Monday - the water men arrive!
After a whole weekend with no water in the house, and having sent an online fault report to the water company on Sunday evening, as well as Donatella having managed to call them from her house and speak to someone who actually knew our house and water meter, we were hopeful of seeing some progress on the water front, even if not actual water coming out of our taps.We were preparing ourselves for another day or two without water - a prospect that in this weather was hard to bear (it's hard to decide whether it's worse being without water when it's freezing cold outside and the idea of plunging your hands into a bowl of ice-cold rainwater to rinse in is decidedly unpleasant, or whether it's worse in the middle of a heatwave when everyone gets hot and sweaty from even the merest exertion - we've now experienced both, and still can't decide). This led me to thinking about where Maslow would place 'water' if he had a hierarchy of household requirements - surely the primary function of a house is to keep the weather out, so number one must be walls and a sound roof. When it comes to the second most important requirement for a house, I couldn't decide between a water supply and a means of heating, but after talking it through with Helen we agreed that water, as a basic necessity of life, must come second - and warmth, by way of wood to burn, and to heat said water, would be easier to come by... we then laughed at the absurdity of a life in which we were fooled into thinking that having soft-close drawers was a basic necessity for a kitchen... a life that we left behind not so long ago.
Anyway, at around 9.15am on Monday morning, an engineer from Acque Spa. (the water company) arrived. I couldn't quite believe it, but boy was I pleased! This was far from the usual kind of time keeping we've slowly been getting used to from the laid-back Italians.
We had a brief chat and he told me that he'd already been to our meter (which is at the bottom of our hill and accessed from a track off the main road) and had found that the pipes were iced up. He wanted me to go down in the car with him to see for myself.
Sure enough, he disconnected the pipe from their side of the meter (it works the same here as in the UK, in that everything after the meter is our responsibility, and everything before it is theirs) and it was with relief that I saw that the pipe leading to the meter (i.e. their pipe) was frozen solid.
He told me that he suspected the pipe was frozen down into the ground too and some way along the mains, and also pointed out a one-metre section of our own pipe, which he said would also almost certainly be frozen.
He told me that he planned to go back to the office to speak to his boss with a view to starting work today - he wanted to bring back an excavator to dig out the earth and piping below it, and from what I could gather, put some sort of box or tank in the ground and re-do the pipework within it. This all seemed way too easy, but he whisked me back up the hill in his Fiat Panda and left me on the driveway wondering if I was still asleep and dreaming all of it!
By this time, Helen had disappeared in the car into Pescia for a coffee and catch-up with Sue, so I set to work on a new project for the week: re-building the area that was acting as a machinery storage area. The recent high winds finally put paid to the rather tatty-looking tarpaulin that was strung between the posts to protect the lawn mower, old generator and old cultivator, and not only was I keen to tidy the place up but I wanted to make somewhere for our new tractor to live out of the worst of the weather.
The first job was to clear the area so that I would have room to measure out and dig holes for new posts. This meant that I needed to move the old three-wheeled cultivator we'd inherited, so it was time to test out our tractor's pulling power for the first time. With a strong cord lashed to both the tractor and the cultivator, I slowly towed the old heap of metal along the driveway to a new, temporary home next to the wood pile - a job I couldn't have done without the tractor, so I was already feeling vindicated having spent the not inconsiderable sum of money on it!
Next it was manual labour with a shovel, digging out four new post holes for the rear posts, all the time dealing with lumps of local sandstone. Our local village (Pietrabuona) got its name ('good stone') for a reason, and don't I know it! Every time you want to dig a hole you can guarantee that you'll hit a lot of stone, and you just have to hope you don't hit anything immoveable. It's for this reason that I've started to favour steel fence posts - T-shaped in profile and no bigger that an inch across, it is much easier to drive them into the ground without hitting anything, and often if you do with enough 'wellie' you can even drive the posts through pieces of sandstone so long as they aren't too large. However, for this job the metal posts were not going to cut it - on previous, failed constructions these posts have bent either because of the wind catching the roof material or because of a build-up of water on the roof, so it was back to sinking a few posts into concrete again.
At around 11.30am, Helen messaged to tell me she was on her way home. Twenty minutes later there was no sign of her, and then another text message arrived, saying she was in a traffic jam! These have pretty much become a thing of the past for us since moving here, that combined with the fact that it was a short three-mile drive between Pescia and our village was puzzling.
Another half-hour later, she messaged again to say that she had managed to u-turn in order to head back to Sue's to wait it out - it had been 40 minutes of stationary queuing before she got the opportunity to make an about turn.
When she finally made it back home after watching the traffic clear from Sue's patio, it seemed that there might have been a gas leak, possibly due to the roadworks going along the road installing fibreoptic cable. We had until this point been blaming the very same roadworks for our lack of water, but as the water engineer explained our water now comes from a cistern way above San Lorenzo, so our supply line goes nowhere near the main road. This makes sense, of course, as to send water up from the town would involve some big pumps, whereas a cistern way above us allows gravity to do the work.
