Come on spring... we're coming out fighting!

On Monday I went down to the apartment to evaluate the situation. You may remember that we'd left it a little like this:

Errrrr. Whoops! What happened to our lovely apartment!?

After some much needed help from Helen at the weekend to clean up the worst of the mess and flip the plasterboard over and lay it onto the floor for protection, we'd decided to try and keep the beautiful old chestnut beams exposed, but not without a certain amount of effort.

After taking down the plasterboard, it had become clear that the state of the floor/ceiling above and the beams themselves was somewhat questionable in places. Forever looking for the positives in the situations we find ourselves in, we realised that had we not taken down the ceiling (and made such an enormous mess of the apartment and given ourselves such a huge job to do), we would never have known that there was anything wrong with the ceiling and would have happily continued oblivious, perhaps until someone fell through a hole from above or the ceiling collapsed into the apartment below... 

Found the original cast iron waste u-bend.

Rather suspect looking repairs that had been hidden by the plasterboard ceiling.

I decided to upgrade two of the fake beams that had previously been holding the plasterboard in place to real beams. Said fake beams had previously been stained a rather gaudy shade of orangey brown, so first I used my wire brush to remove the old stain, before fixing them into place as actual integral parts of the ceiling and beam structure.

My wire brush working wonders on the orange-stained beams.

Two new beams in place and redundant waste removed - just need a cap for the 110mm pipe.

With that done it was time for lunch followed by a dash into the village to show the doctor my thyroid test results (from several weeks ago) to be greeted with a full waiting room - not helpful for productivity but it it gave me an hour and a quarter to read some more of the book I'm currently reading, which has been passed from Helen's Mum, Jill, to Helen and now onto me: 'War in the Val d'Orcia' - a fascinating read.

After getting a 'very good' appraisal from my doctor on the blood test and blood pressure fronts, I left with a prescription for an asthma inhaler (I've never before suffered from this but my breathing had been heavy of late, the Doctor said it's just the time of year... well, we'll see).

On Tuesday morning, Helen headed down to the apartment in a miserable-looking morning: low, heavy cloud after a night of heavy rain did little for my own motivation to get up, so I stayed under the covers for another hour until Helen returned to hop into the shower.

By the time she came out of the shower I was gazing across the valley from my cosy spot in bed at the snow dusted hills above Pietrabuona! The heavy cloud had all of a sudden cleared to reveal the white dusting below.

After breakfast, and as Helen was waiting for some work to arrive, we both headed out for a walk with Reggie. We decided to use the chicken run walk along the river, knowing it would be nice and quiet on a school day (and a cold and damp one at that), which it was - we didn't see another soul.

After the walk, we refuelled the car at the nearby methane station and headed home for lunch and a quick tidy before Chris arrived to do a little video editing with me. I had recently offered to help him out with a promotional video for Pescia Rugby Club in order to help them raise some much needed funding, and today we'd arranged for him to come up and make a start.

He arrived clutching a laptop, a tablet PC and a video camera, and after a couple of coffees we got to work for the afternoon making small but significant progress. Sue came to collect Chris at the end of the afternoon, which made for the perfect opportunity for an impromptu glass of wine and a chat.

There will be no sneak previews of the video, but rest assured that when it is finally finished, I'll be sharing it where possible to try and help their cause - the club, which Chris and Sue set up themselves and run on an entirely voluntary basis and free-of charge (participation in any form of sport for kids in Italy is usually very expensive), desperately needs a proper training ground and better facilities to keep expanding and to continue bringing the joy of rugby to local school kids.

Wednesday was our group Italian lesson day, so after breakfast we left Reggie at home with Florence (in separate rooms of course) and headed up to Vellano to meet the gang for our lesson. The lesson was based around our homework from the previous week, concentrating on two different types of past tense (the passato prossimo and imperfetto), which took us all lesson to work through and took us up until almost midday before we'd finished with the usual chit-chat afterwards.

The snowy view from Vellano.

After lunch, I decided to take Reggie out for a walk as I knew that if I got started with work in the apartment before doing so, he would be unlikely to get one at all.

