Our house is 90% done, at least in terms of renovation. It will take years to furnish and decorate at our slow, frugal, and minimalist pace, but we’re okay with that. When you have a stunning view and sun streaming in the windows virtually every day of the year, everything else fades into the background anyway.

I’m typing this update from my office area, which is an alcove off our bedroom and next to a sunny window.

Warren has been cooking some of my favorite meals, like white bean and chorizo soup, in the bright kitchen.

And the living room is cozy and warm, especially now that we have wood for the stove to take off the evening chill.

The construction next door has leveled off, at least from a noise perspective, and we have relative peace and quiet, especially on Sundays.

We’ve bought more second-hand furniture, including my new desk and our nightstands, as well as some throw rugs from a discount store to dampen the echo of this mostly empty house. We still haven’t bought a car, so we made several trips trotting our new purchases up and down the hills of the village to our house.

Add that to the work we did moving the giant firewood delivery armload by armload down to the basement and we’re getting a pretty good workout.

We’ve been going our separate ways a bit more in the village, which is both strange and good.

Warren spent last Sunday night with a group of guys in a bar watching El Classico, the football match between Barcelona and Real Madrid. He came home at 1 a.m., a little tipsy and smiling from ear to ear. And Friday night he met another group of friends at the cafe down the street from our house.

Slowly but surely, he’s going to get to know every single person in the village.

(Click on photos to make them bigger.)

The extrovert in him loves this, and the introvert in me likes getting the extra time to myself.

I’ve signed up for a sewing class beginning on Monday. I don’t have any sewing projects in mind, but I do think it will be a useful skill to know and an excellent way to get to know other women in the village and practice my Spanish.

I’ve been putting in a lot of hours finishing up this book, and every person we’ve met asks about our progress on it. Then they ask the followup question:

“Can I buy a copy?” Sure, just go to Amazon.

This is when we get the weird look, like why can’t we buy a book you wrote directly from you?

We’ve always been mobile, never carrying any of our own books with us (we actually didn’t even see the printed second edition of one of our books until it had been out for months). All of our sales take place online, through Amazon and Barnes & Noble and iTunes. This arrangement has kept us free and unencumbered to travel.

But life in the village is more immediate, more personal. And now we’re part of it. Our neighbors and friends don’t want to go through a middleman when we’re standing right in front of them. It makes sense.

So we’re adding our little village to the end of our book tour (details coming soon), opening up our new house for our first ever live book launch party. It’s what you do when you live somewhere, sharing your accomplishments with the friends and neighbors around you.

Only now we’re doing it in Spanish.

For more details on how the house came together and what it’s like living in a Spanish village, tune in to Wednesday’s podcast episode, available here on the website or through iTunes or Stitcher.