Now that my residency in Moldova has been approved, one of the things I can finally begin thinking about differently is our property in central Chișinău.
Until recently, so much of life here still felt temporary. There were documents to obtain, administrative questions to resolve and the inevitable uncertainty that comes with moving permanently from one country to another. We were already building a life in Moldova, but there was always something still waiting for official confirmation.
That has now changed.
And with that change, this property increasingly feels less like another renovation project and more like what it is supposed to become: our home and the physical centre of the next part of our life.
I am deliberately not publishing its address. It is in central Chișinău, and that is enough. What makes it interesting to me is not the street name anyway, but its rather unusual structure.
I have started describing it, somewhat jokingly but also increasingly accurately, as our villa.
Not a villa in the conventional image of one enormous luxurious house surrounded by manicured gardens. It is a villa in the broader sense: a private urban property containing several separate constructions, a courtyard, space for cars and, eventually, different buildings serving different purposes.
There are four small houses or constructions on the property. The plan is not simply to repair them. Over time, we want to transform the whole site into something coherent: a place to live, work, receive family and friends, park the cars, sit outside and generally build the sort of everyday environment we want around us.
The first little house is nearly ready
For the moment, almost all the attention is concentrated on the first and smallest house.
It is getting remarkably close to completion.
The underfloor heating is installed. The walls have been insulated. The ceiling insulation has been completed. Much of the interior work is finished, and the kitchen is probably around 95 per cent complete.
The photograph accompanying this post shows where we are now with the kitchen. For me, it is one of those photographs that marks a transition in a renovation. It no longer looks primarily like a construction site. You can actually look at it and imagine making coffee there in the morning.
The kitchen combines light cabinetry with wood finishes, integrated appliances and a wooden worktop. There is still finishing work to do, but it already gives a good indication of what we are trying to achieve throughout the property: modern and practical, without making everything unnecessarily elaborate.
Our target is to have this first house completely finished by the end of September.
That deadline matters because finishing it unlocks everything else.
Once it is ready, we can move into it. And once we are actually living there, the renovation can move systematically to the remaining buildings instead of trying to solve everything simultaneously.
Four buildings, with different purposes
After we move into the first house, attention can shift to the other three constructions.
The final configuration is still dependent on planning and approvals, so I am careful to distinguish between what exists today and what I hope we will eventually be permitted to build.
One of the buildings at the back of the property is intended to become my office, subject to the necessary approval.
This is particularly important to me.
I have worked in technology for most of my professional life, and a proper working environment is not an afterthought. If I am now going to spend part of the next phase of my career trying to build my first start-up in Moldova, having a dedicated office a few metres from the house would be almost ideal.
It would create a useful separation between home and work without requiring a commute. I can walk across the courtyard and be at work, while still having a physical boundary between the two.
Another, and ultimately the last, house is more ambitious. Subject again to approval from Chișinău City Hall and the relevant authorities, I hope that it can eventually become a two-storey house.
That is further into the future. I do not want to describe something that has not yet been approved as though it were already decided. For now it is the intended direction.
What I like about the overall plan is that it lets the property evolve organically. We do not need to demolish everything, clear the land and attempt one enormous construction project. We can finish one part, occupy it, improve the common areas and then proceed building by building.
Before the next house: the courtyard
Interestingly, however, the next major job after completing the first house will probably not be another house.
It will be the patio and courtyard.
At present, the outside space still carries decades of accumulated infrastructure and improvised solutions. There are old pipes, cables and other remnants that need to be removed, relocated or properly integrated.
The intention is to clear all of this and create a flat brick-paved surface extending properly across the courtyard.
This sounds less exciting than building a house, but I suspect it will make one of the largest practical differences to the property.
A courtyard is effectively the connective tissue between all four buildings. If the surface is poor, cluttered or uneven, the whole property continues to feel unfinished regardless of how good the interiors become. Once the courtyard is clean, level and properly surfaced, all the separate constructions begin to feel like parts of one place.
It will also make the rear parking area genuinely useful.
Then, a proper entrance
That leads naturally to another project: replacing the front gate.
There is enough space towards the back of the property to park cars. Once the courtyard has a proper surface, it makes very little sense to leave the entrance as it is.
The plan is therefore to install a proper automatic gate.
It is a relatively simple improvement, but it changes how the property functions. Arriving home should eventually mean opening the gate automatically, driving through a properly surfaced courtyard and parking behind the houses rather than treating the outdoor space as a permanent construction zone.
