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From The Sunday Times

October 14, 2007

Amor at first sight

A British couple cemented their union with an ambitious renovation project in Spain

Lucy Denyer

Meeting someone and moving in with them just a few months later is radical enough. But when it also entails leaving your family and friends behind, and setting up home in southern Spain, in a row of three dilapidated cottages that you intend to renovate, it may seem downright foolhardy.

Not so, say Nick Cooper, 57, and Angie McKenzie, 54, who did just that. Sixteen months on, they have finished renovating the first of the three properties in Andalusia – now on sale for £67,928 – and have got stuck into the second.

When the couple met in June last year, they had both long dreamt of leaving Britain and moving abroad to restore a home in the sun. Cooper, who was lecturing in graphic design at Weston College, in Somerset, favoured Cyprus; Angie, a sculptor by trade, who was working as a live-in carer in Bristol, preferred the sound of Spain. Once they realised how much they had in common, the pair embarked not just on a romance, but on a joint building project.

So, last September, they set off for southern Spain, on a reconnaissance trip in search of potential projects. They came across the three cottages in Alcaudete, a small town halfway between Granada and Cordoba. Unable to choose which one to buy, they decided to go for the lot. Last October, they paid a total of £56,934 for Nos 21, 31 and 23 Calle Molinillos, which had four, three and two bedrooms respectively. In January, they set off from Bristol in a Volkswagen caravanette packed with tools, technology and cooking equipment, bound for a new life together.

The couple had only a few words of Spanish between them, but plenty of enthusiasm. The plan was to renovate the properties one by one, sell off two and pursue an idyllic artistic life in the third, arranging occasional exhibitions of Cooper’s drawings and McKenzie’s sculptures.

First, though, came the hard bit: “They were all in quite a bad state of repair,” McKenzie says. “We decided we would live in the best of the three [No 31] and start work on the worst one [No 23].”

The immediate challenge was to clean the place from top to bottom. “The smell was appalling,” McKenzie recalls. “It was almost like cleaning out elephants in a zoo, with brushes and buckets and water cascading down the stairs, just to make it bearable to work in.”

There was also a mountain of rubble to be cleared from inside the building, which the couple did themselves, lugging heavy wheelbarrows for days on end. “By the time we’d taken out all the rubble, there was hardly anything left,” McKenzie says.

The next problem was the state of the roof. The traditional reeds binding the main beams together had rotted, so they were too weak to support a new roof. The couple removed all the tiles, with McKenzie washing each one as it came off. They then employed Fernando, a local carpenter, and Miguel, a former wrestler and builder, to help them rebuild the roof, using concrete as support.

Because of a previous fire in the house, the beams supporting the room upstairs in which they planned to build a bathroom were weak. This meant that they had to take out the wood and install a strong, level concrete floor. As they worked their way through the house, the couple found that the wood on most of the lintels and doors had to be replaced. They also needed to replumb and rewire.

To save money, Cooper and McKenzie decided to carve out all the channels in the plaster required for the electric cabling themselves, even though this meant hacking through tough, flint-like rock. To add to their problems, about halfway through the project, McKenzie slipped on plaster dust and broke two ribs, which meant Cooper had to become a nurse as well as a builder.

The couple hadn’t banked on the winter being quite so cold, either. There was snow on the ground, and the cottage they were living in had no hot water, an outside toilet that didn’t flush, and just one halogen heater and two rings to cook on. After a hard day’s work on site, the couple would either wash in a bowl of water or shower outside – in January – before cooking what McKenzie refers to as a “one-pot wonder” on the gas ring. They would retire to bed wrapped in sheepskin coats, scarves, hats and boots. “We were living like a couple of hippies in a squat – taking on something even our kids wouldn’t contemplate,” laughs McKenzie, who has two sons and two grandchildren.

By July, however, they had created some semblance of a home at No 23, and were able to move in. The house had new doors, a terrace outside – with a Moroccan fountain that they had bought on a trip to Salobreña, on the Costa Tropical, east of the Costa del Sol – and traditional pebble tiling on the patio, copied by McKenzie from similar work she had seen in Granada.

Altogether, the pair reckon they have spent about £21,000 on transforming the house – not much by the standards of most renovation projects, but considerably more than the £16,637 the house cost. “It has been like a bucket with a hole in it,” McKenzie says. “We’re hoping the next one won’t be so expensive – but we were doing this as if it was ours.” It would, they say, make the ideal holiday home.

They are hoping to have the second cottage, No 31, on the market by the end of the year, priced at £94,000. They have said that they want to do up a house a year – buying elsewhere once they have finished the third cottage – but they also want time to indulge their artistic sides.

Already, after a few months, they have settled in with the local community and made friends with their neighbours. They try to speak Spanish as much as possible. “We took a chance,” McKenzie concludes. “It was a crazy thing to do, but it seems to have worked out.” And, she adds, “When all else fails, there’s always the gin.”

No 23 Calle Molinillos is for sale for £67,928, through Casa Andaluza; 00 34 953 587040, http://casa-andaluza.net or http://web.mac.com/nick.cooper

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