One of the bigger renovation jobs to be done was the balcony, with it’s crumbling orange brick wall (not only an eyesore but a major hazard) and patchy floor, that once was a dazzling bright blue but had now faded to show the beaten up red tiles underneath. The blue was actually swimming pool paint, the kind you use on the bottom of a pool. It’s rubber based, waterproof and the colour stands out amazingly compared to the grey cement paint you normally see. Ingenious? We liked to think so….but unfortunately the brilliant blue doesn’t last long against the Portuguese sun. We’ll put that one down as a “quick fix”. 

Halfway up the stairs to the balcony there is a sort of landing/corridor to the left of the steps that is roughly 10m long. It’s primary use for a long time had been a resting place for the old broken school surfboards, a sort of board graveyard if you like. The floor of this landing was in an even worse state than the balcony, with massive cracks in the cement and completely un-level. The problem here being that when it rains (which is a lot and heavy in the Winter) the water sits there with no place to go but seep underneath. Resulting in humidity getting stuck in the walls below, luckily (or unluckily for us) these walls aren’t attached to the guest rooms but to our living quarters and we didn’t mind putting up with it for a while.

So the old brick wall needed knocking out and a new solid cement one built.  The landing floor needed all the cracked cement pieces pulling up and both floors needed painting in a highly waterproof resin. We bought some lovely new imitation wood tiles to go down on the balcony and some classic, Lisbon cobble design tiles, for the landing. I wish we could say that our DIY talents extended to masonry and tile setting but that would be lying so we hired some professionals to get the job done!