One of the most time-consuming (and expensive) aspects of renovating a house in the medina is clearing away all the rubble you create. It all has to be bagged up into little sacks and left on the street overnight, for a horse and cart to take away first thing in the morning.
We’ve produced hundreds of cartloads since starting our renovation…hopefully not too many to go now!!
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…
“Incy Wincy spider climbed up the spout
Down came the rain and washed the spider out
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain
Now Incy Wincy spider went up the spout again”
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!
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.
These are some of the old floor tiles left in our house.We are not too sure if we can save them all but we will try our best, shame not to…
Yes folks we’ve taken the plunge and bought the house behind (and under) Dar 91. To do so meant buying three separate properties – an experience that has been…well, let’s just say “a challenge” (one day we’ll write a book about that).
So anyway, now we’ve signed the final piece of paper and are the proud owners…apparently.
Over the next few months, you’ll be able to follow our progress on this blog as we renovate the new place. As you’ll see from the pictures below, we have a little bit of work to do…
