We’ve produced hundreds of cartloads since starting our renovation…hopefully not too many to go now!!

But even so we were pretty surprised to find this bone set into some of the plaster. Images of mafia-style killings filled our minds, but one of the builders assured us – with an alarming level of certainty – that it comes from “a dog on the beach”. Quite how he’s able to be so specific, we’re not sure…

When your house is built onto the battlements of a walled city, you don’t really expect your walls to contain a blocked-off doorway that might at some point have ushered you straight out of the city wall. 

But that’s exactly what we found on the ground floor of Dar 91, as shown in this rather grainy photo (You’re just going to have to trust us on this one…it’s pretty dark down there and we didn’t have a lighting crew with us, ok? Ed). Which suggests our house pre-dates the city wall – or that our house was built where there used to be a door into the medina (which seems unlikely).

Kind of annoying, too – could make a rather natty shortcut to the off licence…

We’re not sure the large iron balls the builders found  under the floor are worth a lot, but they’re certainly an interesting find and did get them quite excited for a few moments.

Could they be cannonballs? The ends of weightlifting bars? Any other ideas?

A strange side-effect of starting the work on the house was the growth of a huge number of spiders’ webs at the lower levels of the house. This may have been partly that existing webs became more visible as dust from the higher levels landed from above. But we prefer to believe that the spiders themselves moved down the building to escape the noise and disturbance. We’ve never seen so many webs all in one place!

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A few weeks ago we got the permit from the Council to start with the ‘grattage’. This basically means scraping away the plaster from the walls, and the cement underneath.

For such an exotic sounding word, grattage is a thankless task – and especially for our stalwart builder Hakim, who has managed it pretty much single-handed.

The grattage revealed that our house is built of stone rather than brick, and with wooden beams resembling a Tudor construction.

In Morocco it is frequently claimed that treasure can be found in old houses – people used to hide valuables before fleeing in local dynastic disputes….sadly we have not yet found any….but we did uncover a fantastic old terracotta downpipe set into the wall, from roof to ground level, which is a kind of consolation.

     …so we could not resist when we found this other one and it is a real barber’s chair

Random objects left in the house when the previous people moved out

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