Housewarming time!

Goodness, haven't I got behind with my blogging! Not with the house though - I've been super-dedicated to getting things done! In fact, we've come so far that it's time to declare an official housewarming - also our anniversary of moving in.
I'm sorry to say the camera is playing up, so you'll have to believe me when I say it looks gorgeous! Photos will follow when I get around to sorting the technical probs.
Big news: we did get a tenant for a month - an American traveller. It worked rather well and we'll look to do it again. The guest suite stood up to the challenge! For our tenant's arrival we had to get some rough edges sorted...
We didn't have time to paint, but we did fixative the walls so they wouldn't leak dust. We had to get the doors of both the bedroom and the guest bathroom properly finished off. The bathroom had a sliding door cavity, but no door at all, just a curtain. So our biggest expense of recent months was a basic veneer sliding door at E250. I don't like veneer doors, but having failed to find something else, I gave in. It was probably easier to fit than something adhoc. That said, fitting the sliding door inspired a fair bit of bad language on my part!
There were other bits and pieces - door handles, a hook to hang my bike from the ceiling, light fittings, shelves in my record-player-unit-cum-dresser, and I even managed to fit a friend's old door to our cantina (by which I mean the part of the basement which is still like a garage). This is more surprising than you may think, when I explain that the opening was a rather unusual 165cm high!
I finally got around to tiling the landing between the basement "guest" floor and the ground floor. As well as the drilling out and filling in with cement that I'd already done, this involved several more days of work. The old tiles are a chore to fit - they're 4cm of solid dust to cut through! After laying them in cement to the right height and level, I had to wait several days before grouting. The tiles then looked great, but I was still left with an ugly 10cm of rough-edged gap at the bottom of the wall. It was so deep I had to fill it with cement (with the unlucky side-effect of sandiness, causing the cat to use the area as a litter tray), and wait for the cement to dry before I could come back and plaster. While I was at it, I noticed that the stair risers in that part of the house were really broken and messy too, so I set to, scrubbing off a surprising quantity of black gunk, before plastering those as well.
Conclusion: satisfting to me, but probably doesn't look like quite as much work as it was to anyone else!

Little steps forward

The big steps forward forced by Roscoe’s parents’ visit have led to renewed vigour for home improvement. Every day I manage to get another little job on its way, and it feels good!

I found some wide skirting board in a DIY shop in Rome – almost all are 7-8cm in Italy, so I was really pleased to find some in the older style which I prefer. I bought it unstained and used the stain which the carpenter had used for our windows. These hot dry days are ideal for painting on the roof terrace – well, ideal for drying, if not for the painter! I bought a kind of box saw for cutting at 45° and so far I’ve used the skirting to make the architrave in our bedroom – a job which everyone said I’d need a carpenter to do. It looks quite good. I’ll continue with more architraves and skirting when the wall painting is finished. We may have to compromise on narrower wood for the skirting, as the wide stuff is twice as costly.

I stained a cheap pine table while I was at it, and then waxed it with coloured beeswax and it’s really rather nice now. That’ll eventually go in the kitchen, but for now we’re taking advantage of it on the terrace for dinners up there.

Pleased with the finish of the table, I did the same with an old piece of packing wood to make a hall shelf for keys and things. I rather like that it’s a bit irregular and has some old nail holes.

Our terrace “sail” has gone up – this is a triangular sheet with karabiners attaching it to the external rail. We can move it around as the sun moves.

Our wardrobe – or lack thereof – has long been a frustration to me (though Roscoe seems quite content to use the floor). As I probably mentioned in earlier posts, Roscoe isn’t good at shutting wardrobe doors, and there’s nothing I find more frustrating. So the hunt was for an open wardrobe of some kind. I found a rail – normally for halls – in Ikea, and combined this with a simple shoe rail (which I also stained to make it match our wood colours). Along with some hooks on the wall and some clothes “bins” for Roscoe, it’s quite practical and pretty. Now I just have to save up for a big dresser – we’ve got loads of household towels and bedding on top of our clothes and desperately need somewhere to keep them tidy.

