Vila Nicolina in Águas da Prata: The Roof

When we first arrived in Águas da Prata we came across this vila for rent. We looked it over and immediately started to discuss renting with the then owner. However, the owner decided to stay in the house rather than move to another city as she was quite ill and fragile.

Subsequently she died and the new owners began a marvelous reconstruction/renovation of the Vila Nicolina. A few years later we rented a house across the corner from Vila Nicolina.

This blog is the story of that reconstruction, step by step, in photos.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

The Roof - The new tiles arrive

The owners decided to put new tile on the roof instead of cleaning the old. This was a very large job that took more than a month to complete.

The first step was the arrival of a large truck with 4000 tiles for the roof.

The unloading of the tiles is a time consuming manual job. They began stacking the tiles on the sidewalk in front of the house.

The driver would pass 4 tiles at a time to the two stackers.

It seemed to be an endless task!

The stacke on the ground got higher and higher as well as longer.

They started to run out of room.

Eventually the pile was so big they had to start stacking tiles on the north side.

Now both stacks were big.

The truck went by our veranda with about 500 tiles. That means they only left 3500 at the Vila.

Later they ran out of tiles and had to bring back about 500 to finish the job.

Photos by Urso Branco