We have space in our new apartment, Next Door @ Dar 91, between 15 and 22 September…and we’re offering 15% discount if you book for a week or more! We also have space in October.
Check out the coolest new address in Essaouira: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Essaouira/Dar-91-Essaouira/138803832582?v=photos
As in all the best photo-shoots, it’s the stuff that’s NOT in shot that’s the most revealing…but for now, sit back and enjoy some bits of the new place that we CAN show you!
Click here to see the photo album on our Facebook page – ‘like’ the main page there and you’ll get to see new photo albums as we add them…eventually we suppose we’ll get to the point where there isn’t a building site behind the photographer!
One of the joys of renovating in Morocco is the abundance of coloured glass. We are particularly loving the deep green and rich yellow of these windows, which we found at the junk market and have brought back to life…
Yes indeed, we’re at the point where we can start to show you the charming little details that will hopefully make the new flat a thing of beauty. We’re loving these antique tiles salvaged from a riad on Rue d’Agadir, set into mosaic in the 2nd floor kitchen…
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…
