Tbilisi family finds its holiday retreat mistakenly renovated

Imagine waking up one day and discovering early construction work of your country house upgraded to a renovated and equipped project, without having anything to do with it. That is what happened to a Tbilisi family and their holiday home in the small village of Buriani last weekend. Biologist Vaso Gabunia drove to a village in the Mtskheta municipality, located some 45 kilometres north of the capital, to find various work had been done on what had been a basic frame of the building. Doors and windows had been installed on the house, with roofing and communications also completed. A fence had also been set up around the yard of the holiday retreat, with the ground in the lawn area levelled for comfort.

Shocked at first to discover the development, Gabunia later learned the improvements had been carried out by workers who mistook the building for another house on an adjacent street that they had been commissioned to renovate. His family said they were "scared" when they first witnessed the results of the work on the house they had intended to register — the renovation could have indicated the building was mistakenly registered to another owner. Home to a tiny community of a little over a dozen residents in 2014, Buriani is one of the villages in the municipality where new construction for holiday homes for Tbilisi residents has sprung up in recent years.