A fiery subject

The many unattractive options for heating your Italian home

For many years I have wanted to make an environmentally-kind house – not just double-glazing but photovoltaic cells, wind turbines, underground heat pumps, the works. This project has made me see that it’s not quite as easy as all that.

Apart from the fact that the house is intrinsically well-insulated (metre thick stone holds the heat in winter and keeps you cool in summer!), it’s 16th century structure doesn’t lend itself to our space-age ideas. For example, we’d love to put in efficient underfloor heating (which couple well with solar water heaters), but we don’t want to destroy our lovely tiles by lifting them for the process.

Most of all, our budget doesn’t suit our ideals! There’s plenty of sun here – at least in summer – but the cost of solar panels just wouldn’t pay itself back for over ten years. We may move in under 5 years.

We reluctantly decided to keep our project as modest as possible. There is no existing fireplace in the house (strange in an old house, but it was probably heated by a mobile stove). Keeping on the modest theme, I decided – against Roscoe’s wishes – that a fire would be a luxury and a hassle and radiators would be much more practical. Then just about everyone who saw the house or pictures of it said, “A fireplace/wood stove would be lovely...”

We’ve also been warned that gas is expensive while wood, woody pellets or Sansa are cheaper. (Italians have recommended Sansa on cost, but not on smell. I need to work out exactly what it is!)

My resolve is weakening.

Bewildered by the many options, I sat down to list them out.

It looks like we’d have to have gas boiler plus radiators as a back-up with whatever option we choose, making the cost of a secondary option off-putting. Nonetheless, I’m open to being charmed by other options. I suspect our weekend will include a trip to the fireplace shop.

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PS We did, in fact, go to the fireplace shop, and didn't see anything that appeals. The fires/stoves that combine with water heating systems were all huge. An open fiire in the lounge would still be nice, but doesn't add any practicality. We'll leave it for now.

End of week 2: lots of changes

As we come to Friday beer-time again, I’m excited to see how much things have moved on. It’s wonderful to feel how the lounge and kitchen will be now the door cages are in place. Contrary to expectations, I like the closed-in-ness of the lounge – it now feels like we could fit a sofa without overlapping the door. I don’t feel that we’ve lost the airiness of the space, but I guess it’s early to say.

This week the workers have:

- Enlarged the two second floor doorframes including raising the lintels

- Put in the cages which will hold the sliding doors

- Drilled laboriously through solid rock walls to put in the electricity meter box (although ENEL still haven’t come to connect us) and the post box

- Cemented these in place

- Drilled off uneven (but very hard) cement that previous workmen put in our future study

- Scraped out the remnants of the walls we knocked down so the gaps in walls and floors are ready to be filled in

- Drilled off smooth plaster where we need to attach tiles in the kitchen

- Carted out a truckload of rubble

- Brought in a plumber to get a quote for central heating

- Knocked down the future bathroom floor (which was too high), ready to put in a new floor next week

Roscoe’s arms and ears are feeling how much drilling he’s done. It will be great to get the electricity connected so at least they won’t have the noise of the generator.

Next week may not be as good – there’s going to be a street demonstration of policemen and women so we have to remove the hoist. I hope it doesn’t set us back too much.

Our budget for the works so far:

Previous total EUR 2,147

Labour EUR 1,300

Petrol for the generator & truck EUR 53

Cement EUR 28

Bricks and fast-drying cement EUR 43

TOTAL EUR 3,571

Ikea versus Scavolini

Roscoe teased me during the long wait for our house purchase to go through as I made detailed decisions on furniture and designed kitchens in Ikea’s Home Planner software. “But I need to know that the layout we want will fit!” I protested.

I love to sketch things out to get my head round them. Choices that seem irrelevant to Roscoe, such as where the sofa goes, are key to me. And they all impact on each other. If, for example, our sofa goes along the back of the lounge, we could put one of the computers in the same room, thus freeing up what could have been my “work corner” in the bedroom. Our diverse approaches lead to friction at times, but we balance each other out. When I get teased too much, I cite Grand Designs – the ones that plan in detail first invariably achieve more!

With all those months of thinking about the kitchen, it ought to have been easy when Concenzo asked us exactly where the kitchen sink outflow needed to be. I realised I had forgotten the most vital part of planning – making decisions.

Cue urgent kitchen showroom visits. Ikea is probably the most affordable option, so we were off to Rome the next day to fight the crowds and to try and reach agreement on kitchen units. Neither was easy.

