Casa Neroli

At last! We have come to a decision on the builder. The winner is “Marco”.

Whilst Marco was always the clear favourite from the beginning, we now feel completely comfortable that he is the right choice. We have had 3 other quotes and whilst 2 of them were cheaper, we felt that those would have increased quite rapidly as the build got under way. Every time we made the slightest little change to the specification they would change the cost. Marco however seems to be a lot more accommodating when it comes to those little tweaks, most of the time it was a case of “we can do that, no problem” and when asked about cost, it was ok and included.  Now I guess time will tell, once we get going with the build to see if this holds true, but we felt comfortable, which is the main thing.

There were the incidental things to consider as well; that the architect was keen to work with him, so that would probably work to our advantage. He is also the Mayor of the next village, sometimes, who you know can help.

We met with the architects, Plataforma, on the Tuesday to review the dozen or so outstanding questions we had on his quote, at the end of the meeting we had cleared up all the outstanding points.

A couple more did come up during the meeting, but the architect was able to call Marco straight away to get those answered as well.

By the time we left on the Tuesday, we were ready to discuss the actual details of the build with the builder and a further meeting had been arranged for 9:30am on the Thursday to meet with Marco.

On the Thursday we met with the builder at the architects office and discussed the start date, the probably duration of the build and the various options to make payments.

In principle we agreed that we would start the build in February next year, 2014, and the build would take about 1 year, so would be completed February 2015. We made allowances for maybe a late start depending on the weather, but set the target that we wanted to be in for the Easter 2015. It was also muted that we should build into the contract a penalty clause, that if he did not complete by the Easter 2015, Marco would pay some form of penalty.

We also agreed with the architect that they would Project Manage the build and agreed a fee. Other things we agreed on, was the help they and the builder would give us, in getting the final license, getting the electric connected, getting the borehole drilled and digging in a septic tank. All things that had to be done in addition.

We finished the meeting with a coffee, what else eh! Which just left us with reviewing the payment options that had been proposed and deciding which would work best for us, or make some kind of counter proposal.

We did make a counter proposal; but it was just a slight variation on one of the two options that had been proposed to us. Remember builders the world over will always want some form of up front payment, it is just down to you to negotiate how much up front you feel is correct. I wont go through all the options, but to give you some ideas, the option we agreed on, was a 30% up front payment, then we would pay whatever was done in a month, at the end of that month, but discounted by the same 30%. We felt this showed commitment on both sides, we had the support of the architect and would have a written contract before making any payments. I will let you know how this works out.

So that’s it. The next time we get to go to the plot, next Easter 2014, hopefully the construction will have started.

Here is a photo of where the house will be built , we will try to take a picture from the same point as the build proceeds so you can see.

We had a great week, the weather was just amazing, considering it was the end of October, start of November, it was only on the Monday we had any bad weather, even then it only rained up to about 2:00pm then the sun came back. The remainder of the week there wasn’t hardly a cloud in the sky, it was so nice to wake up in the morning and look out to clear blue skies and the temperature was averaging 70 degrees each day.  The clocks changed whilst we were there so it got really dark about 6:00pm and the temperature would drop, but we still managed a couple of late barbeques in the dark under the camping lights.

We got loads done; we did have some quite long days at the plot, but got a good balance between working and resting. We managed to strim the whole fruit section of the land, prune all the grape vines, prune all the apple, pear and peach trees, not that we have a clue what we are doing but they look pretty now. We also managed to start knocking down the chicken shed that is/was attached to the hut. It didn’t get finished, but we got half way there. The main reason was the sledgehammer I got was just too heavy for me to swing.

We also managed two visits to the architect and had a wonderful days drive up into the mountains. There are some amazing roads and views all within an hour of our plot; wow we are going to have such fun when we get the house built.

Most evenings we were back at the apartment to watch a film on the laptop or do some research into costs etc for the build. All in all a very pleasant and productive week.  We packed everything away on the Friday, ensuring everything we were leaving in the hut was well protected for the winter as we won’t probably see it again until next Easter, boo hoo!

We both work Friday morning, around 1:30 Teresa grabbed her bag (hand luggage) and headed towards Gatwick on the train. After a quick change of clothes in the toilet at work I jumped in the car and headed to Gatwick as well. We pretty much arrived at the same time, I just had time to visit the MoneyCorp desk and pick up some Euro’s.

