We're Ricky & Victoria 👋 We're slowly bringing an abandoned farm back to life & transforming it into a beautiful homestead for us & our two rescue dogs Teddy & Poppy.
We’re not experts in anything that we do here, however we don’t let that stop us from giving it a go. We live our life by trying. We live our life by doing. We live our LIFE BY LIVING.
SUBSCRIBE & follow our journey as we document our life here in Central Portugal & the many DIY projects that we'll be tackling including renovating a tiny stone house, setting up systems to grow some of our own food & finally restoring the 100+ year old farm house.
Ricky & Victoria x
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For business inquiries: contactlifebyliving@gmail.com
Your lovely dog looks like the one I had for 18 years. A mix of terriers, collie, spaniel. Your stone house will be wonderful. I'm glad you can fit in a staircase. There are toilet/sink combinations that might work for your bathroom. One kind has the sink on the top of the tank. Another creates a little wall unit with toilet and sink.
Hi Guys, just wondering if you checked the old glazing putty that you were chiseling out of the old steel window frames as it may contain Asbestos. It was used to add strength and add fire resistance. Not a well known fact but was used in steel framed windows here in Australia during the middle of the 20th century.
I was glad to see you finally use a wheelbarrow!!! You guys have expended so much effort carrying render etc, when the barrow would have saved time and your backs!! I was worried you were going to render the stone work. The house has so much character.. fabulously charming, just like you two
My brother taught me a method of attaching my hose to a long narrow pipe, turning the hose on and driving the pipe into the ground to break up my lawn clay layer to improve drainage. It was easy and quite successful.
Love your energy, humour and creativity! As an old engineer in Canada, I found another trick to add a pull cord to a roll of tubing, without having to unwind the tubing, it is to insert a spool of thread of similar diameter into the tube end, hold the free end of the thread and blow with your Hoover or Dyson. The thread unwinds off the side of the spool, until the spool with remaining thread miraculously pops out the other end. This trick works for any length of tubing as the is no friction to increase with distance or bends. If need a stronger pull thread then use the fist thread to pull in the second etc.; always unwind the tubing for main cable pull. Also love your solar system; here we have similar mounts that one can re-tilt seasonally to adjust for the sun path change and get maximum power. You could drill a few holes in yours to make adaptable. Also you may find the shady space under the panels is handy; if you raise it 8' in your Phase 2 to make a shady lead-to, it would be a good place for petanque or a shade garden. Here some use livestock to graze the grass underneath in summer, so no gravel needed.
25:00 You can get construction grade flood lights from your local equipment and machinery auction to keep working after nightfall, if you so choose, for very little money. Rest is good and quite necessary, and it also feels nice to finish up things when you're not ready to quit yet. They come in handy for the odd time you want to keep going and are also physically and mentally capable.
A Victoria e o Ricky sao pessoas extraordinárias adoro ver os vossos vidios sao fantásticos. Gostei muito de ver o Ricky a montar os paineis solares claro sempre com ajuda da Victoria que tambem sabe fazer tudo muitos parabens. Acho que sao um casal adoravel sempre bem dispostos e muito alegres. God bless you both ❤❤
Don't want to scare you, but depending on how old your windows are, in particular if they're from the early to late-mid 20th century, the putty might actually contain some asbestos. So you might want to take some precaution in particular if you're removing it and it generates a lot of dust.
