What a week!

Apologies for the lack of blog updating, it's been something of an eventful week AND weekend, but all the events have been crammed into the latter part of the week - such is the way of crumbling cookies.

The start of the week saw us hopeful that the oven repair man would be returning (having told us the previous Wednesday that the spare part he needed would take 3 days to arrive). That hope was promptly dashed on Tuesday morning when he informed me that the part (a new thermocouple) had not yet arrived, but that he expected it to arrive in a week. In theory, this should mean that we will definitely have a working oven and hob this coming week - a huge step forwards, and although we've rarely missed the oven it will be great to have it as it will make many more recipes available to us, and as the temperature starts to drop over here and thoughts turn back to log fires over the coming months, we can't help but feel a little excited at the prospect of the odd stew or a roasted pumpkin dish. Of course whether the oven repair man meant a standard calendar week or an Italian week, we're not certain... so watch this space.

The outdoor kitchen isn't so bad!

By midweek, I was ready to pick up the tools in earnest - and not just any tools, but my old faithful plastering tools. These tools felt almost like extensions of my arms in England, but have barely seen any use since getting here.

The overall drive this week was to try and get the three water tanks that had been painted by Kerys and Ben, and which were still currently scattered across the parking area, into their permanent home place before our next set of guests arrived on Friday afternoon. However, before the tanks could be put in place I needed to render the area of outside wall adjacent to where they were going to go - a job that would be impossible once the tanks were in place.

I had hoped to get away with rendering this section of wall in one go, with one coat, but my optimism was quashed before I'd even finished the first bucket of plaster - the combination of the low suction of the stone and the low stickiness of the sand-based render meant that only a thin coat could be applied without it slumping back off the wall. I needed more than a thin coat on these stone walls, so I had to settle for a thin 'scratch coat', which had to be left to dry overnight before applying the top coat. So with the scratch coat done before lunch I turned my attentions to pouring some concrete pads for the the water tanks to sit on.

I used a leftover plank that had been part of the floor of the old woodshed to make two frames into which I could pour concrete and set about digging out the ground so that I could place the frames in the ground nice and level before filling them with concrete to leave overnight.

Hello old friend!

Scratch coat done...where are you DODGE!?

Top coat done, rubbed up and cut off at the bottom to allow some rising moisture to escape

Water tank bearing pads one and two coming up!

Pads one and two poured, 75kg of conrete in each.

On Thursday morning I was up and straight outside after breakfast feeling much more like my 40-year-old self again after several weeks of feeling under par. Having removed the wooden frames from the first two concrete pads - which were now set solid - and set the frames ready for the next two (of 8), I had them poured before mid morning, which meant there would be enough time for these two to set and for me to pour a further two before the day was out, leaving me two last ones to do on Friday morning before we could finally move all the tanks into place.

Pads one and two set solid!

Pads three and four poured.

With pads 3 and 4 setting and a coffee despatched, I headed out on a shopping mission of unknown destinations - unknown because Reggie has now become proficient at climbing the lovely fence we (thanks again Nick and Tess!) built for him. I needed to find some way to adapt the fence that would prevent any further successful attempts at escapology (and, more to the point, prevent any successful attempts at chasing the cats and/or pestering guests), and since Donatella had banned me from fitting either an electric fence or anti-climb spikes to the top of it, I had no other choice but to find some 135-degree brackets to fit to each fence post that I could net - it's a little hard to explain the intended end result, but think POW camp and wait for the photos...

I had no idea where to find these items - they were easy enough to find on the internet... but here? Would it be a builders' merchant? a hardware store? a pet shop? an agricultural yard? I braced myself for a long day's searching based on past experiences.

It would have be churlish to pass by Frateschi, it being in the local village, so armed with a photo on my phone and a sentence from Google Translate, I made it my first stop and soon had Paolo thumbing through his vast catalogues before finally conceding defeat. However, Paolo did suggest that I could buy some 'black steel' from one of his sheds, which I could then cut, bend and drill into what I wanted, so I wandered off across to the yard to look around the storage huts before finding racks of 6-metre lengths of this 'black steel'. I found an off-cut of something that I guessed might be perfect, and Paolo was happy for me to take it away and give it a try - could it really be this easy? I was hoping that it could be, but I wouldn't know until after lunch.

So, after lunch, and after much messing around with an angle grinder, a corded drill and a bench vice for bending, I'd fashioned what I hoped was the perfect anti-climb fence bracket attachment thingy (although of course it is still untested by Reggie). I was so excited by this that headed straight back to Paolo to buy another 30 metres of the stuff without a thought as to how I was going to load 6-metre lengths into the car.

