Today was a vile day. Snow and rain and cold. But I do admit it was kinda pretty. Not the best day for moving out though!
We got up early to go meet up with the movers. I had a few things to do that I thought of while I was supposed to be sleeping last night — I always do that 😑 They arrived on the dot and began packing. We made ourselves available for any questions they might have and hung around until they were nearly done. Walking back to our rental was disgusting.
Our agent, Jim, will do the closing for us. That is at 3:30 and it usually lasts an hour or two. Then we get the keys. That should be significant! We meet up tomorrow at eight for the removal of the household goods from the apartment which will be Step 3.
Today was very busy. We had to wash linens and try to organize all our electronics and cords. And clean things, throw away trash, etc. We did all that as best we could. Then we packed for ourselves for four nights away from home. All our computers, plugs, wires, clothing, etc. Then we turned to the cats. We packed up all their stuff. Bowls, food, litter, litter box, scratch post, heated pillow… They had more than we did!
We walked over to the apartment/BnB we rented and checked in. Then grabbed the car and went to get all the sundry stuff down our beloved 53 steps. Mission accomplished. Whew. The BnB is cute. Only thing is I think there is only one outlet in the whole place. That’s a complete exaggeration 😁. But there is only one in the downstairs area for sure. These old places are often wiring challenged. Here is a picture of the living room.
The cats have very different personalities. Simba, the smaller, is the alpha and not at all laid back. Rocky, the gentle giant, settles in quickly. They are going through all their rituals. Exploring, eating, Simba is jumping his brother. Much caterwauling. It will take time for them to settle…only to have to do it again on Thursday. Poor boyz.
I am not one to ever let a fireplace go to waste. So I got afire going and it’s quite cozy.
Tonight we are going to order takeout from Osteria del Boccojolo. It is just steps from here and I’m getting a pasta dish.
Tomorrow, at 8am we meet up with our trasloco company who are moving us. They will do the packing. Stay tuned…
Cold and blustery today. Snow predicted for the next few days. We won’t get much here in the valley. All is on track for the move. We move out tomorrow to the agriturismo. Our friend and agent Jim, is going to do our closing. He has been amazing! He seems to be able to get anything done. He probably doesn’t read this but thank you Jim, for everything!
I will post for the next few days little, short posts about how things progress. Wish us luck!
Well, time winds down. Doing the final move stuff. I am a Capricorn and therefore a very organized person. Also, my OCD husband says I am OCD too. Well, maybe so. I have a system with all my rooms color coded. We shall see how that works!
All of my boxes and furniture now have colored dots on them. I really want to limit the necessity of moving the boxes around once we are there. If I can get them in the approximate right places then I’m good.
Today I emptied out our chest freezer. We had begun to eat all the food frozen in there over the last couple weeks. Mostly what was left was frozen hot peppers. 😏 but also a ton of pesto, frozen cranberries — which I WILL NOT relinquish — crisco, chocolate chips and pecans from the US. Now that we have emptied both freezers I was able to save most stuff. Just had to throw away some peppers. It will all stay here until after we move.
We will be moving out of here Sunday into an agriturismo here in town. We will move the cats (and all their stuff!) and also several suitcases with all the things we will need for the beginning. I don’t want to have to be hunting in boxes to find the things we need first, like towels, sheets for the bed first night, etc. ~~~~~~ For fun stuff, we had a really nice time at the Books for Dogs quiz night. We teamed with friends, Ben and Karen. We had a favorable showing of third place. Tonight we will dine with our new friends.
That’s all the news that’s fit to print. More as we progress…Ciao for now!
So, I’m happy to report things still are on schedule for The Move. We had our meeting with our sellers. It was good to get back into the apartment because it has been a very long time since we viewed it. They are obviously working on getting out. They had SO much stuff. I can’t imagine. And they told us their house is not ready so they are storing their things and renting a small apartment.
We had a lot of questions which we got answered, but there was one pressing issue in my mind…that the floor plan I had was not the most recent. In my pictures of the apartment there appeared to be a room that was formerly a terrace. So, with our friend Jim we went straight upstairs and saw that I was right, there is a big room that was formerly a terrace. Marcella, one of the selling couple said the work was all done legally and there was a new Catasto. So long story short, the work was done but the Geometra did not do the paperwork and register at the Comune. This also happened to us in our present apartment. We moved the kitchen, which is a major change that needed to be registered. We didn’t know at the time that it was needed, and that it was not done. We got it done and all was well. Today we heard it was an easy fix and they would have it finished before closing next week. It made for a stressful weekend of waiting. Here is the mystery room! I love the space and have no idea what I will do with it. I need to decide this week if I want our office things put up here. I am leaning towards yes.
Here are a few pictures of the bathrooms and some other spaces. I was pleased to see they were leaving some of the built in storage closets. Not all, but enough. And all the built in bookcases. They will look pretty empty because we don’t have a lot of physical books anymore. Nor a lot of decorative things. I am sure we can make it nice…
Main bathroomGuest bathroom
This is the top floor. When I came up I smelled a lovely aroma. It was Marcella’s two lemon trees! See them in the photo above on the right? She keeps them inside in winter. They call it a lemonaia. The trees were full of flowers which have a very sweet aroma. This is also the space I will use to make my open plan kitchen. Behind that large china cabinet is a wall and a minuscule kitchen. We will remove that kitchen and the wall. Then across that whole back wall will be the kitchen and in front, an island. Looking forward to that project! Here is the minuscule cucina.
