STUNNING CHANGES IN OUR BARN CONVERSION | Life Off-Grid in Central Portugal

we are the independent projects b and theo and have been living and traveling the world in vance for the last six years we are currently renovating an abandoned stone

barn

in

portugal

into a beautiful tiny house for us and our cats gingee bear and fernando follow our journey from scratch as we document the entire process of creating an off-

grid

home good morning guys welcome back to a new video of sunny

central

portugal

today is a good day because clearing is complete which means one thing it means we're back inside the

barn

working on our dream home and we're bringing them with us and right now I'm in the barn getting ready to be able to oil the crawl space but there are a couple of steps we need to go through before we can commit to oiling the mezzanine and the first is to get everything out of the mezzanine, which is always a lot of fun work.

It's very hot today so I think in the summer 40 degrees outside I'll be lying here in a down jacket the first thing we need to do is move everything from under the mezzanine to that side of the room and then we can take everything that's on top of the mezzanine and it gets to break come on oh it's super sweaty work but we open that window in the roof and open the door it's creating a lovely breeze so that's a really positive for when we live here in the summer the structure is now completely bare again it is strange to see that it is almost ready to be oiled all we are going to do now is apply a light sand over the top of the joists and the front joist which looks because about once it's had a little bit of wear and tear we've been walking here with our shoes on this tread so a light sand then b can crack and oil well we need to break it out as well totally forgot right?

I'm going to overlay some shots of all the dust here because it's all sitting on top of the roof but yeah we're just in our house and we're in our house I love spending time in it it's nice to be in the back and the reason why the one we're doing this oiling now is so we can plaster the next week or so now thea has dusted the beautiful crawl space it's my turn to do a quick sander and i thought my sanding days are over but to be honest this nothing like sanding the ceiling that was horrible and just wanted to address something look at me standing under the crawl space many of you have seen the perspective on one of the photos we have done and it looks like the crawl space is very low but it lifts the arms we've got a lot of room so I can definitely fit in there with no problem so if you're new to the channel this is the stuff we've been greasing with this is danish oil it's amazing three coats of this gives it such a finish beautiful brings out the grain amazingly which in the chestnut is very very beautiful it will really make the crawl space even more of a feature than it already is this just had a cool light sand and on top you can see the ceiling and it looks so much warmer and cozy so as you know we call ourselves independent projects and that's the reason why we love a good project and right now Oiled Bee is working on the crawl space so I thought it was a good time to come down and start a new project, but it is very important because the temperature today is very warm, even though it is cloudy, it is still about 25 degrees and in the next week or so it is going to be in the 30s and then in the middle of summer we can reach 40 degrees here , so it's very important to keep cool during the day and this right here is our next project this will be our plunge pool there's enough space for Two of us sit here and you can see how it's built it's literally four huge stones of granite attached with these metal brackets here at each corner, I guess to keep the water pressure from pulling them apart and it has a concrete floor inside. and it looks like they just rendered the edges so there definitely needs to be some maintenance on this because I filled it in and it's not airtight and one of the things we learned spending last summer here in

central

Portugal on our land is that a body of water to sit on in the evenings and throughout the day with shade over your head and a nice cold drink just makes

life

so much easier so many of you probably already know that our home on this property is over 100 years old and The next thing I'm going to show you next to the well really demonstrates how they set things up back in the day so if I walk over to the actual well terrace area I actually find out quite a few things and here you can see the buckets that would have been used in the well to get the water out unfortunately they have rusted and have holes in them so they won't be usable but look at this gorgeous thing how cool this is and it actually spins and runs so this is a great set of gears that it goes from here to our well so you can see our well down there and it's a big well filled with all our water that we use here on earth and this thing would have had the buckets on the end, they would have gone into the water, dumped the water out this basin the water would have run up here and into this tub which is going to be our pool so the reason our well is so elaborate and not just a hole in the ground is because it was the infrastructure for a donkey walk around the entire perimeter of the well, pull the gear that would then turn the buckets and fill the pond.

I still have some broadcasting to do around the pit, but you can see the new shoots coming out of the cactus plant. They look great. In fact, they discovered a wall that I didn't even know was here. I wasn't quite sure what was in here. under the brush but it's really cool there's a lot to find on our land that's hidden under brambles and other different things the wall goes all the way around here and I dug out this stone which is really cool so there's a ramp going up next to here to the pool and I'm going to put up a nice set of stone steps leading up to this terrace area so when I was streaming I found some vines that are growing right next to the pool which is awesome so if I can stick a stick in the ground and try to bring them back to

life

a bit they're not dead but they're not exactly thriving so if I can get them to grow around the pool that would be awesome but i just saw this and basically what they've done is add a load of concrete on top of this area I'm guessing because it's all natural stone this stone was much smaller and they tried to level it out and it just looks really bad so what I'm going to do is remove all this and it doesn't bother me much to keep it level.

