Cleaning the original 1920s pantry and touring the downstairs of this +100 year old home in Spain
We’ll be touring the downstairs area, as well as discovering and cleaning probably the only original room that remains exactly the same as when the house was built more than 100 years ago. That’s the front door of the house, and that’s Nelson haha, so when you enter the house this is the first thing you see. Here you have a switch to open the light, and through that staircase you can go upstairs to the livable part of the house.
This door on the left lead us to "El almacén". Nowadays we use it as a garage, as you already know, but you can tell that originally it used to be livable, for some details such as this beautiful beam, that has so many details. However, it’s very old and we are afraid that the wood is rotten, so that’s why we have installed this provisional support beams. We also use this room as a storage room, for example, for the wood for the chimney in the winter. Over there you can see the window, which is in quite good condition and just needs some cleaning. As you can see it’s closed to prevent theft and people coming in.
However, we would like to open it and add a "verja" (grilles) to let more light in as it’s very dark in here. You can see more original and unique features in the walls such as this mechanism that we don’t really know what it was used for. We think it might have been an old telephone or a bell. What do you think? If you have any idea of what this could be leave it in the comments, please. We would love to know. We also have a beautiful rosette on the ceiling over there, to hang a chandelier. As you can see the ceiling is full of cracks and very scary but at the same time very beautiful as you can see the actual original beams through the entire ceiling.
Some people have said that it’s impossible to salvage and that we should just demolish the whole ceiling in this part of the house and the upper floor and have a new one done. However, it would be a shame to get rid of such unique beams, and incredibly expensive to redo the ceiling from scratch. Others have told us that we could maybe just repair the beams if they are still in good condition and work from there, which we would love to do but we don’t really know if it would be safe enough.
What do you guys think? What would you do? Please leave your advice in the comments, we would love to know. Walking through "el almacén", you can see that it’s very untidy and full of stuff. From tools to old and new furniture pieces that we have been collecting, it’s a mess and we are going to tidy it very soon.
Over here you can see this giant birdcage that my uncle built years ago when he lived here. He really liked birds, so he created this home for breeding. Now it’s not in use anymore so we’ll probably get rid of it to make up more space. Now we are going to enter one of the most special and original parts of the home. Through this door we have the "despensa", a room that was used to store food and keep it cool all year long. It’s really nickered and has been neglected for a long time.
Here you can actually see the state of some of the beams and you can see that they are not in very good condition. You can even see some original nails in the walls that served for a specific purpose that we will explain later on. But first, we need to clean this whole space to see it in its original glory. First of all we have this huge container to store olive oil. As you all may know, Spain is a great producer of olive oil and actually some members of my family still own de olive trees.
The olive harvesting is done in late November, so people had to store the olive oil for all year long, until the next harvest. The container had a faucet in the bottom for serving it in the bottles through the year. As you can see there is a big crack under the staircase, so we need to look after it and see how dangerous it is with an expert.
Under the stairs you can see another "tinaja" (container). In this case it was used to store water. As you may know, over 100 years ago people didn’t have access to running water so they had to walk to the town fountain and fill this up with water. It has its original cuerdas de esparto and a wooden top. It is surrounded by this plaster structure to keep the water even colder. It is surrounded by this plaster structure to keep the water even colder during the summer. So let’s recall. They had olive oil, water and then they used these nails to hang the meat from the pork slaugther.
For instance: chorizos, salchichas, morcilla, butifarra… And of course, the window to air up the room. You can also see some original shelving to store utensils. Here we have found this salvapatatas, a special utensil for potatos to last longer. We have also found this 1 kilo weight.
Outside the room we have other really cool utensils that we have found inside. For instance, this beautiful tinaja that my grandparents used to store olives in adobo. We’ll probably use it for decorating the upstairs because it’s stunning. We’ll probably use it for decorating the upstairs because it’s stunning. In addition, another tinaja in this case to store wine.
This one is amazing because it’s in quite good condition. It’s surrounded by a wooden shell to protect it against heat and light, and on the inside there is a beautiful green glass. We’ll probably separate both and use them for decorating as well. Moreover, we also found this table that was probably used to prepare and display the meat and utensils. Finally, this is a snail container. It may be gross to you but in Spain there is a huge tradition of eating snails.
When it rains, some people like to go to the mountains and collect snails to eat, and they use this little bag to store them. It’s made of esparto, and it has holes to let the snails breathe and to let them expell excrements and slime. That’s all for today’s video, but keep an eye on us as the spring is coming and with the warmer temperatures, we’ll be starting with the patio makeover and the almacén cleaning.
Thank you for watching and see you next time.
2023-04-09 23:10