In earlier blogs I have mentioned the importance of using a currency exchange company when you are changing Sterling to Euros. There are a number of different companies you can use, I have recommended World first and they are excellent, but they don’t have a non web presence. MoneyCorp who also do the same kind of service, do have that public presence and at Gatwick they seem to be at every corner. The one thing they do is offer over World First is  a Privilege card, I highly recommend you sign up, you will get a much improved rate of exchange for cash at the airport. When I visited the advertised rate was around 1.06 with my privilege card I got 1.16, that’s an extra 10€ for every £100.

The remainder of the trip over was fairly incident free, apart from a 15 minute delay on the A1 out of Lisbon, due to an accident. We arrived at Marc & Mieke’s apartment around 11:30pm which gave us time just to unpack the bags and into bed by 12:30 ready for the week.

Result!

It’s been an interesting few weeks, trying to decide what to do about the builders. We eventually ended up with 4 quotes / estimates. Two via the architect, the original that was used for the house design and a second from another builder they had used before. We also obtained a couple more ourselves, one was a local Portuguese guy that the people who own the place we have been staying at recommended and then finally an English builder now living and operating in Portugal who we found on the internet.

This is summarised account of the thought / elimination process.

We rejected one of the quotes from the architect fairly early in the process as it seemed to us that this was identical to the other quote they had supplied, yet every item was just that little bit more expensive. We suspect this was just to satisfy our demand for a second opinion on the original, which they preferred and were trying to push us towards them. We didn’t mind this as we were already impressed with the work we had seen that this builder had done.

The second quote to be rejected was from the English builder, we had both, but Teresa more than I, had some reservations after we met him. Everything seemed to be the “English” way, which in some ways is nice, but why would you build an English House in Portugal, there must be a reason the Portuguese build their houses the way they do. His price although being the second cheapest was only an estimate and he was already talking about refining costs as we proceed. We could see this rapidly getting out of control. So feeling uncomfortable we rejected this one.

That left us with two, the original and the local Portuguese guy.

The local Portuguese builder seemed a good option, he seemed to be honest and we felt sure he would do a good job, we had to consider how willing the architect would be to working with him and the fact that his quote was, well to say simple, very basic. Seemed to be the type of estimate we had been warned away from all the way through the process, e.g. one sheet of paper with a price on a separate business card. This we felt was a bit of a warning and whilst he was definitely the cheapest of the 4 we could see that perhaps control of costs could be an issue. This on top of having his quote translated into English by Google and by a interpreter which Teresa had as a friend. I think is counting this one out which just leaves us with one, the original.

We have sent a reasonably long list of questions back to this builder via the architect a while ago and have been hanging on for a reply before making any final decision. This week we received an updated quote which does seem to have answered a lot of our questions but we need to work through the detail before coming to a final decision. Hopefully should be able to complete that over the weekend and have a final set of points to discuss when we are there the week after next.

So I think we are almost there.

Will we end up back where we started with the original builder which seems ironic really, but we will have done diligence and reassured ourselves.

Watch this space could be just a few more days before we award the job.

LD lines have at last put up the crossings and prices for 2014 well at least until after April, this has now posed us another question as there is a huge difference in price if we don’t come back on the Sunday crossing but wait until the 05:30am on the Monday, which is the Bank Holiday.

This means we can change the timing of our travel back, to everything slightly later, maybe stopping at Bayonne on the way back as well as on the way down which means we could leave Portugal a bit later say around 9 or 10:00 am rather than 5:00am which is good, based on the time down that should get us to Bayonne around 5-6:00pm. That sounds quite palatable, time for a nice evening meal somewhere in Bayonne; perhaps we could drive down into the town a bit and have a look around as we wouldn’t be so tired and as we wouldn’t need to be up at the crack of dawn the next morning.

The leg then back to Dieppe would be the same as on the way down as well, so maybe we could leave again around 9-10:00am (Sounds nice) drive for say 4-5 hours that’s about 2:00pm have a nice leisurely lunch what 2 hours and back on the road about 4:00pm that would target us to be back in Dieppe around midnight. The crossing as at 5:50am so 2 hours before at the dock is 3:30am, so gives us 3.5 hours cover for any delays. All this and save £110 um got to be worth a try hasn’t it?

