Canada Calling, Part 5

You might therefore want to look at the area north of Gorna, around Polski Trambesh, or a bit further north, near the Danube. Well, sometimes things do not happen on time in Bulgaria, so don't get too excited about the airport...

From VT to the airport in Sofia is about three hours in a car. Maybe four hours. Driving to the airport, collecting someone and then driving back to VT or Daveri.... Yes, it can be done, but it's tiring and a long day.

I paid our "danak" for our apartment this morning. This is a property-based tax and my wife and I had to pay 47 euros each. I also had to pay another 82 euros for our car. These taxes are annual, not like in the the UK where they are monthly. On the whole, properties in cities have higher danak and country houses are lower. If you have two properties, as we do, then of course you have to pay danak for both of them.

Yes, it’s crazy how much lower the property taxes are there. Here, property taxes are many thousands of dollars a year.

As well as the danak, you will also need to buy an annual vignette for your car. If I remember correctly, it is about 40 euros.

It’s all so affordable! All of the regular bills are just so much less than here. I know electricity bills can get high in Bulgaria, if you aren’t careful or don’t have the right setup, but it’s expensive here too.

In the UK, parking is often expensive. If you have to go to the hospital, you will probably pay 8 pounds and hour for parking!

That's horrible. Same in Canada... But the pound is so much stronger than the Canadian Dollar.

The thing that really uses lots of electricity is heating. Electric lights hardly use any power and cooking does not use much power because you only use the cooker for a fairly short time.

We will likely be doing wood heating. Going to develop a thermal mass heating system to maximize wood heating efficiency.

Most people who live in the countryside use wood for heating. Getting hold of enough wood can be a bit challenging at first. Yes, you can buy logs, but that is not so cheap and often they will sell you wood that is not properly seasoned (dried out).

If you have some woodland on your property, then of course you will probably have some free firewood. Once you have your lichna carta, you can ask the kermit if the municipality sells firewood. If you buy wood from the municipality, then usually it is about half the normal price.

In my research, I found out you need to get your wood order in during Spring and you'll get it in time and more likely dried (or close enough that you can finish it off next to your fire). Yes, I heard the Kermit is the one to arrange your wood through

Of course, there are laws about trespass and theft in Bulgaria, so you can't just go onto someone else's land and help yourself to firewood. However, gradually you will get to know your neighbours and they might tell you what to do and who to speak to.

The local council were building a new bridge and so they cut down some trees. My friend got up early one morning, drove his van down to the river and helped himself to lots of free firewood.

Nice! That’s a big score!

The old wooden fence has been chopped up and it will all go into the woodshed.

The metal fence is really nice. Is the wood reusable for a different project?

Yes, the metal fence looks very nice. The price was not so nice... The old wooden fence was so rotten that it could not be used for anything except firewood!

Oh, too bad. There's so much beautiful old wood in Bulgaria... Not so much if it's rotten. I want to find reclamation yards that have recycled wood (not rotten), hewn stones, slate, bricks, doors, windows, shutters, tiles, etc. Do you know of any in VT or elsewhere?

The fence was so bad! Bits were always breaking and falling off. And YES, there is a big yard for reclaimed building materials in Elena. They have tiles, lots of stone, wooden beams and so on. You really must go and check it out. The bad news? Often you go there and there is no one to help you. There's no one there!

Amazing! I figured this would be a thing there, with so many properties getting torn down for new builds, or just even from renovations. I'm guessing the prices are reasonable compared to buying new materials? (When you can find someone to help you, that is. Haha!)

Silly foreigners (like me) usually go to PRAKTIKER, but my Bulgarian neighbour goes to a builder's merchant in the industrial zone, where he can buy the same things 10% or 20% cheaper. Anyway, have look at the PRAKTIKER website for VT. It is convenient and PRAKTIKER does sell just about anything you could want for repairing your house.

Yeah, I wouldn't do roofs, electrical, plastering, plumbing. Most other things I can pull off... Maybe using YouTube to assist. I'm an experienced landscaper, so that will come in handy. Good to hire some basic labour for some of that work.

When we found out that the bottoms of our wooden columns were getting really bad, we realized that we had to have the old ones completely removed and new columns installed. 

This was going to involve some serious scaffolding to support the balcony above and then the roof, so we could not take the chance of anything going wrong. My friend Mark Thomas and his team did a really good job.