Days 9 to 13 in Portugal 🇵🇹 - Building new homes

After a bus journey from Domus House, we arrived in Tadim and the building site.

This building represents 6 new homes ranging from from 3-bed apartments for families to single bedroom units. Most of the units are intended for refugee housing with two units intended for local Portuguese residents. The intended residents contribute to the building process though we only met one of them on the last day (Friday).

The following photos are artist impressions of the finished building

Having supervised this type of work in the past it was good that they held a health and safety briefing and we were all issued with hard hats as there was to be quite a bit of work off scaffolding. Gloves, protective masks, ear plugs and safety glasses were all available.

Initially Patty Fronberry and I were asked to focus on the window openings and prepare for plastic trims around the openings.

Cutting the reinforcement mesh to go around the opennings

A window opening before we had fitted the trims and mesh around the openings

Fitting the trims

The rest of the week was a continued process of rendering the flank wall to prepare for priming and application of a decorative surface, as well as roofing, decoration of steelwork, rainwater goods, preparing a manhole, repairing the road, etc.. Everyone was kept busy and by the time we were transported back to Domus House, ‘the batteries’ were pretty flat and we slept well!!

Here are a load of photos from the build week:

The week on site was very rewarding and I developed new skills which should serve me well at home 😀