That said need to see where 4-5 hours from Bayonne would get us. Time for Google directions. Looks like Poitiers or Châtellerault could be likely contenders; they are about 30 minutes apart.

Next Job is to find rooms for the night we have always use the f1 on the way down so we could do that both ways, the issue with the f1 is that the bathroom and toilet are away from the room, which when you are getting up at 4:00am it’s not a problem as there is nobody around, but that could be a problem at 9-10:00am could get busy so maybe get a room somewhere with a bathroom attached. After a bit of research the B+B looks a good contender, we have used a B+B before at Bordeaux and it was good value. Maybe use it both ways?

Last job then before getting all this booked is to check with Marc & Mieke if the apartment we stay in is available? If it is I think we will give this a try, it’s the same route so we won’t have those problems, the timing may be a problem, and getting home first thing in morning rather than last thing at night may not be good, but let’s try it and hey if it is not good we won’t do it again.

Well its nearly time for the off again, just a couple more weeks and we can whistle our way back down to Portugal, can’t wait, just hope we will see some sun. I’m sure we will. Fingers crossed anyway. Just going for a week this time, so it’s a hop on a plane, pickup a hire car and a late night arrival at the apartment.

These last few days our intention is to try to up the pressure a bit on the architect and builder to get the bulk of our outstanding questions answered. That way we really should be able to meet up this trip and get the final bits done so we can organise for the build to start early next year.

The problem we face now is what to do for getting there next year. I f we start the build we are sure that we will have to make a lot more trips but just for short periods, maybe just a day or two, but we still need a holiday and be able to spend some time clearing the growth (Strimming).

Looking back at our trips during the last year, going for 2 weeks at Easter worked well, we managed to get a lot of clearing done and it helped to make the rest of the year easier, so would be good to keep that. June was good for the same reason, just a week helped keep on top of the jobs but proved difficult with Teresa getting time away from work. The summer, August break was brilliant and very hot, which is great if you just want to sit by a pool, which of course we do want at some point, but trying to do work was hard. The October / November week is good as it gives the opportunity to tidy before the winter.

Remembering that Teresa is limited to the school holidays and I only have so many days holiday from work in a year what to do? So maybe we should look to get the two weeks at Easter and a week in October, then keep the remaining days for the short interim trips.

Well we have just got to go don’t we!   Its where it all started and they have an exhibition and we have been offered free entrance tickets, so theres no choice, it has to be done!

So up early, jump in the car and head off to Birmingham for the day. We didn’t expect too much as we were sure that it in the main it would be based around the TV shows and really aimed at people who are still looking to buy or invest.

We had a really nice relaxing drive, of course there was the usual copious cups of coffee that I am sure aided the relaxation.  We arrived around 11:00am and made our way to the exhibition hall.

Amanda Lamb being interviewed

It was as we expected, very focused at those still looking to buy or invest, but it was very interesting to see the presenters from the TV shows and hear what they had to say. There was no surprises or nasty shocks in what they advised, which was good.

We did sit in on a couple of the presentations, which is not something we would normally do, especially as they where about all things financial. However it was interesting to hear what was available if we decided to eventually retire to Portugal. I wont go into the details here as they weren’t that exciting and we are not ready for retirement yet, but it was good to get an idea of what might be available when the time comes.

An interview with Jasmine Harman (very pregnant)

Also if you are thinking of doing a project like this or looking to just buy, this would be a great place to investigate the different possibilities, along with details of some of the more popular countries, there are lots of people to help and advise.

From what I can see they seem to have these a couple of times a year now, so as long as Channel 4 continue with the program in one guise or another I am sure they will continue to happen.

Do we think we wished we had visited one of these exhibitions before we started? No I don’t think we did as we were so sure of where we wanted to go. If you don’t have that it is a great source of information.

So now we are back and once again into the day to day life cycle and planning for our next trip later in the year, we need to set ourselves some objectives or targets otherwise time will pass and not much else will happen.

