Renovating a Serbian Rural House 1

Based on my 6 Lessons of Rural Serbian Architecture I'd like to share my own renovation of the old family house in a small village in the South of Serbia.
It's a documentary of 3 years work (we only worked during the summer month and only when we had enough budget, so we had to be patient!)
The building team was composed by mainly 3 persons: my father-in-law (he is an engineer and master-builder and was the construction-manager of the entire works), my husband (he was in charge of deliveries and supplies of material and cost control) and I (I was in charge of the project and the plans).
Then we got help from friends and relatives....

 We started with the rough works and decided that the terrain has to be prepared also to be accessed with bulldozers and trucks for levelling and excavation works. So we flattened the site and built a boundary wall around the ground. The site can only be reached by unpaved road. The pictures give an impression of the substantail impact our works had on the surrounding!
To prevent later transports we already brought sand, plaster and cement to the site.

After a temporary gate and boundary walls we built a Garage so we had a place to keep all the material, the tools and so we had a room where we also could sleep if necessary.

Above: stages of the Garage works that took place 3 years ago. When we wanted to order a garage door, the carpenter showed us one he already had made for another customer but for some reason the customer didn't wanted it anymore. We took a few measures and saw that it would fit well for us...and got it for a good price!

Here how the Garage looks today. The cool Fića (the nickname for the "Zastava 750") is the plumber's car!

To made a better insulated house, we decided to add an external brick layer to the walls. For that we had to broaden also the soccle of the house. A the house has no cellar, the soccle is just a base to compensate the inclination of the terrain.

With the same concept as the boundary and support walls we managed to do also the soccle wall of the house: selected stones (we choose the grey/green ones) from the nearby river were mixed into the concrete wall.
Those works took place 2 years ago.