With Helen finally home we sat down to lunch before she headed into the office to do a few hours' paid work while I went back outside to continue digging holes and then loading the car to dump yet more rubbish at the bins as well as collect 20 litres of water from the roadside fountain so that we could at least wash dishes this evening.
While loading the car the guy from Acque called and told me he'd be back at around 14:15 to start work. After my trip to the bins, the water fountain and then Frateschi's to buy some materials I got home and took another phone call - this time it was Romeo, a guy who I'd first met when he came to our house to give me his opinion on whether a tractor or a mini-dumper would be suitable for our terrain and who I'd recently bumped into again at the restaurant in the village. I'd asked him to come and look at a clump of acacia trees I wanted taking down but was too worried about doing myself due to their proximity to the power lines. He was calling to say that he was in the village and would be here soon - I was starting to feel like a site manager, all this time on the phone dealing with workers and getting little done myself!
Romeo arrived shortly afterwards and instantly took an interest in the tractor ,so we chatted briefly about it but were soon interrupted by the Acque guy and his colleague arriving.
Mr Acque once again explained what he was about to start doing, but also told me that later I would need to pour boiling hot water down the pipes from somewhere near the house in order to melt any ice in the pipes further down. The Acque me then headed off to start digging - oh, for an excavator!
Romeo and I then climbed down the terraces to take a closer look at the trees and after much discussion and weighing up of the trees and which way they might fall, he said that most would not be a problem for him to cut, aided by his large tractor and winch, and that once the majority were out of the way we would be able to see more clearly the task involved in taking down the two or three amongst the electric cables.
After more tractor chat, he left saying that he would aim to come back on Thursday but would call me and keep an eye on the weather in the meantime.
It wasn't long before finishing digging my paltry four fence post holes that darkness began to fall so I put my tools away and went indoors to light the fire for the evening, feeling pretty satisfied with the day overall: despite not personally having done very much, a lot was happing on our behalf. Not only that, but the water had returned to the house just before 5pm! Showers all round!!
After lighting the fire I decided to dash down the hill to tell the guys that we'd got our water back, but all I could find were the trucks parked, and when I got to the meter I could just see the guys in their high viz clothing far into the woods across the river. As I turned back, I bumped into the neighbour whose house we have to drive behind in order to access our water meter. I'd met the son, Guliano, briefly in the summer (the last time we were having water issues), but now I was talking to his dad, Umberto, who lives in the same house.
Umberto turns out to be a lovely old guy, although he made no concession for my poor Italian despite me asking him to slow down! Nonetheless, we chatted for about 20 minutes, I say "chatted", but it was mainly one-way although I did manage to get a few questions in, and I grasped enough to glean that the factory at the very bottom of our hill (and behind his house) is now just a storage facility but previously used to manufacture metal fencing, and before that plastic plant vases.
I also learned that the small stone quarries on our land were in operation in a period as recent as shortly after the second world war, when apparently a stone mason lived and worked at our house.
While we were on the subject of the war, he told that as the Germans retreated up our valley towards the Gothic Line at the top of the valley, they destroyed the bridge in front of his house with explosives which damaged his house at the same time - he said that he has a photo of the damage that he would copy for us. As Bob Hoskins once said 'it's good to talk'!
Tuesday - water gone again/back again
On Tuesday I headed out first thing before breakfast to take Reggie for a walk as he'd missed out yesterday with all the site management and traffic issues, so we headed out to the chicken run for a good leg stretch.When I got back I found there was no water in the house again, but I had seen on my travels that the guys from Acque were back and parked up at the meter again, so we guessed that they had probably just switched it off again while they worked.
I then headed out while Helen worked away in front of her computer. I needed to buy a pile of wooden posts with which to make the new machinery shelter. I had decided that crude chestnut posts would be a little more aesthetically pleasing (not to mention cheaper) than regularised, pressure and chemically treated posts. Not having seen any chestnut posts like this at the usual shops, I decided to try a new agraria that I had not yet used - Sorini at Chiesina, a place that I had passed numerous times on the way to the autostrada with piles of the very fence posts I was after.
I parked up and started to nose around but was soon pounced on by the owner (Mr Sorini maybe?). I told him I needed ten 3-metre posts and eight 2.5-metre posts and he went to load them into the car, examining each one and sorting through them as he did, trying to find the better posts - even finding a 'bello' one, beautiful!
I followed him into the shop and we chatted for a while about where Helen and I live and why we'd decided to come here, and he told me about his daughter who is going to England in February to learn English. A very nice guy and I'll be going back to his shop again soon, not least because my wellies have sprung a leak and he seemed to have large selection of them in the shop!
