The final steps to getting my electricity connected sounded easy: get a certificate from the builders to confirm that the wiring and circuit breakers conformed to local regulations, and set up an account with a (retail) supplier of electricity. Drop the certificate at the (wholesale) suppliers of electricity, make an appointment to have them install the meter, and watch the watts roll in.

This is Belgium, though. Hopes are dashed while you wait, 1 hour service. At first, the person I spoke to at the electricity company could not find the certificate I sent them by mail. After a search lasting about ten minutes, he found it, only to say: “It’s not correct.” Of course it isn’t, being correct would have been too easy.

“What’s wrong with it?” I ask.

“It’s three times 230 volt,” he says.

I had thought he understood that I was a clueless consumer of electricity, not an actual electrician, so I had to prompt him. “What should it be?” 230 volts sounded quite good to me, my needs are humble. A few volts to recharge some batteries for my camera and my new doorbell, perhaps a few more to power a router and a computer. “It should either be two times 230 volt or 440 volt,” he responds. He’s lost me, and he knows he’s won.

“And has the digging been done?” he wants to know. Trenches have been dug, yes. Cables have been put in them, and covered over with dirt. I’ll be buggered If I can say whether any specific works have been carried out, so I just confirm that the digging has indeed been done. I hope.

So I need to get a new certificate from the builders, yes? Yes. And then I take that to the electrical company, and they’ll install my meter, and I’ll have electricity, yes? No. I also need to give them the yellow book.

“What yellow book?” I ask. “The one left on top of the box,” he responds. Which box? There’s a box for the circuit breakers, but I haven’t seen any yellow book. “I’ll have a look,” I say. I looked. There was no yellow book.

So now it’s back to square something-or-other, getting another certificate from the builders (a different certificate which will no doubt bring difficulties of its own) and finding the mysterious yellow book (a treasure I expect to be the product of an unlikely, expensive and time-consuming chain of events).

Life was so much easier when electricity was simply something that fell out of tiny holes in the wall.

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As it turns out, being hooked up to the water mains really doesn’t mean having the water supply for the house switched on. The sub-contractor for the utility company came along this morning (in fact, three trucks and about seven or eight people came, three of whom did something!), installed a water meter in the house, tested it, and promptly sealed the pipe. The next step is that an inspection must be made of the pipes in the house, and only once these have been certified will the utility company send somebody to unseal the mains. Then, and only then, can the builders connect the water mains to the house’s own pipes. Realistically, this could take two to three weeks.

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Well, as I predicted, “hooking me up to the grid” did not in fact mean that I have electricity. An inspection has to be done of the electrical wiring in the house, and a certificate issued to prove that everything was done to specifications. The builders were supposed to organise this several weeks ago, but I haven’t heard anything about it since. Had I known he significance of this certificate, I probably would have asked for it more often. Only once I hand this certificate over to the electricity company, allowing for a delay of up to eight working days, will they throw a magical switch that will unleash the graceful blue eddies of current to wash up our electrical piping.

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Well, the latest is that the water guy will try and fit me in to be hooked up on Friday. No guarantee that “hooking up” actually means running water, but it’s a start. However, if not Friday then early next week. I might still in fact be moving into a dry house.

The electricity guys will be along this afternoon to hook me up to the grid. However, nobody can tell me if that will translate into actually having electricity in the house.

Several things need to happen to the internal wiring and the switch box, including inspection by an authority I’ve never heard of. They will then issue a certificate, which presumably needs to be handed to someone else, who in turn would need to do something before the power supply can officially be switched on. The Polish builders are handling this side of it, and I haven’t heard anything from them lately.

So in addition to moving into a dry house, I might also be moving into a dark house. A good argument for being off the grid if I’ve ever heard one.

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A wise man once said: “Every cloud has a silver lining.” I would like to meet that man, and then punch him in the face.

The house was supposed to have been ready for occupation at the beginning of June. That would have given us a month of overlap before we had to be out of the house we rented for 10 years. Needless to say, nothing was ready. Not only did we not have electricity or running water, we didn’t have floors or plaster on the walls either.

The next milestone was to be the end of June, the deadline for vacating our old house. Nothing was ready. I started moving furniture and large boxes into the unfinished living room of the new place, leaving the builders free to complete the family room, kitchen and downstairs bathroom. A bare minimum would have to do. This whole process of moving took much longer than I anticipated, running well past our June deadline. Then the sub-contractors for both the electricity and water utility companies took off on their summer holidays. The new house wasn’t ready, but at least the builders were gearing up to plaster the inside walls.

And so on to another milestone, the end of July. This time the absolute minimum was to be ready: at least part of the house had to be habitable, and the water and electricity had to be hooked up. This would be the final deadline, no extension possible this time. Of course, we’re into August already, so it’s not looking good. The electricity company can’t tell me when the electricity will be hooked up, and they can’t allow me to contact the sub-contractor they use. They pass my details on to the sub-contractor, who decides when to call me for making an appointment. Presumably, there’s no rush.