I want it to be rustic. I want it to look cool so it doesn't really matter. The water never will. i get to this level anyway because when we sit on it it will overflow so im going to splinter just cleaning the floor and the concrete floor starts to slope and i was thinking i was going to have to put my own drain in but this could be a blessing because the floor slopes down and there's a hole here, but on the other side it's just dirt, so I'm going to dig on the other side and see if I can find the drain and then maybe we can put our own. touch it so we can close it and open it whenever we want to make it look good, i think we did a good job, we cleaned as much moss as we could from the walls, so the cement will adapt to the size of the wall and it looks much cleaner , I'm so happy I found the drain, it's been a long day so just what we need, the truck won't start brilliantly, like it's dead and my friend came by yesterday because it wouldn't start and he managed to get it on it runs but now it feels completely dead i did the exact same thing he did and it goes out the lights we have but for the last month it has worked perfectly but all it needs is a new starter so it can't be hard to change if there is any mechanic on here let me know in the comments how hard it is to change my own starter because i have never done anything mechanical before do you want this to work with the tractor again? working im towing b all the way to the top of the earth big tractor always love it its another beautiful day here in portugal yes a little windy actually i just grabbed a bottle of water to take to the good i got something to drink because it's pretty hot and here I have the pipe that I need to pick this up from the city and I also have a jet pump that it will connect to and I hope that we can get running water straight from the well today so I actually managed to fix the truck last night which is awesome its a temporary fix until i can get my hands on a new starter and swap it out.

B is not here today. He headed for the train. to lisbon very early to go shopping and have a day off and i thought you know what i am going to surprise her i am going to try to install this pump and prepare the shower so when i get back everything is fixed so for the last 45 minutes i have been working Too hard to figure out how the jet pump works, prime it, set up all the plumbing, install it in the shower I bought for the spa area, I call it the spa area, off-

grid

spa right? next to the well it's going to be a lovely little area to hang out in the summer and keep cool but let me show you what I've been doing it's a workplace right now a bit of a mess but here you can look at this it's the jet pump right here on top of the jet pump there's a pressure switch so basically what it allows me to do is run these different pipes in different areas so I have one that goes to the pool and if I turn this on the water comes out and everything is on demand so if I turn that off the pump will eventually turn off and then I have another one where the pipe runs up here and look at this I brought this pool shower so again if I turn the handle here the right way i get a really nice cold shower coming straight from the well beautifully cool water this is just amazing so if i turn that off and down here i even have a little foot pump so if i turn that look at the pressure you can wash your feet before you go in the pool if you don't want a full shower and i'm running the whole pump system on solar so i have a 100 amp solar generator battery lithium battery an hour with a thousand watt capacity inverter to get the pump running perfectly which is good news but eventually i will make this 100 safe and also waterproof because you can't leave the pump or solar generator out in the rain i need to build like a little pump house for all that to sit in so it's nice and out of the way so i started digging a trench down here and this is so we can empty the water tank what i'm going to do is in the Inside here where the old lead pipe is, I'm going to put another pipe in there and glue it down so it's nice and secure, and then I can put a faucet on the other side so we can drain this tank with very easily and then I've roughed out all the pipes roughly where they're going to go so the next step is to dig all this up.

It's very windy today and the plastic in the shower is going crazy. I need to rip it off, but I got so excited I just took it. i took the box out and left it on but i brought the only shower that you can't just bolt to a stone or a concrete slab you actually have to pour concrete up to here and then this sits on top so there's a little more work I'm involved with this shower but it's not too hard so now I'm back from Lisbon as you can see because I'm back on earth and I'm blown away by what Theo has done it looks fantastic and it's perfect because today . it's pretty hot i think it's around 26 degrees celsius and it's a taste of things to come this space here is going to be absolutely brilliant it's going to make the summer so much more bearable and here's a lunch i made for you good to have you back of course not just for the food yea it's good to see your face just finished shower lads it's all set it's cemented into the floor so that has to go off now for a couple of days and then we can use it on friday when it's 28 degrees probably going to spend all day in the shower and b finished oiling before i went to lisbon one of the things i wanted to check off the list was to finish oiling on the mezzanine looks amazing i am going to eat this we're going to go in the house and we'll show you how fantastic it looks good here is three coats of Danish oil on the crawl space and it looks absolutely fantastic if I do say so myself and it matches the ceiling so well look at that amazing guys it looks very well and we've also had a couple of different friends over the last few days say how beautiful it looks which is always so nice to hear and it's actually another monumental experience to do this because it means the next stage can happen now that the wood is protected, actually we are going to go to the city and get some supplies to prepare, so that's it for another video here in the sunny center of portugal i hope you enjoyed it and i hope yoube as excited as we are about the off-grid spa situation for the summer.

It's really going to change our lives. Getting in and out of the pool. Taking cold showers is something we dream of last. year when it gets to them crazy temps like it does here but now we're kind of excited because we feel like we're ready and getting ready for that crazy heat and last year we just got thrown but yeah things are moving fast we're ready to cast so be sure to tune in to the next video to see how we are doing with the cast take it easy and see you in the next video