The walls are looking livelier thanks to a productive Saturday. Some basic pine frames (yet again, stained by me with our ubiquitous walnut shade) mingle with bright scarlet ones to show off before-and-after photos – it makes us remember just how far we’ve come! Then, in the echoey lounge I wanted some fabrics. The windows have shutters so don’t need curtains, and the floor tiles are too pretty for carpets. A neat solution came in three wooden frames that I covered in bold African fabric (a present from Roscoe’s parents). The frames (thanks again to Ikea) are big and square and deep and have drawn a few nice comments already.

I found a neat gadget in Lidl to hang my wine glasses upside down from the kitchen shelf. It’s nice to get the cardboard boxes out of the kitchen.

Our main bathroom has finally started moving forward again. Above the sink, I needed to plasterboard in a false ceiling in which to insert a halogen light (they need clearance above the fitting – so not good for solid ceilings like ours). Fearing problems with moisture, I painted the pieces of plasterboard many times with fixative. I’ve never used plasterboard before and it’s probably not the best job in the world, but it sure makes me happy to see the final shape of the room. I guess we’ll see how neat it turns out after plastering (I’m not attempting this myself, but waiting for a chap to come next week!).

Meanwhile I’ve still got to replace the tile that got broken off to fix tap problems. This means detaching the taps, so the sink is out of order for the duration. And then there’s still the question of the undersink unit. Latest thinking is to DIY it, using wooden shelves covered in tiles. I suspect it won’t be easy. And then, finally we can paint the bathroom, then the architrave and get the mirrors put up around the sink niche. Oh, I can’t wait to have it finished.

The basement bedroom with its big antique bed hasn’t been used since we got the kitten, as the room doesn’t have a door (think how surprised you’d be if a playful kitten suddenly pounced on your toes in the middle of the night). But we’re having visitors soon, so we’ll have to face the question of doors once more. We had managed to find the perfect solution – an old door, frame and all, from a dealer for €200. We got it all the way back on the roofrack only to discover it opens the wrong way. Doh! (I’d checked that the left to right bit was right, but it was nailed shut for transport and I didn’t click that it swung inward rather than outward. Didn’t I feel stupid!) I hoping the dealer will take an exchange.

Meanwhile I got another door from a house that was being knocked down nearby. It’s in terrible condition, full of nails, spiders and woodworm, with whole bits missing. We’ll see. It might end up going back to be demolished, or it might work for a while. At least the style is right – it’s exactly the same as those from our house (and, ironically, in rather worse condition than our house’s old doors that Roscoe chucked out at the start).

Continuing the theme of weird and wonderful old bits, I bought an interesting old unit on Ebay. It used to house a record player and records, but I want to use it for clothes and jewellery. It’s a rather fab piece, with a bit of curiosity about it. I’ve been replacing the missing shelves and handles to make it practical once more.

And last but not least, the best job I completed recently was in the cantina – the room of the basement that we’ve kept as a storage space. This is a rough, low-ceilinged concrete room housing the boiler and all our building junk – a surprising amount by now! It had so much thrown into it that it was impossible to move. And I wanted to move the junk from the little spare room in there. The only solution was shelves and many of them. I got wonderfully strong, simple, cheap aluminium shelves from Ikea – Hyllis for €8.99 a piece – thoroughly recommend them. But how could I put my many shelf units on an uneven cement floor? Luckily our kind neighbours lent us a pneumatic drill and I had fun learning how to use it. The cantina is now much more accessible! While I was at it, I drilled out the broken floor on the landing going down to the basement (after having twisted my ankle on it a couple of times!), and have now to tile this.

Bathroom before and after

This is the (tiny!) space we decided to make into a bathroom on our bottom floor

First it needed the floor lowered and the wall straightened out, then a sliding door cage was put in, as the hallway is tight

After plumbing and electrics were laid, I got started on the tiling

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Today

Today

Before & after: the study!

The space that's now our study was originally walled off as a bathroom, between what's now our lounge and kitchen. We knocked down the wall in this picture.

It got worse before it got better! The walls were all shapes, so Roscoe spent many hours with a pneumatic drill taking them back to vertical. All the old pipes were lead and broken, so would have had to be replaced anyhow.

The study as of today! Yes, I know, it's not the tidiest, but let's face it, it's only going to get worse... We bought unvarnished wood and the carpenter gave us the same stain he had used on the windows so we could create the study to match.

It's a game of cat and mouse in our study... Needless to say, at least one member of the family settled in right away.

