Oh Po Po! is the exclamatary phrase we Greeks come out with when something becomes a little too much or when we’re suprised. It’s a phrase that came to mind last week when after years of waiting to begin restoring our house of dreams on Tinos, we were finally given the go ahead to start with the works.
For months now, friends have been checking in to ask, “how’s the Tinos project going?”, “have you started yet?”, “how long will it take?” My response has been consistent: “It’s not going. We don’t have permission to go ahead yet.”
In Greece, especially in Cycladic villages in which protecting original features and adhering to the character of the architecture is essential, the correct building licenses and permits have to be obtained before you can even touch a centimetre of plaster work, let alone make big tweaks (like replacing an entire roof like we have to.) There’s a lot of paperwork involved and though my Greek is fluent, I’m not down with engineering and architectural lingo, unfortunately.
For this, we had to engage an aging engineer who came recommended to us because he has friends in our village. He’s pushing 90 and I was worried that one day, he simply wouldn’t be there to answer the phone and that death would come for him before our building permission comes to us. It’s macabre, I know, but that’s life.
The Oh Po Po! moment came when last Monday, we heard back from our chosen contractor and the engineer in tandem. The small scale building permission has been granted to us. There’s a gap in our contractor’s schedule which means he can work on the house for two weeks and not the given start date of January 2027.
While I was quietly resigned to the roof to completely caving in with this winter’s rains while we wait for our contractor to finally have some time in his schedule next year to fix it, the stars had aligned. Suddenly, it was full steam ahead and “get us 30,000 euro in cash to the island so we can get started”. No joke.
How does one get their hands on 30k of cash with two days’ notice and then transport it from one side of Greece to the other in that same time frame?
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