whenever we flushed, it was pouring down the terraces onto our olive trees! That is only the tip of the iceberg to the lies he told us.

We have had a builder working for us for the last 2 ½ weeks putting things right for us, and he is due to start work on the casita for us. The seller never contacted us again, after he walked away with our money!

On to MIL. We organised appointments for her to see oncologists etc, and all seemed to be settling down. We knew that she had a limited time, but thought she appeared to be doing really well. Fantastic appetite, no pain etc. The oncologist requested another CAT scan, and last Friday Terry and I were told she has another tumour on her only kidney, and that they gave her 4-5 DAYS. We were devastated, but again decided not to tell mum. As I sit here, she is asleep in her bed, which we have moved into the lounge so that she could look out at the views. This is day 4. She is heavily drugged with morphine and now is in a little world of her own. So, we are playing a waiting game. Neither Terry or I have had much sleep, as we are taking it in shifts to sit with mum throughout the nights.

Certainly not the happiest of starts to our Spanish adventure. We seem to have had problems and heartache since arriving. We love where we are, the scenery is fantastic, the house is gradually getting put right, but dear old MIL will never get to move into her casita, and that cripples me emotionally.

I wish I could have written a long email about how wonderfully well everything is, but unfortunately I can’t at the moment. Don’t misunderstand, we don’t regret the move, we know we did the right thing, but just at the moment it is hard to see the end of this very dark tunnel, even though we know that we are almost there.

I will try to get back onto Expats occasionally, but at the moment we have taken out a mobile internet access contract with Movistar just so that we can do our online banking and check emails. I hope everyone is ok and look forward to catching up with you all sometime soon.

Take care

Sally