April 16, 2026:
Building a house in Portugal is not for the faint of heart! Five years from the land search to ‘go-live’ (move-in date). Throughout this process, I have acted as our project manager and interior designer, ensuring that a space has good flow and functionality, balancing movement, layout, and usability with the overall design… alongside our existing furniture, art, and color choices.
I retired from corporate life three years ago thinking we had about three months to go. Little did I know it would be three YEARS!
PMI’s PMBOK defines the project manager role to include managing Scope, Schedule, Cost, Quality, Risk, Team (the builder and subcontractors), Communication, and Procurement/Vendor Management. This ‘job’ required ALL of that along with a massive amount of patience and tenacity, and a constant eye to the final vision. Besides myself, my only Stakeholder is Rog, my husband of nearly 29 years. His experience and expertise is in construction. Mine is project management, design, and team dynamics. Together, we thought we could conquer the quirks and frustrations of building a house in Portugal in a shorter time than most. We were wrong. We had the skills, but the timeline is basically uncontrollable. You can track it, but you can’t really control it.
1. The first six months of this five-year odyssey was searching for land. We had searched already up north, north of Braga, in 2020, after the first COVID wave subsided. We were days away from handing over promise money to the seller when I got a feeling that this just wasn’t the dream location. Another COVID wave was coming and a location near the Spanish border just did not feel right. We backed out and decided to consider the Silver Coast area, near Caldas da Rainha. Four months later, we moved south. The land search began again, and Rog would go hunting for land while I stayed home and worked. He found a lot in September, we made a low offer, and it was accepted. Little did we know that this was the easy step.
2. Using the layout of the lot, I created the original floor plan to scale, considering aging-in-place, wheelchair accessibility, our needs for a 2 bedroom, 1 office, 2 ½ bath space, lot restrictions and size, our desired view (sunset over the ocean), spa bath, and lots of storage (no attic, no basement, no storage unit). The process of drawing on graph paper (along with having lived in about 10 houses together) gave us a basis for long discussions on what we really wanted and why. My plan was given to our first architect to create the official plans to be turned into the city for approval. After a few months of heated discussions with that architect, we determined that we were not on the same page about his role and our desires. We had to fire him and hunt for another. We found someone local who could work with us, and he modified the design to further accommodate Portuguese regulations on window size and location, easements, geography of the land, etc., and then submitted that to the city. Then we waited… and waited. After eight months, we were ready to give up when the architect told us that our plan had finally been accepted.
3. Roger and I then collaborated on choosing a builder who would also come with an engineer. We did tons of research on type of construction (concrete/traditional, wood, light steel frame). We had a spreadsheet of maybe 40 builders. We ranked them, visited three, and chose our favorite. Days before sending the downpayment, we determined that the first one was a fraud. Back to the spreadsheet. After one meeting at the jobsite, we determined that the second one was a bad fit for our style/process of building. The third was incapable of finishing (after only the foundation) and then working with a lawyer to get some of our money refunded. At that point, we’d wasted a year. After a few more months of searching again, we finally chose a builder who would pick up mid-project to get us to the finish line. An angel.
4. With our final builder, we agreed to NOT have a turnkey service… that we would manage the work of many of the sub-contractors to help us manage cost and adapt to changing conditions and new information. (A very agile way to build a house!) This decision then made it our task to find the subs, and my task to manage the budget, spending, and all payments to them, trying to keep us within budget and still achieve our requirements alongside our dream elements.
5. I created and managed a project plan of all of the required tasks (since no one else was doing it). We found out that there were so many tasks we did not know that we did not know (necessary scope creep). I had to readjust the timeline endlessly (and cost), and we had to manage our patience and three rental-home contracts for us in the meantime.
6. Our engineer of record also lied to us about having submitted our drawings to the city. We found out very late, and finally pressured him into submitting the critical drawings. They were never, however, reviewed with us, and we are sure that some were never done. In spite of that, our final builder (along with his own engineer) and our subs have built a house, and we will have to submit the as-built drawings to the city for final approval at the end. Another consequence of that is that I took on the role to create simple ‘maps’ of the many systems inside the house. The maps gave us a basis for making our own decisions. Then we could use them to communicate with the subs (a picture is worth a thousand words when you are working in a foreign language). We would also have a record of the location of systems which would be hidden inside the walls for future maintenance issues. My chosen tool is Canva using a base image of the house floor plan. I then created drawings for the following systems in the house:
- Ceiling fans
- Lighting
- Sewer lines inside and outside
- Septic tank and septic field
- Site/yard drainage trenches
- Gutters
- Garden, circle drive, driveway
- Front and back deck
- Retaining wall on north side
- Utility trench from the street to the house (with boxes)
- Mini-split / AC plan with exterior compressors
- Smoke detectors
- Gas lines
- Ethernet & wifi
- Flooring
- Paint colors by room
- Tile design for the utility wall at the street
- Outlets (in excel)
- Electrical switch plates (in excel)
7. We had several subcontractors with whom we had quality issues (but never the main builder) and some no-shows. We also had a few angel subs who pointed out these issues and were able to fix them. Drywall. Plumbing. Painting. But some subs were amazing. Septic provider. Flooring. Kitchen cabinets. And we found one company who showed up for tiling and ended up doing many more tasks in the house and finding some of the subs for us. All of this was a massive exercise by my husband and I in bi-lingual communications via WhatsApp, email and verbally…. Constantly testing our Portuguese language and cultural skills (and improving them) along the way.
8. After five years, this project has had so many risks. PMI’s PMBOK defines several types of risks, and I think we’ve managed them all.
- Business Risk: Would we have enough money to finish given the unknown costs we kept running into.
- Technical Risk: Would the decision we made about how the house would operate play out as we planned. Only a wood-burning stove. Gas cooktop. No mini-split AC (but we did pre-wire for them). Ceiling fans. Air flow. No garage, only the annex (Rog’s workshop). So far, the house is untested. We will see if our decisions were good ones as we live there.
- External Risk: Risks in geopolitics. Risk in our own visas for Portugal. Risk in all of the subcontractors doing good work.
- Organizational Risk: Could our marriage survive the massive frustrations associated with this project to make it to the finish line.
All of these risks were ‘tested’ over the five years.
This is the longest project I have ever managed, the most frustrating, the most difficult. We are 2-3 weeks from moving in. Our boxes and furniture are in. Our artwork hangs on the walls. We are down to the final tasks in the project plan. Countertops. Water. Plumbing. Sewer system around the house (round 2 rework). Retaining wall. Deck. The critical path to move-in is the water and plumbing. We’ve learned a lot about Portuguese construction and our Portuguese language skills have improved immensely. Our marriage has survived through some rocky times and we look forward to our 29th wedding anniversary in a few days. We can sit on our own sofa and finally enjoy the ocean sunset view that is The Vision, The Why, that we started with.
UPDATE – May 2, 2026 – Day 1 living in the house. The project is not over, but this is go-live day. It’s a bit surreal waking up in a house that I designed on paper 4-5 years ago. The are some post-go-live projects related to the exterior… drainage, gutters, retaining wall, deck. All this seems minor and manageable now that we are here. I feel ready to get back to painting, coaching, and more.
THE VISION has been achieved.