So we are planning to go back at the end of October, so let’s see if we can complete the builder selection process by then. We can at least then get moving with applying for the licence as mentioned in a recent blog and making arrangements with the architect to project manage the whole thing and then maybe we get to “cut the first sod” as they say at the start of 2014, that’s start the build to everyone else 🙂

I was going to do my usual detail analysis on the quotes / estimates that we had received and sat down with my MacBook and Excel and started, after just a few minutes it was clear that this was a ridiculous waste of time, in some ways it was possible in others not as the details and content varied. So we decided to take a more generic approach.

Gut Feel, who did we have a good feeling about and who was not so good, what was the overall price? And what were the big ticket items that were included or not. Once we had this we did have a clear favourite, although there were still a lot of questions we needed answers to.

So a quick, well not so quick really email, it took me a while to compose, to get the questions asked and now I guess we have to wait a few days, and then chase again, but determined we are to get the selection processes and final quote agreed by our next visit. (Fingers Crossed).

Following on from yesterday’s post about the excellent service received from Montepio, I am pleased to be able to write about the excellent service received yesterday from World First. It does seem a bit contradictory to be writing about a superbly quick service on a blog about a project that all about getting away from the world of “instant gratification” but sometimes, just sometimes it is nice to see.

I guess this is just as much about the whole banking and currency processing operation as it involved a number of banks and companies, but I will award the praise to World First on this occasion as that’s who in the main I was dealing with.

As a result of charges I wrote about in my last blog, I did as I said transferred some more funds into the Montepio account to stop any unnecessary charges. I logged into my account at World First (World First are a Currency exchange company) at around 8:45 a.m. monitored the rate for about 5 minutes and then booked my transaction. The rate is fixed at this point and as long as you transact over a certain amount they do not charge a fee.

I received an email back with a minute confirming the transaction and giving me all the details I needed to transfer the Sterling amount to them. I immediately went online with my UK bank as made the transfer, you don’t have to do it that quick but I did. So by just before 9:00am it was booked and paid for.

About mid morning probably around 10:30am I received another email confirming the money was in their account and they would process the transfer. In the middle of the afternoon I got an email confirming that the transfer had been made.

I got home at about 6:30pm and checked our Montepio account and hey presto, the money was already in the account, I don’t know exactly what time it happened but I reckon that’s a super service. Deal done and completed transfers in less than 9 hours.

Again I hope I can continue report good things about World First going forward. Well done Guys, and Girls.

If you read back about a year ago we opened a Portuguese bank account with Montepio, we have received excellent service from the account, although we haven’t made that many transactions, but in the past couple of months we have seen a couple of charges appear on the account.  These charges are fine and in many ways we have been waiting to see what happens, as

I know the banking system is different and we can’t expect them to operate the account for nothing.

I suppose we didn’t investigate enough when we opened the account as to what charges may apply so when the charges appeared we kind of understood in part what they were for, but we needed to be sure and one we just didn’t understand.

Montepio operate a Customer Service Centre (includes email) which operates as well in English as it does in Portuguese. A simple email to then late on a Sunday evening was responded to and all my questions answered in full and in English. I have to complement their service.

Because this is a separate account and we are not yet paying in on a regular basis e.g. Salary or Pension  there is a annual charge for the Debit Card of 10€ + 4% Tax for each card, so if like us you have a joint account with two cards, guess what! Yep two charges, but this seems to be an annual fee. No Problem makes perfect sense.

The second charge was a little more unexpected, but again we totally understand but something you should be aware of, again it only seems to apply, as we are not paying in a regular salary or pension amount. We only got the charge as we have been spending the money from the account and therefore the balance has reduced and until now we hadn’t added any more. We have now!

All the time the average quarterly balance is above 3500€ there is no charge.

If it is between 2500€ and 3500€ then a charge of 5€ + 4% Tax is charged for the quarter

If it is between 1500€ and 2500€ then a charge of 10€ + 4% Tax is charged for the quarter

If the average quarterly balance is below 1500€ then the charge is 15€ + 4% Tax for the quarter.

Note these are quarterly charges so could be as much as 62,40€ for a year around £50 so well worth keeping in check.

These may be different when you open an account and may be different if you use a different bank, but I expect they all do something similar. On the whole at this point in time I have to say “Excellent Customer Service” Montepio.

Keep it up guys and let’s hope I can continue to report good things 🙂