Reggie and I headed back up to Vellano to the quarry track in the hope that we might see a little of the snow that had fallen the day before and sure enough there was still a smattering around. The track itself was clear, but amongst the trees and higher up at the reservoir there was plenty for Reggie to enjoy rolling around in.

First snow of the winter...for us at least.

Reggie enjoying his snowy walk.

On Thursday it was back to work as normal and I spent a couple of hours with my large hammer chisel drill taking up more of the concrete floor in our utility room to facilitate the needed repairs in the ceiling below. This was not conducive to Helen's work, as you can imagine, with only a 4-inch block wall separating us, but by lunchtime I'd make enough of a mess to be able to stop.

By today, the cold and wet weather of recent days had well and truly passed and we enjoyed a glorious lunch outside on the veranda for the first time in a long time - which made it really feel like spring was heading our way (which then instilled a mild panic into me, knowing how much we still have to do before spring arrives and all I've done in the last week is add more work to our to-do list!).

After lunch, we got ready for Samantha's visit, as Helen's lesson had been moved to Thursday this week. At this point I had no choice but to turn my attentions to much quieter work, and it was with this excuse that I left the apartment in its 'just been bombed' state and instead did a few things outside to make myself feel a little better about the advance of spring.

As Helen worked on her ever-improving Italian indoors, I got to enjoy the glorious sunshine outdoors while I tended to the chickens, test-painted one of three inherited concrete plant pots with some copper-effect paint we'd bought months ago, and turned out all of the last year's compost ready for transporting to the veg garden (and what a heap we had! over 300 litres I would guess, or four large sacks).

Chickens diving into the small compost heap, wire netting not quite up to their weight though.

Fresh compost...over 300 litres of it! But could still do with more...

Oi... copper! No, not that copper, think I'll do the other two!

Finally, I made a start on the terrace strimming, which desperately needed doing with the grass on the verge of getting out of hand.

As I finished the tank of fuel in the strimmer, Helen emerged with Samantha to head together into Pescia for Helen's first Italian hair cut. Samantha had kindly made Helen an appointment with her own hairdresser and was taking her down there and planning to act as interpretor for this all-important first meeting (to make sure she didn't come out with bright red hair, as quite often seems to be the fashion around here).

In the hour I had before going to collect Helen, I dismantled the temporary greenhouse (frost shelter) outside the house as I was keen to prune our citrus trees. The RHS advises to prune citrus trees in February, and we were already 10 days or so into March, but such was the snug fit of the greenhouse I wasn't going to be able to prune without dismantling it (I clearly hadn't thought that through when constructing it). Since the weather forecast was now for good weather for at least the next ten days, I wasted no time in dismantling the greenhouse, feeling safe in the knowledge that we wouldn't be seeing any frosts any time soon.

Soon after discovering two stowaway lemons that had somehow grown to full size without us seeing them, I was Pescia-bound with Reggie in the back of the car so that we could give him a short walk once I'd found Helen.

Surprise!

I parked in the piazza and walked in the general direction of where I knew the hairdresser's salon to be and soon spotted a beautiful lady walking my way, who I could see was smiling at me from a distance. Of course I returned the smile (it would have been rude not to wouldn't it?) and of course it was Helen, who was indeed looking beautiful with her perfectly blow-dried hair, looking like she'd never seen a day's farm work in her life.

After a short dog walk along the river, during which we spotted Donatella walking Ray on the opposite side, we made a short stop at the Phillips's to drop off a tripod for some video camera work and headed home to light the fire.

Friday was a fairly uneventful day: I had agreed for Chris to come up again after lunch to continue working on the rugby video, which meant that before lunch I needed both to walk Reggie and to do the supermarket shopping. Neither of these activities were worthy of remark other than to say that, being the crazy and spontaneous sort that am, I decided to do the food shopping backwards, starting at the bottled water and working backward to the fresh veg - and I managed the entire shop without forgetting anything (I realise it's possibly a little early to be making such a bold claim, I'll only be able to do so with impunity once the week has passed and we haven't starved).

The afternoon was once again spent thrashing out more of the rugby video over numerous cups of strong coffee and tea before Chris was collected by Sue at the end of the day, leaving us to open a bottle of wine and enjoy an evening's TV in front of a very toasty fire looking forward to what was forecast to be a sunny weekend ahead.