When I first moved into this place I bought three extension leads.
That felt reasonable.
The house was half finished, half wired, and the remaining half appeared to have been designed by someone who believed electrical sockets should exist mainly for decoration.
Three extension leads seemed like planning.
Two months later I owned twelve.
I’m not proud of this.
They appear slowly. One from the ferretería in the village. Another from a Chinese bazaar because it was cheap and I thought it might come in handy. One ordered online because I suddenly decided the other ones weren’t long enough.
Then one day you open a cupboard and realise there’s a box of them. All tangled, obviously.
Different lengths.
Different colours.
Some with switches.
Some without.
None of them where you actually need them.
Apparently this is a normal phase of renovating a rural Spanish house. You start with tidy intentions and end up with “temporary” solutions that quietly become permanent.
The kitchen was the first place it happened.
Originally the kettle was supposed to sit on the left side of the top. The only plug is on the right. No problem, I thought. Extension lead. Temporary fix.
That was eight months ago.
The kettle still lives there. The extension lead now lives there too. I’ve even started wrapping the spare cable neatly so it looks intentional, which is probably how you know a temporary fix has officially settled in.
Then there’s the office.
Calling it an office is generous at best. It’s a room with a desk, a router balanced on two books, a chair that creaks slightly when I lean back, and more cables than I remember installing.
That room alone has four extension leads. Four.
At one point I tried to work out which one powered what. I lasted about ten minutes before deciding making a cup of tea was more productive.
Things became slightly more serious when I started building the media corner.
This was after the projector arrived and the idea of a small home cinema stopped being theoretical. Suddenly there were speakers involved, a little amplifier, a streaming box, and the creeping realisation that the power situation behind the sofa was starting to resemble a bowl of electronic spaghetti.
Everything worked. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was that unplugging the wrong thing could quietly shut down half the room. And the house.
I discovered this the other night when I pulled one extension lead out thinking it powered the lamp. The lamp stayed on. The projector went dark. The router died. And the fridge in the kitchen stopped humming.
Which was impressive considering the fridge lives two rooms away.
I stood there for a moment looking at the cables trying to trace what had just happened. After about thirty seconds I decided the system was beyond investigation and simply plugged everything back in again.
And, to be fair, the house carried on working.
That’s the strange thing about this cottage. It’s not finished, and probably won’t be for a while. Rooms change purpose, wires appear where they weren’t before, and sometimes the solution to a problem is simply another extension lead.
One day I’ll add more sockets and tidy everything properly.
But right now the system works.
Mostly.
As long as nobody touches the wrong plug. Me usually.