As it happens I have the phone number for the sub-contractor used by the water company. We had an appointment to hook up the water several months ago, but as there was no electricity available he couldn’t complete the job. I’ll try and pin him down to get the water going before the end of the week, although I’m sure it’s going to be a struggle. He didn’t strike me as the pro-active and accommodating type.

However, come hell or high water, I’ll be moving in at the end of the week. And high water will be just what I need to make the toilets flush.

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This past Saturday we had a meeting with the architect and our (former) builder. Not in a very friendly mood, our brick-stacking friend, but perhaps he was intimidated by the team of Polish builders on site now finishing his work at lightning speed. The long and short of it was that he doesn’t have the money to pay us back the full sum he owes us (being about €30,000). However, he is more than willing to pay the money back in instalments of €5,000 per month, over six months.

I can fully understand anyone not having €30,000 cash lying around, but if you don’t have access to that kind of cash I don’t see how you’ll be able to spare €5,000 per month. That’s a lot of money to have left after paying for rent and vittles. The first payment is due on 1 August, and I’m quite anxious to see if it materialises. I have a sneaking suspicion the builder’s enthusiasm for this scheme is merely a way of buying time.

Meanwhile, we need this money to pay the Polish builders. Their bills run at around €5,000 per week, so we’ll need to get the bank mobilised as soon as possible.

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So where are we? Somewhere up Shit Creek and arguing about who lost the paddle, basically. Our builder has, apparently, run out of funds, a sizable portion of which fleet-footed funds having been intended to finish this phase of our construction work.

So we have walls, which nearly reach the empty space where the roof should have been by now, and an impressive collection of rubble and bric-a-brac. We have a replacement builder lined up, but of course he would like to get paid as well.

The architect estimates the value of the outstanding construction work at around €30,000. Somehow, we have to find a way of transferring funds from builder 1 (who does not have them) to builder 2 (who would very much like to have them).

We have a meeting with builder 1 and the architect this coming Saturday, and we’ll see what can be sorted out. I don’t have high hopes, but presumably one of these options will be the outcome:

1. Builder 1 finds a way to repay us the full amount of the outstanding construction work.
2. Builder 1 and builder 2 agree upon payments directly between them in installments.
3. We instruct our lawyer to swoop in and try to squeeze the full amount from builder 1.
4. I bean builder 1 with the first handy bit of rubble I can lay my hands on, and hide the body in the windmill.

Of all the options, number 4 appears least likely to get us our money back, but should be the most satisfying of all by far.

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A bad storm on the night of 29 February caused some serious damage to the house. An original roof truss (due to be replaced) blew down, in the process knocking over a section of the front wall (not due to be replaced). Luckily the wall fell outwards, without damaging anything else.

This underscores an argument we had with the town planning people in Leuven when we applied for a building permit. The sensible thing to do would have been to knock down the existing walls and build from scratch. Not only would this have been less expensive, but it would have resolved the doubts everyone on our side had about the strength of the walls.

Let’s be clear about the walls: this wasn’t Hadrian’s Wall, or the Great Wall of China. These were walls built to keep “inside” from being “outside”, and possibly hold up the roof at the same time. These were functional walls, never intended to do more than they were built for. They weren’t built to keep out the damp, or the cold. They weren’t built to last a hundred years. They were simply built and added to over the last 80 years or so to encase an animal feed mill. So when someone intends turning this feed mill into a house, the walls shouldn’t have to be part of it.

To this day, I still don’t understand the rationale of the town planning people’s decision to make us retain the original structure. There’s no point. If the building was of potential historical interest or value (which it isn’t), we’re messing it up anyway, even if we don’t change the outside skeleton. If the building was even just slightly aesthetic or important to the local architectural landscape, I would understand. But it isn’t, and the local architectural landscape can only be diplomatically described as eclectic. Even if the building tied in to the windmill in any way, I would understand keeping a matching set, but the building was designed in a very functional way to mill animal feed. It has nothing to do with the windmill, and only served as a carbuncle on the landscape.

So today, due to the inscrutable wisdom of the town planning department in Leuven, we have walls that might or might not fall over in a storm. At least now we have one section of wall less to worry about, as we rebuild it using proper bricks and cement.

A large wooden hopper/sorter we hoped to have in our living room was also badly damaged, as the wind blew it hard enough to break both front legs. The original can be seen here on Flickr, and this is what it looked like after the storm:

More photographs, as always, on Flickr.

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It’s taken some time, but actual construction has started. These are some photographs of the state of the site before the actual building work started.

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Construction continues, in its way. Most of the demolition work has been completed, and a crane has deposited the lovely old Ruston & Hornsby diesel engine, a wooden feed sorter, several millstones and some assorted bits of industrial debris in the garden. This is where my pond / Ilze’s swimming pool will be, so until there is a clear winner we’ll pretend it’s a modern art exhibition.

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