We want horizontal lines in our kitchen, which are in fashion so should be easy to find. But there are some things that Ikea just doesn’t do. Like horizontal wall cupboards that are the same length as the base cupboards beneath them. The horizontal wall cupboards come in 70cm and 92 cm long, while every other cupboard comes in 60cm and 80cm. Why?

Italy has plenty of alternatives to Ikea kitchens, and while I’m not a snob about Ikea, I do like to buy local. We looked at Scavolini and a number of smaller firms. They were all disappointingly similar: nice, but not perfect. As Roscoe says, I want my cake and to eat it too.

Still undecided.

Our budget for the works so far:

Previous total EUR 2,117

Petrol to Rome Ikea EUR 30

TOTAL EUR 2,147

Getting connected – internet in Italy

My experiences with internet in Italy have been shaky to say the least. In our previous rented appartment in the city, we got a line put in by Telecom Italia to use broadband (but not the phone). We were stung by a EUR 200 “contribution” for the connection, and then our bimonthly bills went up by EUR 20 over the course of a few months. When we came to closing the account, they insisted we call from the same phoneline “for security”. We had to procure a phone to make that one final call.

In the new house, we’d like to use Telecom Italia’s competitor, FastWeb, who get rave reviews and do cable TV to boot. They should bring a line up to our village this autumn. Fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, in our temporary rented room, we sure don’t want to pay another EUR 200 connection charge, but I need the internet to work. We were advised that mobile internet has taken leaps and bounds recently and is now as fast as fixed line broadband. You connect the mobile to the computer with a cable or bluetooth.

There are two main providers: TIM and Vodafone.

- Vodafone do a competitive, fast service, but our village isn’t covered by their 3G network

- TIM’s service uses older technology and is therefore slower, but does cover our village

- TIM offer unlimited data transfer for EUR 25 a month, but only at evenings and weekends and for a total of 3-4 hours a day over the course of a month

- Their only other package is unlimited time online at EUR 20, but only half a gig of data transfer – much less than we’re used to having

We went with the last option, as I need the internet during the day. It took us 5 days and an equivalent number of trips to town to get it working. Although I had bought a Motorola phone to use with the TIM service, the shop didn’t mention that Motorola also expect you to pay for their software – cheeky! (I hear Nokia are much more reasonable!)

We’ve only had the service 3 weeks, and haven’t been thrilled. We fail to connect at busy times.

Then it stopped working altogether a couple of days ago. After a day and a half of waiting, we took phone, computer and all associated cables and paperwork to the computer shop. Shut for holidays. Another trip to town and we tried the phone shop that had sold us the package. Shut also.

I start to wonder how much petrol we burn for the sake of TIM. I resort to calling them. Ten times, each trying different routes of their “Press 1 for X, press 2 for Y” system. Nothing about reporting a fault or getting updated on the service, and no way to speak to an operator. A new computer shop explain the Centralinea has been damaged by the forest fires raging through Italy this week. They give me a new number to see if this was the problem.

Thirty minutes on hold with Cristina Aguilera’s CandyMan blasting in my ear – could they have thought of a better torture? I held out though, and eventually got to tell some poor bloke just how horrible the song is. Finally I found out that there was, in fact, a fault. They might get it up and running again tomorrow afternoon. And no, they wouldn’t reimburse me.

What did I expect, he said, it’s like buying a Fiat Punto instead of a Porsche!

PS Internet finally got started again after another call to TIM and 4 days wait. At least Fiat have customer service!

What should I do about earthquakes?

When I first, excitedly, mentioned to a northern Italian friend that I’d seen a house I liked, he tried to put me off the idea. “But that's an earthquake zone!” Disheartened, I looked online to see if what he said was true, and gave special instructions to the people doing the survey to quantify the risk.

It is in an earthquake zone, I discovered, but so is the rest of peninsular Italy.

The city in the base of the valley has been hit many times, with tragic effects mostly in centuries past. My own village has escaped for the most part, it seems. It was affected by an huge earthquake in 1984 that destroyed many buildings across the country. My future house was damaged, and goverment funds allowed structural work to be done, including a new roof.

Meanwhile the survey was confusing. After some insistent telephone calls, I was able to make out that I could, if I wanted further earthquake protection, put new floors in with a wire web inside (to make them more flexible I assume). However, this is neither required or even recommended. It would not prevent the house from falling down should a particularly large earthquake happen.