It's been ages since I blogged, and there's lots to update! Most importantly, our first guests (Roscoe's parents) survived their two weeks visit. The house is officially road tested! Although they did suggest we buy a vacuum cleaner for the extreme quantity of dust in the house...
With a lot of last minute elbow grease, we managed to get the second bedroom sorted. The antique bed has not, as yet, fallen apart. (We slept in it ourselves to be on the safe side!)
More details to come soon, but to ease me gently back into blogging, here are the pics of our latest, dare I say, success?
Converting the old bathroom into a study was one of the hardest choices we made. Roscoe was convinced of the idea, and he brought me round. On paper, it means losing a room, but his passion is to open up the space - so the study is directly off the hall.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

The tiling marathon has been completed!

Faced with the fear of Roscoe's parents arriving and our spare bedroom still being a building site, we finally knuckled down to the tiling/plastering. Three backbreaking days of tiling later, and I never have to lay another herringbone terracotta tile. This was the last room in the house to be tiled (I think there's a step somewhere that still needs done, but I'm trying not to think about it). They still need grouting in the gaps between the tiles, but they look quite nice anyhow.
This bedroom has a door onto the street and, to limit the dust in the house, I set up my workbench and tilecutter outside. By the third day, I was the attraction of the village, with several neighbours dropping by to judge my progress. They seemed bemused to see a girl tiling: "You're doing it? By yourself?". I think my reputation just got upped a level to "very eccentric foreigner". Nonetheless, the compliments and encouragement did keep me going through the long last day of tiling.
Now I must apply myself to transforming the antique bed into a comfy night's sleep. I'm certainly learning new skills!

Advice needed - mosaic centrepiece in bedroom floor

Okay, so we're still going. We took a break after - disappointingly - not finishing for our Easter deadline. This was mainly due to work commitments for Roscoe, and house fatigue on my part!
But now I'm ready to press on for a few last weeks of hard labour before our first guests arrive. The main job is still plastering and tiling the remainder of the bottom bedroom, and of course the dreaded painting. The plastering is most of the way to done, thanks to some weekend work by Roscoe, and I'm preparing to lay into the tiling.
BUT, it's a very weird shaped room. I plan to do, as elsewhere, a border of the terracotta tiles, and the rest in herringbone layout. I also want to add a centrepiece of 30cm x 30cm mosaic (which I bought a while back). But where should a centrepiece go?
The obvious answer is "the centre", but in this room, I'm really not so sure, as it's got two zones. The physical centre doesn't feel very, er, central.
Design guides suggest lining a decorative piece up with the centre of a door. Great, that makes sense. But this room has two doors on opposite walls, and they aren't lined up. On the plan above I've drawn a central axis, and then an axis from the centre of one door to the other. Is this where the mosaic should go? Should it be straight to the long axis, or to the one between the doors?
About the room: it's very rustic (a euphemism for having no straight walls) and will be a twin bedroom for guests. It's about 5m x 2.5m (measurements in the drawing above). One of the doors comes from the hallway, and the other leads, via a metre-deep arch, to an external door. I don't expect the external door to be used often.
The photo shows the mosaic surrounded by some of the main tiles. Do let me know your opinions and past experience.

The tiling marathon – progress update!

Tiling the cantina hall and bathroom floor

The front door

The cantina external door

Goodness, where does the time go? With our Easter deadline (to finish the main work on the house) only a couple of weeks away, I’m pressing on with the tiling. It’s pleasing seeing it come together, but slow.

In contrast to the modern bathroom upstairs, the tiles in the cantina floor are a traditional cotto and much more rustic looking. Kinda cute. They’re also easier to lay. This is because they need, by virtue of their rough edges, a wide fuga or gap between tiles. Everywhere else, I’ve gone for a sleek modern effect of edge to edge tiles. But tiles are never perfectly the same, so it takes a lot more work to get them right if you do this.

Just to make sure I don’t make my job too easy, though, I decided to lay them in a herringbone pattern, as in the photo. This means lots of cutting! Luckily, my local ferramenta or ironmongery advised me to buy a costly diamond blade (€42!), which does make the job quicker.