Luckily, just as I was ordering this from Paolo, my Albanian builder friend Angelo arrived in search of plant food (yup, it seems that over here, builders merchants also stock plant food - so you can see the difficulty we have in locating stuff over here!). It was while I was listening to a half-hour conversation between Paolo and Angelo in Italian, which I could barely follow but seemed to revolve around how complicated things are in Italy (nice to know we're not the only ones!), that I realised that I had no way of cutting these enormous lengths of steel - cue Angelo, who took his grinder out of his car and came and cut the steel for me into manageable 3m lengths!

By the time I got home it was 6pm already and I'd yet to pour the next couple of concrete pads, so after a quick glass of beer, I got back to work, and as the light faded, Helen cooked dinner in our outdoor kitchen and I poured pads 5 and 6 by the light of the LED security lights before heading indoors for a well deserved plate of pasta.

Friday was 'Community Day'. Between five of us: Helen and me, Donatella, Sarah and David, we have decided that, whenever time and other work allows, we should try to dedicate half a day a week to helping each other out on each other's land - with some lunch thrown in. This week we had decided to start at ours, and the gang were due to arrive at 8.30am. Having procured the anti-climb fence materials we were going to focus largely on that, with a few other little jobs thrown in.

After coffee in the early morning sun, we all set to work. Helen and Sarah set about finishing cleaning the apartment in preparation for the arrival of another set of guests this afternoons - this included dealing with a less than pleasant smell in the apartment that had just started... but more on that later... while Donatella turned her attention to the mowing of the lawn and the removing of the old (and now ineffective) anti-climb measures from the fence, and David helped me with the manufacturing of 46 new anti-climb brackets. Donatella and Sarah later turned their attention to the picking of tomatoes and trimming of tomato plants while Helen prepared lunch - and all of this was with visit from Angelo (the builder) and a plumber thrown in, to give us a quote for our almost approved solar water heating system.

Donatella mowing the lawn for us!

David putting his grinding skills into action, not those of the dancing variety, the roofing variety... or so he tells me.

A nice pile of almost machine precision anti-Reggie-climb brackets.

The tomato dream team of Sarah and Donatella, picking and trimming.

The resultant tomatoes.

It was an amazing buzz of busy-ness all morning and one that gave us a warm fuzzy feeling that friends would willingly give up their valuable time to help toil with us. It was a thoroughly enjoyable morning (for me at least, I can't speak for everyone) in which we achieved a huge amount - an amount that would have taken me a week to do on my own.

Lunch, which included tomatoes picked just half an hour earlier, finished just before mid-afternoon, at which point Donatella went to walk poor Ray who had been stuck in the back of her car all morning with the exception of a short walk before lunch and an unplanned walk with Reggie before we started. The earlier walk was unplanned because we'd decided to take Reggie out to the car park on his leash to have a sniff around - he'd clearly picked up that Ray was around (he could hear him barking), and seemed agitated, so we thought that if we took him out on the leash and let him have a sniff around, he might settle down. Having done so, we took Reggie back into the garden (through a different gate) so that Donatella could get Ray out for a little stretch of his legs - at which point Reggie ran straight around the other gate that we'd completely forgotten we'd left open, and charged straight out to "introduce" himself to Ray. This was something of a disaster as Ray has no time for playful adolescents and Donatella had to resort to one-handedly picking up all 25kg of Ray to get him out of Reggie's way - who by the time I ran to the scene (by way of a rare sprint) was jumping up and trying to nip poor Ray.

With Reggie safely back on leash, Donatella suggested we try and turn the affair into a more positive experience so together we walked the two dogs along the driveway, Reggie being kept at a respectful distance from Ray and being treated to a very intimidating snarl from Ray when he got too close.

It was nice to have our first dog walk together, but a real shame it was under such stressful circumstances! It's clear that we still have some way to go before a full and proper friendship is achieved between these two.

But I digress. As the gang left after lunch (Sarah bearing a load of dirty washing for us, after having offered a laundry service while our machine is out of action and we await the arrival of our new one) we got back to work ourselves, which included pouring the last of the concrete water tank pads and having a good tidy up ready for the guests to arrive between 4pm and 8pm that afternoon.

Concrete pads 7 and 8 eight poured and water tanks 1 and 2 stacked.

Now, back to the odd smell while we wait for them to arrive: over the last couple of days, on the odd occasion (and only when we sat on the sofa in our living room) we had noticed a faint, but mildly unpleasant smell. As seems to be human nature, we did no more than say "that's odd", give it a little thought, but then forget about it as it was so intermittent we parked the problem to deal with later, thinking that Reggie was to blame (probably having lost something down the back of the sofa).