Very odd to me that Marcella and Walter do not have an oven in either kitchen. So strange. Do they never roast anything? Or bake anything? I couldn’t live without one. I am buying one that sits on the counter for the downstairs kitchen. But for the new kitchen it will be a very nice range, this time free-standing. Not built in like our present one.
So there you have our latest update. This week I have to do a lot of final stuff. We also are meeting some new friends for dinner Thursday. And there is a Quiz night tomorrow night — a benefit for books for dogs. Should be fun! Ciao for now! 🌈
We got the new year off with a bang! We are only five days in, four of those were working days, and already I have received my renewed drivers license and our new Tessere di Sanitaria, health care cards. I think getting the later this fast must be a record!
I also have an upcoming unpleasant test to prepare for. I think most can figure out what it is 😏. For this I had to get blood work done and buy meds which my doctor said were over the counter. Got both of those things done yesterday.
We did a pleasant task today as well. Thank goodness sometimes we get to do fun things! We ordered two beds for our new house. We have only one mattress that we are bringing so we also bought a new mattress. We visited our old friend Sr. Tiziano. We bought a lot of things from him back when we moved into this apartment. He has a showroom with some furniture. But he also has books full of products to order. I leafed through the copious pages and chose two pretty iron beds. I really like their look. Clean and spare. We asked if he could deliver the same day as we move into our new place and he can. That’s good because I want to move in as soon as we can. A bed to sleep in is essential.
Tomorrow is Epifania, Epiphany. It is a holiday here. The end of the Advent-Christmas season. I wrote a post about this and the beloved witch Befana who comes the eve of Epifania. It is an interesting story — check this link for the legend. All the Italian children wait for her to come and bring them gifts. Much like Santa. Anyway. I heard the town band playing and went to the window to see. They were coming down the street all dressed as witches! And one of them was dressed as Befana herself. She is the one in the scarf and checked apron.
We are nearing our move. I am doing some packing of things that I would rather not have the movers packing for me. Our guest room is piled with boxes. I have been purchasing some odds and ends that I think will come in handy. Like a hand truck. I love hand trucks. I used to manage all of the trade shows for my employer, back when I worked. I accompanied our big display booth, making sure it got to the show and back safely. I used a hand truck all the time. I decided it was just what I need now to move boxes around. I think Amazon knows how much I love hand trucks because they sent me two!
The weather is still vile. Not terribly cold, in the 50s in the daytime. Not cold at night. We did get down to 3C last week. I see next week it will become a deep freeze with temps to -3C at night. Time to cover the lemon tree!
We have been entertaining (!) ourselves getting some needed things done as you know from the last post. Yesterday we went to Città di Castello to Mailboxes Etc to mail a package to my sister and send Luther’s Passport off to the Embassy in Rome for renewal. What an ordeal. The instructions were to specifically “go to Mailboxes Etc” to mail and get a return envelope. The woman at the shop had no idea how to do this. Doesn’t seem they actually “have” return envelopes! So why would the Embassy website specifically instruct us to go to Mailboxes Etc? We hope what we did will work. Hopefully the embassy will call us if there’s a problem. We can always go to Rome to pick it up.
Then we drove past the Poste again, and it was again very crowded. So we skipped that. Finally we stopped at the little shop which does stuff for cars and drivers licenses etc. My license will expire on December 28 so I got the ball rolling to renew.
Later in the afternoon we were off to Perugia to have an adjustment done on Luther’s new hearing aids. They do seem to help. It is bad enough when you can’t hear well, but not hearing well in a foreign language sure doesn’t help with comprehension! We drove back along the E45 super strada. Bad traffic jams. Rain and dusk and road construction didn’t help. After we broke free we admired the trucks as they approached us on the other side of the highway. Some of them are amazing with all kinds of lights. A lot have lights in green red and white of the Italian flag. Many have the drivers name in neon lights in the front window. We oohed and ahhed. Luther said it was like looking at Christmas lights! Hah! It was! ~~~~~~~ Now for the BIG news…we got our closing date on the new house. January 23. A little longer away than we thought but it will work out ok. Now at least we can DO some things to prepare. We contacted the moving company and they gave us dates of 23-25 January to pack and move us. I decided I cannot pack the entire house myself. They will pack for us but it is an extra cost. So we opted for that and now I will stop packing. I sent out a request to reserve a place for us to stay for a couple days during the actual move. Someplace to take the cats where they will be out of the way and safe. And we need to order two beds and a mattress from our old friend Mr. Tiziano. We bought quite a bit of stuff from him when we moved here in 2014. If we’ve got beds, then at least we’ll have a place to sleep. It feels better that I can start working now! ~~~~~~~ They put the lights in the Christmas tree on Monday. Now it awaits it’s grand lighting ceremony tomorrow on L’Immacolata.
Lunch today was my old friend Zuppa di Cicerchie . You may remember this pea from previous posts. Here is what Wikipedia says about it: “Lathyrus sativus, also known as grass pea, cicerchia, blue sweet pea, chickling pea, chickling vetch, Indian pea, white pea and white vetch, is a legume commonly grown for human consumption and livestock feed in Asia and East Africa.”
Who knows how it came to Italy. It is common in the central Italian areas of Tuscany and Umbria, parts of Lazio and Abruzzo and the Marche. It fed the poor when nothing else was available. It is essential that it be soaked for at least 24 hours and the water be changed several times. It removes the toxins in the grain. It does make a delicious winter soup!