Meanwhile, the falegname (carpenter) finally came through with our front doors – just as we were desperate for them! We were poised to go away for a week (as the falegname had been advised well in advance) when he turned up, allowing us to close the house securely for the first time since we got here. They still need a few trimmings, but aren’t they gorgeous? And the new bedroom in the ex-cantina is so much brighter now that the door has a window in it. Happy proprietaria.

The tiling marathon has begun!

We've created a cement "step" to extend the shower - it'll be tiled.
The epic job of tiling the basement floor starts here - 2 days work to get this far!

The time has come. No more procrastination. I've had to knuckle down and start the tiling. First of all the walls of the small basement bathroom, and then I'll move on to the floor tiles. The entire basement floor will be done in cotto (terracotta type tiles). They're rectangular and I'm thinking of doing a herringbone pattern - wish me luck!
First, I've got to get the bathroom walls done though - and it's not going quickly!

Furniture!

Ok, this was going to be a post on our new furniture, but the sofa didn't arrive. Nor the second time we agreed with the shop. Great. Our next hope is Wednesday... but I'm not holding my breath.
On a positive note, the '70s table and chairs we picked up on a classifieds site are working out well.
PS It arrived! We now have a sofa! It's rather big and dark and masculine, so I might need to get some brightly coloured cushions and throws!

Thermal undies are out again!

The outside of our future front door with handmade handle

The inside of our future front door

Roscoe’s dedication to painting has paid off – the bedroom is finished off just in time for our sofa delivery, so we can vacate the lounge and actually use more rooms of our house. The bedroom looks wonderful. Originally the soggiorno (lounge), it was a feature that sold us on the house, being spacious and airy, and it’s so great to see it tidied up.

However, a few hurdles remain… The bedroom - still without a door to the hall - is on the same floor as the front door – which is unfinished. The result being gaps as big as your thumb on all sides. Fine for the summer, but it’s COLD out there!

And then there’s the heating. Doing a thorough job of the painting meant taking off the new radiators and therefore draining the whole system. This was carefully planned for the last possible moment, so we could do two coats in the course of a long day, and then get the heating on again. But then a little rubber ring that seals the join broke. We’ve scoured the plumbing shops of town, no luck. We’ve just got to wait for the plumber to come back and sort it. Meanwhile lounge temperatures have sunk to what feels like sub-zero (but is actually a balmy 12 degrees). Brrr.

I checked progress on our front door this week. It seems other clients have managed to get in front of the queue. Given that the carpenters got us our windows when we needed them, I don’t want to complain. But it’s been three months since then. We agreed on mid-Feb for installation. I also got to check out my new, specially-made door handle. It’s a style common in the area, but not for sale anywhere! A fabbro (blacksmith) made me this one for €35. Bargain, I reckon! It came out much bigger than I thought, so I hope we can fit it on!

I also had an exciting shopping trip to PuntoBrico to get my very own saw and workbench. Been happily sawing away (not very well) since. Haven’t dared to attack a door yet, but they’re looking scared!

Making money from our house

My attempt at power-sanding the nasty green and yellow paint off

Scraping the paint off after painting on the stripper

The door after a couple of evenings' work
With the job market in the area as weak as it is, we have been forced to think about jobs elsewhere. We would be sad to leave, when we’re only just getting to enjoy our new home.
One option would be to look for short term contracts, perhaps in the UK, while letting the house for the summer. Or, we could let out the large guest room to help pay bills and stay in the house ourselves.
Thinking about sharing the house changes the choices we make. For a holiday rental house, we probably need to think traditional rather than our more eccentric ideas. We’d need to spend more upfront on things like wardrobes and seats. The house would easily sleep seven so it needs a good deal more furniture, kitchenware and linen to be able to be let to its full potential.
This would be a lovely holiday spot:
• In the middle of great mountain views
• Fabulous local food
• Ten minutes from a pretty mediaeval city
• Central to a friendly village with three bars
• Two hours to Rome and 50 minutes to the beaches by car or public transport
• Trekking trails start outside the house
• Perfect for artists and history-lovers
• Lots of castles, churches, palazzi and Roman remains to visit
And the house is spacious, pretty, cool in summer and warm in winter. With its panoramic terrace, it would make a good rental for a group or family wanting to sample the Italian countryside.
But we want to enjoy all the above ourselves!
Meanwhile, work on the house goes on. We have two of the original doors from the house, filthy and without architraves. I decided to see what kind of door was underneath layers of nasty green and yellow paint.
Powersanding was fun, but slow, and luckily someone recommended paint stripper. Yuk! That stuff is nasty, but it seems to be doing the business. It stripped the two layers of paint okay, except where the paint had sunk into nicks in the wood. But then I found a layer of what I presume is woodstain. The stripper reduced this to a molasses-like substance – very tough to get off. You can see in the pictures that the door is far from perfect. But I haven’t given up yet!
I’m psyching myself up for the huge tiling job in the basement. We created an extra step down there, having lowered the floor, so I went back to the tile shop to ask for stair-edging tiles. These have an L-shaped profile, so protect the edge of a tiled stair. With a look of concern, the assistant found the stair-edging tile that matches my cotto floor tiles. When she told me the price, I realised why she looked concerned. For 2.2m of edging, it would be €300. “Ma come?” (but how?) I asked, shocked. To no avail. The understanding assistant suggested I try the marmista (stone mason) to see if he could do me one cheaper. I sure hope so!