After lunch, Samantha arrived for Helen's weekly Italian lesson. While the girls talked Italian indoors I took the tractor down the driveway to collect some of the gravel that we've had piled up next to the gate for the last 12 months as I needed to put some into the post holes as drainage.
I shovelled a heap of gravel into the bucket on the back of the tractor before trundling slowly back down the driveway (hoping not to meet Samantha coming the other way!). As I parked the tractor up again, I marvelled at how much time and effort that one trip along the driveway had saved us - those who have walked the long walk down the 250 metres of driveway with a loaded wheel barrow (Jill & Mike, Louise, Noah, Nick & Tess...) will know that it's no easy task, and in just one trip I must have transported about 8 barrow loads. I figured the trusty tractor would be saving us a day and half or even two of labour, so it's starting to pay its way already and hasn't even seen a piece of wood yet!
Wednesday - soil pipes
On Wednesday morning it was the usual dash up to the hill to Vellano for our group Italian lesson, this week going over what I missed last week when I stayed at home with our visiting friend Dave: the passato prossimo (recent past). It was something of a slow lesson, but pennies did drop for all of us in certain places so it was another satisfying and as ever enjoyable lesson, and we were soon heading back home for an early lunch.As it was another cold day, we lit the fire at lunchtime so that we could eat in comfort before both heading to work.
 |
| Frosty morning. |
Normally, I might have headed out with Reggie at this point, but his charge along the river yesterday seemed to have aggravated a swelling on his left front ankle (wrist?), which we think he picked up after charging through the woods in pursuit of a deer last week. Although not noticeably bothering him or slowing him down, the swelling was quite significant so we decided that a couple of days of rest was in order - he just can't seem to do gentle walking, it's either charging around like a mad thing, or nothing!
So instead of dog walking I had the joy of 'playing' with our soil pipes - a job I had put off for way too long, for one reason or another, and one that was making me increasingly nervous as what happened in the apartment before Christmas is not something anyone should have to deal with more than once in their lives (if ever). As seems to be the way here though, there are always numerous tasks vying for attention and shuffling their way up and down the priority list, so it was only now that I got to have a look at improving the waste situation.
My plan was to completely replace the two 8-metre runs of 100mm pipe from the house to the drop down the first terrace (to the septic tank) but to add a fall to them in the hope of permanently fixing the problem. It wasn't until I'd spent an hour digging around the pipes and disconnecting a lot of it that I realised my plan wasn't going to work - the toilet waste that exits from the apartment is as high as the pipe can go, so I can't raise the pipes to add a fall. All I could now do was to add in a load of inspection/rodding access points at all elbows in the piping and commit to regular checks from here on in. A least with the new access points we would be able to clear any future blockages easily and without dismantling the pipes, so off I went on a shopping trip to Frateschi to buy all the bits and pieces needed.
As the light faded my enthusiasm went with it - it was freezing cold, the mains water had come back on after a third day of works down at the meter, and I had managed to reconfigure the pipework and fitted some of the new inspection caps, so I called it a day and went indoors for a much needed shower.
Thursday - timber!!
Thursday morning, as promised, Romeo called me around 10am to say he was on his way, and he soon rolled up in his 100 horse power diesel monster tractor, ready for business. |
| This monster makes our tractor look like a toy! |
After winching a couple of large trunks up onto the driveway Romeo packed up and went for lunch at the local restaurant, leaving Helen and me to spend the afternoon trimming up the remaining felled trees and lugging all the large pieces we could manage by hand up to the driveway until it got dark and cold.
Friday - preparing for next winter
Romeo returned promptly on Friday morning, and he spent the morning dragging his winch cable down to trees on the terraces below, climbing back up to operate the winch, and then back down to repeat the process over and over until we had what he estimated to be around 60kg of wood on the driveway - maybe a whole winter's worth if we're lucky - we just just need to cut, split and store it all now, no small task!After a brief chat in which Romeo apologised for not being able to tackle the last two or three trees that are entwined in power cables (his tractor is too large to get in front of the house in order to use the winch effectively) but suggested that the electricity company, ENEL, should come out and cut them for us because of how dangerous they are (cue a difficult call to ENEL in the near future), he disappeared once again the direction of the local restaurant for much needed sustenance.
After lunch, and with Reggie still on a walk ban as his ankle/wrist remained swollen, Helen and I spent the rest of the afternoon with axe and chainsaw tidying up the epic mess on the driveway, starting a fire along the way to burn the small branches as we tidied. We eventually ended up with a nice tidy pile of trunks on the driveway as darkness fell, and even managed to burn the old desks from the office, thus doing a little more tidying around the back of the house at the same time.
 |
| Helen's workstation for the afternoon - beats an office. |
 |
| Tidying the car park. |
 |
| The results of just a couple of hours' work. |
 |
| Burn, baby burn. |
When it got dark, we headed back indoors to get some heat into the house, shower, and settle down for the weekend ahead.
No comments:
Post a Comment