Mid-week... again!

I think I must be getting older quicker over here, and I'm not just talking about the ageing effects of all this sun that I'm so unaccustomed to - blink, and half the working week has gone!! I'm sure there's a saying about time going quickly when you're having fun, but think it needs to have some small print added to say 'time also flies when you're flat-out busy'.

It was back into the apartment again for me this morning - where else!? I decided that my next job would be to repair the couple of joints in the plasterboard ceiling in the bedroom where the boards had been moved over the winter in order to access electrics (or so we were told). Once this has been done, the bed can go down and we can start to make it look like a real room.

(Despite finding the traditional tiles and beams behind the ceiling boards the other day, the final verdict was to put the plasterboard back - the boards are hiding waste pipes from the kitchen and shower room above, and it would take too much time, effort and money to make it look presentable. Maybe one day we will be able to uncover them, once we have everything else under control and time on our hands (ha!).)

So, I took a scraper to the ceiling to remove the flaky sections of plaster before repairing it, and... well... this kind of happened:

Multiple choice time now: is it (a) Tuscan snow, (b) mouse droppings, or (c) lime finish plaster?

The answer, of course, is (c) lime finish plaster, although you can have half a point if you chose (b) as there were quite a few of those amongst it all. In fact, I received a mouse dropping shower for my efforts whenever I moved one of the ceiling panels, and I had to move all 12 of them. I now suspect that the reason the previous owners had moved the boards to get into the ceiling space was not to look at the electrics but to 'remove' a family of squeakers that had somehow invaded.

Anyway, I fixed lengths of timber to the back of the plasterboard joints to remove the sags in the boards and level them with each other so that I could then start the process of filling the joints before painting. I'm not sure quite what sort of finish I'm going to achieve with the Italian ready-mixed filler I have, but it's got to be a darn sight better than what was there previously. In fact, this has been the only setback I've been happy about - the thought of a bodged ceiling being the first thing that paying guests see each and every morning was starting to give me sleepless nights!

Shortly after I'd finished making the mess, I spied a strange face outside the apartment door - it was a bit of a shock to see someone I didn't know and hadn't invited (we don't exactly get passers by here - not even the postman comes anywhere near the house, what with the post box being 160m away at the end of the drive). I went outside to say hello. In those initial few seconds of meeting, I couldn't quite decide what nationality he was: he was certainly tanned enough to be a local, but as I wasn't expecting anyone, the only person I could think it might be was Chris, husband of ex-pat Sue who paid us a visit last week. Based on this, I opted for a 'hello', which I soon discovered was the wrong choice! That was no problem, however, as the man, who introduced himself as Sergio, spoke very decent English and seemed to enjoy the chance to practise it! We had heard of Sergio through the previous owners - he, or at least friends/colleagues of his, had been responsible for sand blasting all of the internal ceilings and beams in the house, re-roofing the house, and rendering it. He had also given the previous owners an estimate for building the extension.

We had a good chat about 'stuff', and then I took him upstairs to the house to write down his mobile number. Helen got say hello too, and we also picked his brains about solar thermal heating as it seems that he can help us with getting that sorted too. He has invited us to his house next week to have a look at his own solar heating system, excellent!! He seems like a really nice guy, and fun to talk to, so we'll look forward to developing that relationship soon.

So, after waving goodbye to Sergio and sweeping up the 'snow' (I must have accumulated about 25kg of the stuff), it was already time to repair to the patio for lunch - see what I mean about time flying?!

After lunch, I was in need of another trip to Obi for more filler and there was a long list of other items that we now needed for the apartment too: a loo roll holder, a towel holder, a new bathroom bin, a new loo brush, a shower curtain, some wood to make a new frame around the shower room window to tidy that up (Helen's biggest aggravation), a pole to hang coat hangers on in the newly constructed wardrobe... the list went on.

Helen jumped at the chance to come along and see the outside world, so off we went. We've noticed that leaving the house feels like a bit of a treat, something we really quite enjoy and we miss it if we don't do it for a couple of days - not because we're glad to leave all the work behind, but I think because being up here on this hill of ours, it's all too easy to forget where you actually are. The sun is out most days, so it's fairly obvious you're not in England, and the old stone buildings in the village below are something of a giveaway too, but still, without close-up contact with people or other scenery, we tend to forget where we are, so going out kind of has the feeling of being on holiday - because all of a sudden you actually are in Italy! Simple things!

By the time we got back (complete with lawn mower that Helen snuck into the trolley - that definitely wasn't on my shopping list), there was only an hour or so of the working day left. Helen went back to her office for another hour and I tinkered around in the apartment putting some of the new fixtures in the shower room.

Things are starting to take shape quite nicely now:

Clearly the ceiling needs finishing and re-painting (white).

The curtains need adding to the wardrobe - oh and the bed needs putting back in.

There will be a shower curtain on those curtain rings....

When Helen logged off for the day she came down to the apartment to find me, excited about the prospect of getting the shiny new lawn mower out of its box and putting it to work on the lawns (which have gone somewhat out of control since their last haircut a couple of weeks ago). After her previous attempt to trim the lawns with a strimmer she was excited to give them an altogether neater look with the new lawn mower.

I duly started unpacking and assembling the mower. A fine looking thing:

Certainly looks the job.

Unfortunately, I had to break it to Helen that she would have to keep a lid on her excitement for at least another day - the one thing the lawn mower did not come with was a cable. In fact, I'm not even sure where to find the sort of plug/cable combo needed for this thing:

You what?!

Just like everything else we're discovering with this house, nothing is ever straightforward!

So that was our day, a bit more progress in the apartment - we must be running out of backward steps down there now, so each new day should (I hope) bring it forward in leaps and bounds.

Happy halfway through the week, folks!