There is a sequence emerging:
First house
↓
Move in
↓
Clear old courtyard infrastructure
↓
Create flat paved courtyard
↓
Replace entrance gate
↓
Renovate remaining buildings
↓
Dedicated office
↓
Future two-storey house
(subject to approval)
There will obviously be overlap and surprises along the way. Renovations rarely obey diagrams. But this is roughly the direction.
Undoing decades of “quick and dirty” infrastructure
There is one aspect of the property that irritates me considerably: some of the old utility infrastructure.
Power cables, gas pipes and other services appear in places to have been installed according to a philosophy I can only describe as quick and dirty.
As an engineer, this bothers me perhaps more than it would bother somebody else.
A technical system should not merely work today. It should be safe, maintainable, understandable and, when installed around somebody's home, reasonably integrated into the physical environment.
Some of what we inherited feels like the opposite approach: find the shortest practical route, put the pipe or cable there, make the immediate problem disappear and leave the next person to deal with the consequences.
I tend to associate much of this with the Soviet-era infrastructure and the layers of modifications that followed it. But I also have to be fair about what the property itself can actually prove. I can see old installations and poor implementation choices; I cannot reconstruct the reasoning, constraints or exact date behind every pipe and cable.
What I can say is that we do not intend to preserve bad solutions simply because they have been there for decades.
Where practical, the renovation is an opportunity to rethink these things properly: remove obsolete installations, rationalise routes, hide what does not need to be exposed and make future maintenance less of an archaeological exercise.
And then there is the Internet
One thing genuinely surprised me.
For all my complaints about some of the old physical infrastructure, telecommunications in Chișinău can be extraordinarily modern.
When investigating connectivity for the property, I discovered that multi-gigabit fibre is available in Chișinău. That changes one of the assumptions one might easily make when moving from a major Western European city to Moldova.
For somebody working in software, infrastructure, cybersecurity and potentially building a technology company from this property, connectivity matters enormously. A dedicated office becomes much more interesting when the network connection is not a compromise.
Current residential offers in Chișinău include fibre services measured not merely in hundreds of megabits but in multiple gigabits, with some providers advertising up to 10 Gbps at about 550MDL/month (€27.5/month) where coverage and technical conditions permit.
There is a wonderful contrast in that.
I can stand in the courtyard looking at an old pipe whose routing makes me wonder what anyone was thinking, while at the same property I can potentially have an Internet connection faster than almost anything I had considered necessary for a private home only a few years ago.
Old physical infrastructure and very modern digital infrastructure are literally meeting in the same place.
More than a renovation
I think this is why I have become increasingly interested in documenting the project.
If this were simply about replacing a kitchen, insulating a ceiling and laying some bricks, there would not be much of a story.
But it is connected to everything else happening in our lives.
We moved to Moldova and began the process of establishing ourselves here. I have now received my residency. We are rebuilding this property. I am exploring the possibility of creating my first start-up here. And, if the plans work, one of these little buildings will eventually become the office from which at least part of that company is built.
There is something appealing about the progression.
First, finish one small house.
Move in.
Make the courtyard usable.
Fix the entrance.
Renovate the remaining buildings.
Create an office.
And, subject to the necessary approvals, eventually replace or extend the final building into the two-storey house we have in mind.
None of this will happen overnight.
There will be bureaucracy, construction problems, unexpected costs and almost certainly discoveries hidden behind walls that nobody particularly wanted to discover. There will also be decisions that we change after seeing how the property works once we actually live there.
That is fine.
I am increasingly learning that this entire move to Moldova does not need to be completed immediately. It needs to move in the right direction.
Watching it become home
For now, though, the milestone is much simpler.
Finish the first house.
The kitchen photograph makes that milestone suddenly feel very close. There are cabinets. There are appliances. The heating is installed. The insulation is done. Rooms that not long ago were part of a renovation project are beginning to look like rooms in which somebody can actually live.
If everything continues reasonably close to plan, by the end of September we should be able to move in.
Then the view changes.
Instead of travelling to a property that we are renovating, we will wake up inside it. We will see the remaining buildings and courtyard every morning. Decisions about the next stage will no longer be abstract drawings or discussions with builders. They will be decisions about the place immediately outside our door.
I suspect that is when I will really begin thinking of it as our little villa in Chișinău.
Not because it is grand.
Because it is becoming ours.
.jpeg)
Where relevant, factual and technical references were checked against the sources cited for the article. AI assistance does not replace professional legal, regulatory, financial or technical advice, and the final selection, interpretation, opinions and conclusions presented here remain my own.
Comments
Post a Comment