Gabrovo
When we eventually turned up in Gabrovo we stayed at a 2 star guest house in the old town which had its own private parking and an immaculate hotel quality double suite.
By this time its 2pm on Sunday so most places are shut but there is a very nice restaurant next door and we go there for lunch.
You just can’t go wrong with the food in Bulgaria, no matter where you seem to go from a truck stop diner to an upmarket restaurant the food is always consistently fantastic.
Even though Bulgaria is a heavily wooded country it is difficult to find a good timber merchant, literally because it will be hidden behind a village down a little track nestled somewhere so unless you know where they are...you’re stuffed.
Anyway I’d stumbled across a stack of heavy timber on my travels to Plovdiv and took a photograph of it for the purpose of being able to show somebody as part of a charades type mission.
Getting back to Gabrovo, we awoke and showered in time for an 8am breakfast.
The owner’s mother who speaks little or no English had been up and cooked us some fresh Banitsa, this was apart from the cheese, ham, fruit, yoghurt and coffee. shortly afterwards her son who is the owner of the guest house turned up to see us and he speaks very good English, we talked for a while and he told us that he had built the guest house himself over a period of nine years.
The quality of the finish is excellent especially in the detail which is where it matters.
I mentioned to him in conversation that I couldn’t find a timber merchant for larger timbers and he replied “stay here, I take my Son to school we go I show you”
Gabrovo is about an hour and a half from our village and on the northern face of the Balkan mountains, there are two main roads in Bulgaria that run from Sofia to the coast one in the North and one in the South, we will live just off the northern route.
Anyway we met a man in a small wood yard and I bought about 120ft of structural timber for joists and about 100ft of 3/4” floorboards both 5” and 8” wide.
I was in luck because the guy goes to Sofia about once a month and to do this he has to pass our village, we where lucky because he was due to go that week, it was just a case of meeting him at the Shell petrol station and having him follow me to our house.
All in with delivery this cost me only 200 bgn which is about £80.
We returned and Nicky the owner would not take anything for his time so we agreed that next time we are at Gabrovo we will go for a beer, as I keep saying the people are genuinely friendly.
I had spotted a DIY shop close to the woodyard, so this was our first stop and once we had purchased a few supplies and a wheelbarrow we made our way to Mikre.
Mikre our village.
We arrive back in Mikre just in time to meet our hosts in the main square within two minutes of parking up a guy comes over and greets us, his name is Plamen he is the brother of Boryana our host.
The house we are staying in is not far away and when we turn up we are then greeted by his Grandmother, Mother and Father.
We are shown the house and told “My mother has prepared food, come you should eat with us” of course we accept and spend an hour or so chatting outside in the garden before going to our house to start work at about 2pm
We are here now for four nights and for the next two days we don’t really see them
because we are up and on site for about 7am
There is quite a lot to do, we need to clear the land around the barn before we can even think about starting to empty it.
About 7pm on the first day a man turns up at our gate with a axe, we say hello he comes into the garden and starts to help us clear the nettles, after about 5 or 10 minutes he goes away and then returns with some gardening tools and once more carries on clearing our land with us. We decide then to call him “Rakeman” but after about half an hour showing us how to use the tools he goes away again and a little later he returns with a tractor and trailer to take away the garden waste, we now call him “Tractorman” he must be about 60yrs old and his name is Nicolai in fact he is the local shepherd but everyday he visits with his tractor and takes away any waste. He is such a nice guy if you met him you’d love him. We keep trying to pay him but he wont take any money from us, we separate any metals and glass for him as he weighs these in.
We think Bulgaria has a deposit system on glass bottles because when you buy beer at Kaufland there seemed to be a 10stonki charge against all the beer bottles less than half a pence.
Tuesday is our first full day back on site and I inspect the woodwork in the timber floors and as suspected it is quite rotten, so these will have to be replaced.
I knock a good size hole through kitchen floor in the corner and then I proceed to take down the kitchen ceiling. This is made of heavy timbers the the underside of which is covered in bamboo and then rendered.
I remove all the bamboo and this will later be used to start a fire, and then brush all the old render down through the hole in the corner of the kitchen into the basement for removal at a later stage.
Whilst I have been doing this Sally had been busy clearing nettles etc from around the barn and exposing the existing stone base.
Now its time to make a fire we find an old cabinet and place it on its back in the garden it is filled with some dry twigs and bamboo, one match later and we have a fire that will burn for almost four days
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| kitchen ceiling gone |
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| Old joists exposed |
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| small fire started |
The first victim for the fire was the hen house although it was large and heavy it was rotten and no match for the crowbar and sledge hammer but by the time we finished that night again it was gone 8pm.
Wednesday morning and I’m meeting the woodguy at the shell station just before 6-30 so yet again another early start.
We have coffee and decide to knock down the old toilet and “house for pigs” but we only work till about one because the temperature had risen considerably and it’s just too hot to work especially when combined with the heat of our roaring fire.
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| old outbuildings still standing |
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| hen house and toilet now gone |
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| All outbuildings now gone |
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| middle barn full of rubbish |
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| Nearly there |
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| middle barn empty |
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| left barn full of waste for the fire and dynamite |
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| left hand barn empty |
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| Site cleared just as the heavens opened |
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| Babba Penkas chickens |
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| TractorMan |
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| Sally Relieved at the end of a busy day |
So we took ourselves off for supplies of beer, juice, food and also to buy a big brush.
We come back to site for about 5pm and clear out our first barn this is now a store room again “Tractorman” turns up and takes away the metal and garden waste.
We have done that much clearing up and burning that it all just blends into a blur, but we haven’t stopped for almost three days
During this time we have met lots of our neighbours who have just turned up at the gate to say hello and welcome us to the village, they cant quite grasp that we are going home in about a weeks time.
We have taken wooden logs and kindling to the neighbours on our right hand side who are 85yrs old “Nico and Suilanka”, we where given a tour of there house by the old woman who then took out the family album to show us on the covered porch, Sally showed them pics of our family on her tablet and we where given some pickled chillies in jars as a gift.
Babba Penka, lives only a short distance away and has been back and forth with her cart for bits of wood etc for her cooker.
One day both Penka and her friend Vradka turned up and escorted us back to Vradka’s house for coffee.
The house is just fabulous, totally immaculate with gorgeous views and a lovely courtyard and summer kitchen. She is very proud of it and made a point of showing us her Zanussi washing machine and fridge freezer.
After coffee we are taken to Penka’s again it was spotless and tidy, but too our surprise she also keeps about 20 chickens plus baby chickens she has a gorgeous flower garden and a full size veg plot that is a total credit to her.
Thursday was our wedding anniversary but despite this we still worked right through till about 6pm and now all of the barns are cleared.
Hristo and Zdravka our hosts parents came to see how we are getting on, they tell us that it must have been owned rich people because it has lots of rooms and is a big house.
Thats about it for now today we are going to Sofia for a couple of days to see the estate agents and do some paperwork, we also want to find the British Embassy to get some advice on just how to dispose of a large amount of Dynamite that I found in the barn..
There is never a dull day in Bulgaria.
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