Against my better judgement, we had agreed my best friend Helen's husband, Steve, would work on restoring the old part of the casa. He was an electrician by trade but had done a lot of the building work on their Spanish house, including fitting a new kitchen, installing new flooring, tiling the walls and putting in a bathroom. They had only paid for a few things to be done by Spanish tradesmen, notably the plastering.
'Oh, yes,' Helen reassured me. 'Steve will be able to sort it all out. He seems to be able to put his hand to anything.'
'I'm just worried that if anything goes wrong, it could affect our friendship,' I had said to her a few times.
'It won't ever affect our friendship. We'll leave it all to the men to sort out and we won't get involved. They can have their little issues and deal with them themselves. And anyway, Steve will do as he's told. He always does what I tell him!'
As it was a big job though, we had also arranged for a Spanish builder, Benjamin, to build the new part of the house, as it would need a steel structure and was definitely outside Steve's capabilities. Benjamin found two Romanian peones to assist him and these two men had already been at the house from the end of August, clearing the garden of the overgrowth of several years and sanding down the beams in the old part of the house.
For Steve, we agreed a start date of Monday, the 1st of of October, and at 9.15am he duly drove into La Gloria as we were having our coffee. We'd just dropped the children off at the village school. Seeing us at the cafe, he stopped his car, got out and came and sat and ordered a coffee. We discussed the work that needed doing and then the three of us went to the house. The other builders had been working since 8am. It was now 10 o’ clock and time for their break. Steve started trying to chat to them in his non-existent Spanish – he seemed to think that if they were standing around or having a snack or cigarette, then he should too. When they went back to work at 10.30 he shuffled into the house, not sure where to start, it seemed.
We discussed all the work that needed doing and Adrian said that his first task could be to install an electrical fuse box.
'I know exactly the type we need to get,' Steve said, 'but you'll have to come with me, Ade, because there's no way on earth I can explain it in Spanish.'
'Well, let's get going, then,' Adrian said, 'and let's get a move on, because time is money.'
We were paying Steve ten euros an hour from the time he left his house in Adreimal, and at this rate it would be afternoon before he actually did any work.
Adrian drove them both down to the coast and came back two hours later with the box. Steve was about to install it when Benjamin, the Spanish builder walked past and said:
'Que estas haciendo? What are you doing? You can't put that box in. They don't allow those indoor ones anymore.'
He said the box didn’t meet new regulations, because the boxes had to be the type that could go outside, where the electricity company could access them.
'Damn,' Adrian said, 'well there's no way we're going back now. You get on with something else and Becky and I will take it back this evening.' We didn’t want to pay Steve 10 euros an hour to go on another drive to the coast.
Steve looked around. He didn't know where to start. I'd never noticed it before, but he was an energy-free zone.
'I don't see what you want me to do,' he said, finally.
'Well you could start working on the floor,' I suggested. It had to be levelled out so that the flooring could be put in.
'Mmm, I dunno,' he said, ignoring my suggestion. Instead he wandered outside and started pencilling in where the electrical box would be going outside. He then got his tobacco tin out and rolled and smoked a cigarette. By the time he left at 5pm we had no idea what he'd achieved.