Hi there,
Today I want to tell you a little more about the house, about Diego’s accidents since we arrived in Porto and why we decided to put the house up for sale.
In previous posts I told you about the odyssey that was to do renovations in the house and the trauma we have gone through after realizing that we had been scammed in the sale of the house.
In addition to this, Diego seemed to have fallen under a curse since he arrived in Porto.
A few days after buying the house, we went for a walk in Parque Oriental and Diego fell in the dumbest way imaginable. Even though it was a stupid fall as can happen to all of us, he scraped all his arms and legs. In addition, he did a lot of damage to his big toe and was unable to walk properly for a couple of weeks. His finger was like a sausage.
He did an RX, and it was not broken. Even so, the finger got weird, and he couldn’t flex it properly again.
When we were at the peak of anxiety due to the problem of the renovations and with all the illegalities in the house that we were discovering, and weeks without being able to sleep from worry, one night I am in the bedroom and I hear banging on the stairs, when I go to see I find Diego lying on the floor in a fetal position because he had fallen down the stairs.
I cried laughing trying to lift him off the ground.
It should be noted (for his defense) that at that moment I was varnishing the stairs, so he had to go two by two on the steps and tripped in the process.
With everything that had happened to us, even though I loved the house, I had that trauma in my head that I felt that a tragedy was going to happen at any moment, I was even afraid that the roof would collapse on me. Also, we had a feeling that the house already had a bad vibe and maybe it was just how traumatized we were. For this reason, we were considering putting the house up for sale.
That day Diego fell down the stairs, when he managed to get up and compose himself, he said “This house is cursed, it must be put up for sale.”
From there, we placed the house in Idealista for a price that would allow us to earn a little money to later invest in something else (and logically recover all the money and time invested). What was clear to us is that after so many problems, anxiety, sleepless nights, and legal fees, we were not going to lose money with the sale of the house.
In March, one Friday night, Diego was walking barefoot and hit a box we had in the kitchen with his little finger. He stayed for a few minutes leaning against the wall, twisted in pain.
His foot swelled up and turned purple, but we thought it was nothing serious since the same thing had happened to his big toe and it hadn’t been broken.
The following Saturday we went hiking and, in the end, Diego could no longer stand the pain in his foot. When we were going to the highway to ask for the Uber, almost 10 dogs came out of a house barking and one of them bit Diego’s leg.
When I pulled up his pants, a lot of blood was coming out and everything went through my mind, even that he was going to die of rabies.
The owner of the dogs came out and we told him that Diego had been bitten and he went to bring alcohol to disinfect the wound. We waited two minutes and left.
When we were calling the UBER to go to the Hospital, the owner of the dogs came with alcohol, and I told him that it was something serious and that we had to go to the emergency room. The man took us to the medical center and then brought us home.
Even so, I was left pending to file the complaint because we are talking about a person who is with the gate of his house open with almost 10 aggressive dogs where a hiking trail passes. Fortunately, Diego had trekking pants, because if not, the dog would have ripped off a piece of his leg.
Two weeks later, as Diego was still in pain and his foot swollen, we took advantage of the fact that we had an appointment with the family doctor so that he would get an X-ray.
The next day they told him that his finger was broken, and we went to the emergency room to see if they had to put a cast on it. Nothing was placed on him, but he had to rest for almost a month.
At the beginning of May, he also had to go to the emergency room because his eye swelled up and he could barely open it and it was an allergy.
When we talked about all the accidents he had had, we remembered that in June 2021 when we were in Porto for the first time, on the last day Diego got something in his eye and he went to the emergency room as soon as we arrived in Valencia. He had a little piece of metal stuck in his eye.
In spring, which was when I wrote this post, we also remember that in winter, when it had been raining non-stop for a week, in the middle of the night the intercom began to ring by itself and did so several times until we decided to disconnect it. That night was very creepy.
Despite all the problems and Diego’s bad luck, this house was a significant upgrade from our previous houses and even more so if we consider the accommodations we found as digital nomads.This upgrade and the good things that the house had, we had forgotten due to so many problems and bad experiences.
First, I was in love with the tranquility of the house. Being at home and not hearing anything is a great privilege.
Coming from Spain where we couldn’t sleep because of the noise from the neighbors and from Latin America where you couldn’t sleep because of the traffic noise, the house in Porto was like a little paradise.
My next-door neighbor was the most adorable thing imaginable and to top it off, he spoke perfect Spanish. In fact, it was the only thing I was going to miss about the house if we finally sold it.
I thought that if I were in Spain with my garden attached to the neighbor’s, I would have gone crazy between screaming children, rowdy people, multiple parties, etc.
Apart from my next-door neighbor, the rest of the people in the area didn’t bother me either. There were specific times when it could be noisy, but it wasn’t anything too annoying. Even when there were many marginal people in the area and many people who used or lived on drugs, the area was generally quiet.
One thing that did bother me is that there were some old drunks who would pass in front of my house on their way to the bar and they were always coughing and spitting up gurgles.
There were also some very nice ladies. One offered us her ladder when we were painting, and another was super worried when she saw Diego climbing over to paint the last wall.
When we were painting the facade of the house, we were the sensation; everyone who passed by would stare, congratulate us on the choice of paint color, tell us that it was “direitinho” or “certinho”, and they wished us good health to be able to enjoy the house.
I detail what I like and do not like about my house:
I don’t like
- The street in front of my house has more traffic than I expected and therefore more noise than I expected.
- Plasterboard walls and poor qualities of the renovation in general.
- Insufficient thermal and acoustic insulation.
- Open space kitchen.
- Ugly views.
- Noise from motorcycles.
- It has stairs (We wanted the house on one level).
- We don’t have any supermarket nearby.
I like
- Our quietest house so far.
- Have a garden and outdoor area.
- It has good orientation and is bright.
- We don’t have a wall to wall with anyone.
- We do not have neighbors upstairs.
- Quiet neighborhood.
- We have a medlar tree.
- Good location with two walking routes 5 minutes away. The area is very green.
Diego told me to put as a negative aspect that we had a lot of spiders and other insects because we had a small forest behind the house. For me this is not a negative aspect because it denotes that the environment is healthy.
Of course, when we returned from spending 5 days in the Azores, the house was covered in cobwebs.
After we had finished making all the arrangements in the house, I said that I wanted to change the door handles because they rattled, and Diego told me that I was obsessed with the imperfections of the house and that in my mind the house was never going to be 100% fine.
Even though we had decided to put the house up for sale, the location seemed ideal to me. If we went to another place in the future, I wanted it to be Rio Tinto, Valbom or Gondomar.
As for the insulation, in winter we got to be at 8 degrees in the part of the living room. In the bedrooms it was warmer, but the part of the living room / kitchen, was a refrigerator.
The good thing is that, in summer, that is the area of the house that has a super pleasant temperature.
Something that also began to bother me in March was the noise of motorcycles and there are many morons who ride the noisiest motorcycles out there. When I complained about the noise, Diego told me that I needed to go to Lima for a week to remember what noise really was.
In short, this house was the best home we had had so far and more than enough to spend the summer, which was what we wanted it for.
The decision to put the house up for sale beyond the things that I couldn’t like about the house, was due to the bad vibe that we had after all the problems. It was like we wanted to start off on the right foot in a better place. Also, with all the learning we had, if we changed house, it would be for the better.
Even so, we weren’t as desperate to sell as we were with Diego’s apartment. We were just open to the option to sell.
On April 5th we put in the house the Turkish eye that we had bought in Istanbul and that had stayed in Valencia to see if our luck improved.
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