It was only when the apartment cleaning was started on Thursday that we realised the same smell was beneath the sofa - down in the apartment, only stronger! Why did we not think to look downstairs earlier? Well, I'm blaming the fact that as it isn't part of our living space we forget it's there when nobody is occupying it - in fact we often forget it's there when people are occupying it.

So, the smell was stronger -  not so strong that it was a cause for concern just yet, but enough to know that when we next had a gap between visitors we would have to sort it out. Having given a bit thought to the issue, I realised that the septic tank system that had been installed by our predecessors had been installed without any vents whatsoever - and even my rudimentary knowledge of plumbing meant that this had the whiff of a cowboy job about it... as well as other whiffs.

Come Friday morning, with three other noses to pass comment, everyone agreed that it must be a plumbing and septic tank issue - we decided to "feed" the septic tank with more enzymes to see if it would help and as the day wore on, the smell dissipated and with much relief we thought the problem had been solved.

Come 6pm on Friday, we finally called an end to the week and in turn we each headed for a shower in readiness for going out that evening - little did we know that they would be our last showers for a few days!

8pm came and went and our guests still hadn't turned up. The evening out we had planned was an 'end of summer' bash at the Bistrot in Vellano with Donatella, Sarah and David. This was due to start at 8pm and as we knew that it was fully booked we didn't want to be too late or risk being seated somewhere on the huge communal table for 50 in a less than optimal place, i.e. not with friends!

Having failed to contact our guests we had no choice but leave to leave a note on the door for our guests and head up the valley with Reggie onboard - we decided it would both be an unfair welcome to our guests to have a dog barking his head off above them all evening, and unfair to Reggie to have to worry about having heard bangs and bumps below.

We parked up and headed into the Bistrot, which was jam packed to bursting point - and it was just as we walked into the crowded room that my mobile phone rang: our guests were lost, their Sat Nav having told them our address didn't exist. By the time I'd established where they were and had finished directing them to our house it seemed there were no more places at the table, so we decided to head back home to sort our guests out - much to Reggie's relief!

We got home to find they had just arrived so we showed the to their quarters before leaving them in peace to relax. It turned out that they had already been in Italy for a few days - during which their luggage had been stolen in Milan while they were sightseeing, and they had had to cope with a flat tyre - not a great start to their holiday, and after getting lost in the dark trying to find us they seemed frazzled and ready to collapse after a long day.

With the guests happily accommodated I headed down to the restaurant (Da Nerone) in Pietrabuona for takeaway pizza. Having psyched myself up for an Italian buffet, an emergency plate of pasta with pesto was not going to cut it for me and I think Helen could tell as much as she gave in straight away to my request for pizza. 20 minutes later, after a beer at the bar while I waited for our pizzas to be cooked in the wood-fired oven, I was back home with dinner which was devoured in double quick time, it being almost ten o'clock already.

When, the next morning, I went down to say hello to our guests properly and asked how they slept, I was more than taken aback when they said the hadn't slept a wink! My first thought was that maybe Reggie had been making some noise all night long, his bedroom being above theirs, but I knew that Helen wouldn't have slept through that. When I asked why they hadn't slept, they told me that there was such a bad smell in the apartment they simply couldn't sleep through it... Clearly the smell that we thought had been got rid of, had not only returned but intensified.

I felt sick with disappointment for them - instead of a happy start to their already faltering holiday we had inadvertently added to their woes (or should I say the previous cowboys had).

I apologised profusely and told them that we would do our very best to remedy it during the course of the day but that if we couldn't, we would refund them fully and help them to find alternative accommodation elsewhere.

Being very reasonable people, they headed out to do some shopping, leaving Helen and me to start digging out the pipes and dismantling the politely named "soil stack" in the hopes that the lack of vent was the problem and that by dismantling the soil stack from our own part of the house, it would provide immediate relief to the problem. This did mean that our own bathroom (and kitchen) was no longer connected to the septic tank and therefore no longer usable... but needs must, and when the guests returned a few hours later and ventured into the apartment, they reappeared with a smile saying that it was 70% better already- so it was with a huge sigh of relief that we told them to open the doors and windows to air the place properly.

Feeling confident that we had resolved the problem, we headed out after lunch towards Montecatini Terme to try and find the appropriate parts to rebuild our soil stack, but this time including a vent above the roof.

Our first stop was Obi - which let us down completely, having a very poor offering in plumbing supplies. Our next stop was Obi's competitor, Brico, who were closed until 3pm (15 long minutes away) so we headed off, now clutching at straws in search of 'Big Mat', a proper builders' merchant. I was fully expecting them to be closed on a Saturday afternoon, but at this point we were willing to try anything to delay the disappointment and huge inconvenience (excuse the pun) of not having a bathroom for as long as possible.