I was loath to pull up our fragile old floor tiles, so I decided to see what the requirements are for insurance. If an earthquake was determined to shake down my house, at least I wouldn’t lose everything. But would anyone insure my house in an earthquake zone?

Certainly. My own bank, BancoPosta, didn’t even need to know where the house was. Earthquake damage was covered.

After careful study of the earthquake maps:

http://kharita.rm.ingv.it/Gmaps/rec/index.htm

http://www.ingv.it/terremoti/terremoti.html

we decided to go ahead. After all, I was unlikely to find a house in the Appenines that wasn’t at risk of the shakes.

We’ve now been in the area for almost two months, and our first earthquake happened yesterday afternoon. We didn’t notice a thing.

Happily, the house is still standing, although Concenzo did hurry to get the new lintels in place today. Can’t be too careful.

End of week 1: really rather good

When I brought the Friday afternoon beers to the hard workers at the house, I was delighted to see that they were already finishing off the new cement floor of the kitchen – this time at the right height! In the end, it took between 3 and 4 days to do it, so cost about EUR 1,100 including materials. I’m tempted to go ahead with the other floor too, although it will set our timetable back.

This week, the workers have:

- Brought in all their tools and materials and generator etc. (not as easy as it sounds given that we’re about 5 metres above the road!)

- Set up a hoist to carry up sand and carry down rubble

- Shovelled and wheelbarrowed out 3 trucks worth of rubble

- Got the water running in a little tap by the meter

- Lowered the floor of the future study (this one wasn’t complicated)

- Removed the floor of the future kitchen and built a new one

I’m impressed.

Next week, we should be getting a visit from ENEL, the electricity folk, so one of the next jobs will be getting the meter container in the wall. Concenzo has also talked about getting the lintels raised for our sliding doors, and installing the cages. It’s exciting to see things change so quickly.

Our costs for the works so far (revised from yesterday):

Previous total EUR 226

Labour EUR 1,300.00

2 door mechanisms & new lintels EUR 348.00

Terracotta crossbeams & other floor materials EUR 124.00

Materials for securing house EUR 19.00

Sand for cement EUR 10.00

Petrol for the generator & truck EUR 70.00

Rubble disposal EUR 20.00

TOTAL EUR 2,117

To slide or to swing: doors, doors, doors!

(The doodle shows the original layout at the top, our new layout, and the measurements for a sliding door.)

I now know why doors are often in the corners of rooms. When they’re in the middle of a wall, as we’ve cleverly created in our house, an open door becomes an awkward barrier in the room. Our kitchen is narrow, so an open door would block passage completely.

Roscoe is fond of open-plan, so we toyed with doing away with doors altogether. But I do want to be able to put spare guests on a bed settee in the lounge, for which a closeable door would be welcome.

Sliding doors seem an ideal solution (though I maintain that they aren’t as intuitive nor attractive as normal swing doors). But even sliding doors aren’t without their problems. Our friendly builders’ merchants explained:

- The original “Scrigno” brand costs about EUR 300 for a single mechanism

- Scrigno mechanisms have a rail across the bottom, and can take heavy doors (i.e. solid wood)

- The copycat brand looks nicer, without a rail, but can only take light doors (i.e. the hollow kind)

- It costs about EUR 130 per mechanism

- The copycat brand doesn’t do double doors (which we’d hoped to put in)

- They all involve making an aperture double the size of the door, in order to put in the cage into which the door slides. (Our doors are going in supporting walls, so making big holes is no small matter.) The cage is then covered to look like solid wall

- Both brands come in a standard 210cm high. (Ironically, our lintels sit at 205cm high)

I was against the idea of either rails across the bottom, or cheap hollow doors, but Concenzo convinced me that carpenter-made doors would “cost me an eye”. We’d hoped to keep the double width aperture, but eventually compromised on a single-width door that would involve less destuction of supporting walls (as the cage could go in the other half of the hole.

It’s a loss for open-plan living, but everyone involved in the works breathed a sigh of relief.

Our budget for the works so far:

Previous total EUR 226

10 labourer days (1 week) EUR 1,300

2 sliding door mechanisms c. EUR 300

Terracotta crossbeams & other materials c. EUR 200

TOTAL EUR 2,026

Una bella dilemma – the steps

Call me fussy, but I hate tripping over unexpected steps in houses. One stubbed toe is one stubbed toe too many in my opinion. And it just feels so cobbled together. Steps belong in staircases and floors ought to be flat.

