Monthly Archives: August 2014

Kitchen and sofa

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Wednesday. Not a lot to report. A beautiful day after thunderstorms last night. Today was market day and I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people. I think many of the summer residents are here now and of course the market would be a big draw. I went out early to buy produce, which is beautiful and bountiful right now. Also two whole trout from the fish monger and some little tiny clams. We will have them tonight with linguini.

Monday we met with Emanuele and gave him the list of what we want and what we don’t want. Va bene. All is well. We cut about 1/4 from the costs.

Our sofa was delivered yesterday. I hid in the house while Luther went to deal with the delivery men. Why? Well because the sofa is BIG. And the stairway is narrow with an inconvenient U turn with a low ceiling. I wasn’t at all sure it would fit. And it was a very near thing Luther said. But in the end our sofa is there! And it looks great and is SO comfy.

Today we got confirmation that our wire of the deposit reached Pedini. Also Roberto from Pedini came and he and Emanuele proceeded to measure precisely for the kitchen.

All good. It means things have begun. Emanuele will begin work soon. I imagine he will start with the removal of all the stuff like the old kitchen, the attic debris, kitchen floor, etc.

Pietralunga outing

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Yesterday we went to a hilltown called Pietralunga. It is a quite remote area past Montone up into the hills. Pretty drive and a very pretty town.

There were little patches of carpet each with a chair next to it along the streets and walls. It seems the town encourages artists to come and bring their work with them to sell and exhibit. There were a number of artists here as well as many empty spots (you can see some of the art in the 3rd picture below). It is a good idea to promote their town and bring visitors. We had come to the town to view the Civiteli Ranierie artists’ works which we did. They were interesting if not terribly notable.

Here are some pictures of the town. The first two are the main piazza and church (dating from the 8th century) area.

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At the top of the town was this tower and these arches also dating from the 8th century.

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These next two pictures are interesting. All buildings in Italy have metal covers over the water, gas and electric meters. In Pietralunga many of them are painted by artists. You can see that these are little doors. Much prettier than the ugly gray covers we have on our house in Umbertide.

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After our visit we headed out to find lunch which was more difficult that we thought it would be. We ended up at Trattoria di Botticelli. It was along the road between Montone and Pietralunga. It was quiet and they cooked us a nice lunch to include antipasti of meats and cheeses as well as deep fried squash blossoms and bruschetti. Afterwards we had pasta and the guys got yummy desserts and they brought refreshing after dinner drinks of either melon or banana. These had been kept in the freezer and were frozen and slushy and yummy. It was fun.

Here is a picture from my walk this morning of a pretty chicory flower. The picture below that is of a farmers cart full up with buckets of roma tomatoes destined to become sauce. I love tomato season!

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Hall steps

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Here is a picture of the steps I mentioned in my post about the renovations. It is taken from the living room. You can see one step up from the living room. Then a flat area which is one step up from the hallway to the stairway down out of the apartment. From that flat area you go up one more step to an area just in front of a bathroom. Then one more step up to the hallway back to the bedrooms and kitchen.

Emanuele wanted to raise the step in front of the bathroom and also raise the area before the stairway out to all one level even with the hall to the bedrooms. This would mean you’d have 2 steps down into the living room and 2 steps down to the stairway. I see his point but it is an expense that we will probably have to forgo at this time.

Ordering the kitchen

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Last night I phoned USAA, our bank in the US to have them wire €10,000 to the kitchen people. This is a 50% deposit. We signed the contract and emailed it back. Turns out the contract had been sent to Emanuele a whole week ago and we never got a copy! Too bad but I hope the delay is not going to affect things too much.

Kitchens in Italy, and all of Europe for that matter, are kind of like kits. You buy the whole thing, they assemble it and get all the appliances and then the whole thing comes and is installed in one day. Really! Of course the prep work has to be done beforehand. This explains why Europeans generally take their kitchens with them when they move. When you look at an Italian apartment most of the time there are just pipes sticking out of the tiled walls and outlets along where the cabinets were/will be.

Emanuele will be doing the electrical and plumbing work to include moving the gas, water and drainage. The old kitchen will be removed. Then he will prep and tile the floors in the kitchen and the pantry. They will then do the tiling on the patio and the built-in seating and the new gutters and repainting the railings. This should all get done before the kitchen comes.

On a more fun note, it is Saturday today and we planned a trip to Pietralunga which is a hill town up in the mountains past Montone which is the close hill town to us. They are having an exhibition of paintings from the artists in residence at Civitella Ranieri near us. After that we will have lunch either in town or out at an agriturismo I found. We invited Susan and Gary to join us.

I will report back after our adventure.

Meeting with the Geometra

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So on Wednesday evening we met with our Geometra, Emanuele with Susan in tow to translate if necessary.

Emanuele had a line item list of costs for the things we want done. To be short, it was a lot more than we want to spend. So we took it home to decide what we want to do and what we do not “need” to do.

We went over to the house and looked at each item. All the kitchen, pantry and patio stuff are important to us so we will do those. Also having the floors cleaned and refinished and all the walls painted. Lighting is also important but we had already whittled that down from the “everything you could EVER possibly want” to what we “actually” wanted. The initial estimate was €10,000. We got it down to under €4,000.

The things we cut out of the budget were mostly in the attic areas – there are two of these. The areas are very large, great for storage. The estimate included painting the spaces and tiling the floor which we pretty much nixed. We are OK with them cleaning out all the old stuff left up there. I am thinking we can just take a couple of cheap carpets up there to cover the crumbled concrete floors and still use it for a lot of storage. We will still have them put vent windows in to release the heat up there and replace the small windows that are in each attic. We also discovered we could see down into the kitchen from up there so that needs to be fixed!!

Other stuff that we nixed were sealing and waxing the vaulted ceilings and the living/dining room beams. I am OK with them as they are. Also changing the steps in the hall. Emanuele said it would be good to make them more level. Hard to describe. I need to take some pictures. Anyway, in the end you would walk from the hallway onto level area with 2 steps down to the living room and 2 steps down to the foyer. Rather than one down now from the hall to the platform and then one down to the LR and foyer. Just not worth the expense.

Long story short, we eliminated about a quarter of the costs so that will work in the long run.