Sure enough, at Big Mat the gates we're closed - cue sinking hearts, but not for long! According to the sign, they were just closed for lunch and would actually be open again at 4pm!! Not only that, but tantalisingly, we could see a huge selection of large diameter pipes and connectors in a cage - we virtually punched the air with excitement - in an hour's time, we  would be sorted, all we had to do was kill an hour.

We drove around unfamiliar roads for a while trying to find somewhere for a drink to kill time, but ironically, we found that most bars were closed... for lunch! We went around in circles for a while until we made a spontaneous turn into a little retail area we'd not yet frequented. Part of the reason we've never ventured into this area before is that it hosts a very large advertisement for a 24-hour 'sexy shop' - not giving it the impression of being the most salubrious area! As it turned out, there was a small bar that, while unassuming from the front proved to be a lovely modern affair and we settled in for a couple of enjoyable drinks, very pleased with our find.

It's not so bad killing time!

As the time ticked on to almost 4pm, we paid the bill and headed off for Big Mat with a shopping list of plumbing items. We parked up, and with list in hand, we pushed through a gate to find a couple of women coming out of a dark store. They asked us what we wanted, I spent sometime establishing what it was we needed, only to be told that the shop was closed and only the showroom was open on a Saturday afternoon!! They also told us that, in fact, they didn't even stock the items we needed in any case, so not only would we have to wait until Monday, but we'd also have to find somewhere else to source the parts from!

Feeling deflated, we finally returned home empty handed. On the bright side of things, we found our guests appearing from the apartment having had a very peaceful and smell-free siesta, which had them viewing the world through a much happier lens. Keen to meet Reggie, we invited them up to our patio for a glass of wine and a very enjoyable hour or so's chatting before they headed off to Montecarlo, on our recommendation of course, for some dinner.

Pleased that we had at least finally got our guests' holiday off on the right footing, we went indoors happy and settled down to a bottle of wine and a movie, feeling tired both from the day's physical exertion and from stress!

Being without a functioning bathroom, you won't be surprised to hear that we were up and out very promptly on Sunday morning - almost too quickly for Reggie to finish his breakfast before being harnessed ready for a walk!

We stopped at Da Nerone in Pietrabuona for coffee and pastries - and (most importantly) use of their facilities - before heading into Pescia under very grey skies to walk Reggie along the river.

As we walked along the river, it wasn't long before I recognised a dog heading towards us. It was Riegel, a dog Reggie and I had met before, along with her owner Carlo. The last time we met, Reggie and Reigel had got on so well that I stood chatting for ten minutes or so with Carlo, a lovely man of 70 years with a smattering of English, before we parted company. This time started in a similar vein, with Reggie and Reigel having a great time running around, playing with each other. After a lengthy stationary chat, we decided to finish our walk together. Before long, we came across another guy with his dog, Giotto - who Reggie seemed rather fearful of. It turned out that the dog's owner, another very friendly guy, runs the car dealer AutoPippi in Pescia - the place we should have bought our car from rather than CartoCar...

Anyway, another ten or fifteen minute chat followed while the three dogs played before we headed off again, walking with Carlo and his dog until we reached our usual point of about turn, and headed back to our respective cars. We waved goodbye to Carlo and Reigel, arranging to meet again next Sunday for a walk.

When we got home I went to see our guests - with my breath held, I asked if they had had a better night... Their answer was that they has slept like babies and were very happy indeed! PHEW!!

Feeling relieved, we left Reggie at home and headed to Vellano to collect our washing from David and Sarah. Of course we stayed for a coffee and a good catch up with them, and would have loved to have stayed for longer were it not for the looming task of supermarket shopping that dragged us away.

Having checked in on Reggie at the house, we headed out in the now POURING rain to do the shopping. On the plus side, we were pleased to find Esselunga almost empty, and were in and out and on our way in no time. This meant we had plenty of time for another social stop: more coffee, this time at the Phillips house. We had a great catch-up and chat with Chris and Sue while the boys headed out with their roller blades and skate boards to make the most of a break in the rain.

We eventually decided it was time to head home to make sure Reggie was OK, and while I sat down to write this rather long episode, Helen is attempting our second and hopefully more successful batch of passata (the first batch having ended in ominously hissing jars, which were soon disposed of) from the huge basket of tomatoes that Sarah and Donatella picked for us Friday.

Congratulations if you've made it to the end of this update with your eyes still open! Wish us luck for the coming week when we hope to have a fully functioning toilet and bathroom back in order, a new washing machine and a fixed oven. We live in hope, it's all we've got!

Passata...take two!