Getting plastered

Kitchen when we bought the house

The too-high floor is destroyed

The new floor goes down

The walls are roughed up for tiling, and the gas/electric/water fixtures are marked

The pipes are installed, the windowsill brought out to a right angle, and the tiling is done

We start to build the Ikea kitchen

And the kitchen is (mostly!) finished

We’re in the house three months and it’s starting to feel like the house we dreamed of. After those first hard weeks with no gas or lights, we’ve enjoyed a normal-ish life here, even surviving half a metre of snow. The kitchen is a real pleasure to work in. The photos show it from July to December.

Very little progress with the works has been made since moving in – partly because we need a pause, and partly because we’re short on cash and doing things ourselves takes ages!

Just about everything is unfinished, but on the way.

• Electrics are done, but we still need to find light fittings we like – we’re in the bare bulb stage! Our home cinema is far from finished. Roscoe is determined to work out how to “crimp” the LAN cable to bring a signal from the computer in the study to the projector in the lounge. Lots of internet help guides have been consulted! Given that we can’t afford the projector for the next ten years, he’s got time to learn.

• Plumbing is a shambles – since we took a radiator off to paint behind it, we haven’t been able to fully bleed the system, so heating isn’t perfect. The main bathroom is a mess which annoys me daily – our under-sink unit is a couple of planks on cement, our fitted mirrors are awaiting funds, our tap drips (apparently unfixable, because I didn’t drill a big enough hole in the tile to get the bloomin’ thing out again), and worst of all, the shower leaks profusely. The plumber has tried to fix it with silicon to no avail, so we’re waiting for another visit. And the second bathroom still needs a division wall built before we can plaster and tile, etc. But that’s for when I have time and money to get the builders back.
• White paint is spreading through the house – on days when I feel keen I pick up a roller. It’s slow because the old walls need polyfilling and sanding, and then the coloured walls need lots of coats of white. But it’s getting there, and has a big effect. We may even get ambitious and paint an accent wall red in the bedroom next.
• Woodwork is no more complete than two months ago. Our front doors should be done soon, and we’ve seen the pieces in the falegnameria (carpenter’s workshop). Our internal doors are such a stressful subject that they were put to one side for Christmas, but now we’re on the hunt again. I’m still determined to have solid wood doors, but even hollow ones cost an occhio (eye) here. I’ve ordered one basic pine door in Italy for €160 as a test run. It’s much cheaper than alternatives, so I’m wary. But if it’s ok, perhaps we’ve found a solution. And then we’ve still to think about skirting boards…
• Plastering of the basement level is further on. Roscoe has done a great job of the hall down there, and is now an expert at stucco rustico (nicer than it sounds!). He’s still to do the bathroom ceiling and the large guest bedroom – at a few square metres a day, it’s slow going. When he’s done, I’ll follow with a huge area of floor tiling – a job I’m dreading!

Beside all these tough jobs, there are the fun bits. We’ve just ordered a brown leather sofa for the lounge, and we’re thinking about planters and benches to get the most out of our gorgeous terrace.

It feels daunting, but we’re aiming to finish for Easter. We’ve set €5k aside to do the job, but it will probably take €6-7k.