If he wasn’t already dead (of natural causes I assume), I’d like to throttle the eejit who poured cement onto the floor in two rooms of the house. Because of him, after we add tiles we’ll have a 3-5 cm step going into our kitchen and our bathroom. Before you ask “how could you possibly have employed said eejit?”, this all happened before we bought the place. And yes, we did vaguely note the cement as we looked round, but as the tiles are missing in those two rooms, the problem isn’t as obvious as it could be. And it certainly doesn’t look as expensive to fix as it will be.

Our Italian friends smirk at this dilemma, understanding all too well that a contractor working for an absent client will happily throw cement and plaster where it’s not needed in order to claim for the work. Same firm also replastered parts of the house before the pipes and electricity have been embedded into the wall. Beggars belief.

How do you lift a layer of cement? Well, it was all going well at first. Our cheerful builder’s pneumatic drill seemed to be doing the job of lifting just the new cement. Then Concenzo, the geometra, brought us to look underneath. Although the drill wasn’t reaching the terracotta cross-beams that make up the ceilings of the house, the vibration of the drill above had shattered them. Darn.

Concenzo poised the question: continue, and have about six days work per room to completely destroy and replace ceiling/floor, or have an annoying, I’m-going-to-break-your-neck-one-of-these-days step. (Incidentally, most of the work is shovelling away foot-deep rubble after the drill’s done it’s job. Something that Roscoe with his bad back is not thrilled about.)

I haven’t had a puzzler like this since the multiple choice questions of my GCSE chemistry exam. And just like the exam, I’m not convinced either answer is the right one. On one hand, I don’t want to delay the build by two weeks plus, and we won’t see that money back when we come to sell the house. But I really hate steps.

We eventually came to the compromise that the floor of one room would go. When I have fully understood just how much sweat and pain the workers put in, I can decide for the other room.

Lacing up power and water

How do you make an alcove for an electricity meter without first having electricity?

A conundrum that ENEL (Italy’s electricity supplier) don’t seem to have taken into account. The hole needs to be substantial – around 50 by 30 cm and 30 cm deep. They want it nicely finished before they’ll connect us. (Unless we’d prefer to pay the connection twice – once for the building site, and again when works finish? I decide 600 Euros for one connection is probably enough to spend.) And the most difficult part of this puzzle, the walls are metre thick stone.

Our geometra calmly encouraged us to get the electricity and water “allacciato” or “laced up” before he brought the builders to start work. Resourceful we are, but chipping away at a stone wall by hand seems silly.

We didn’t even try. Time ran out, the builders arrived, and brought a generator. Now there’s a solution.

Our budget for the works so far:

Previous total EUR 152

Temporary door materials EUR 32

Chain and padlock EUR 8

Two folding chairs EUR 34

TOTAL EUR 226

First day of work on the house

Finally – work begins!

While buying the house took longer than we expected, this day has come quicker than expected. We arrived in Abruzzo to pick up the deeds five weeks ago. Now, we’ve met with some geometras, signed a contract with our favourite, informed the Comune, and everyone has turned up with more tools than I could name in English, never mind Italian.

We chose Concenzo, our quiet geometra principally so we could get our hands dirty. Or at least Roscoe can. (Concenzo doesn’t need to say a word for me to understand that women do not work on building sites. Fine by me. I’ll wait for him to go home before I swing a hammer.)

Most geometras are considered lofty figures – we don’t slip out of the formal Lei with them, we don’t question their judgement. It was clear to me that despite our romantic notions of putting our house in order brick by brick, it was more likely we’d be kept well away from the project. A friend getting a house renovated here was told off for turning up at her house without arranging the visit first!

But Concenzo seems different. Without us saying a word, he sized Roscoe up as a handy chap with a drill, and said he could come and help. Concenzo will charge us for the hours spent at the house, so the more Roscoe does, the quicker it will finish and the less we will spend.

Meanwhile I can bring trays of refreshments.

Our budget for the works so far:

Water connection request EUR 27
Water meter (asciutto) EUR 19
Water and electricity boxes for meters EUR 48
Impregnante - wood protector for roof EUR 28
Sundries from DIY shop EUR 30
TOTAL 152