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.