I spent a couple of hours after breakfast with my large chisel-enabled drill attacking the surprisingly tough 4-inch concrete floor in the utility room that had been poured directly on top of the original cotto tile flooring some years back instead of repairing the original floor - something of a suspect plan in that as the original floor starts to deteriorate you add hundreds of kilos of weight to it... The sooner it was out the better, and the more I got out, the worse state the floor appeared to be in. The mortar between the original two layers of tile was no more than sand now, or worse, just dust, heaps of it, and despite opting to push all rubble directly down into the apartment and working with the door closed, dust, like water, seems to always find a way and by lunchtime when I surfaced from the room literally every surface in the house was covered in a thick layer of dust.
Fortunately, spring had sprung and the weather was beautiful so we retreated outside for an al fresco lunch, breathing the clean air into our lungs, along with the smells of spring.
Lunch was a relaxed affair, largely because it was hard to tear ourselves away from the patio and the glorious weather, but also in part because Frateschi doesn't open until 14:30 and I needed a pile of new cotto tiles before I could go any further with the job.
After a trip to buy the tiles and picking the brain of Danilo in the yard about the materials used these days for re-laying a new floor in a traditional style, I loaded 4 packs of tiles into the boot and headed home.
Before getting started on the flooring I decided it prudent to take Reggie out for a walk just in case I got so involved in the job of cutting and laying tiles I didn't want to go out again so we hopped into the car and headed for the quarry near Vellano.
It was then back to work and making a start on replacing and fixing a few new beams before laying new tiles on top. The process for making a traditional floor like this is that you have very large chestnut beams embedded into the walls roughly every couple of metres, then at 90 degrees to these and laid on top you have much smaller chestnut beams, spaced so that you can lay the cotto tiles across them, then goes on a layer of concrete with steel mesh embedded, on top of which you lay your floor material - traditionally another layer of cotto tile.
The tiles I bought were 30 x 15 centimetres, so I spaced the new beams accordingly, only to find out that the tiles weren't as labelled and were an extra centimetre larger, meaning I had to cut that centimetre off most of the tiles - a painfully slow setback, but by the time darkness was approaching I had three of the four rows cut and laid. From beneath it was all starting to look rather beautiful - so much so that the remaining floor adjacent was now looking worse (by comparison) than before I started. This, combined with the fact that the general state of the floor in the utility room and office has turned out to be worse than it looks from beneath means we could end up needing to replace substantially more than we had originally planned (or hoped) to.
Tuesday was back to the noisy work of chiselling out a bit more floor so that I could safely get the next row of tiles laid, giving us a floor space big enough for the washing machine to go back onto - having decided the only feasible way to tackle this job is to re-do half of the utility room at a time.
The noisy work was done soon enough (although not soon enough for poor Helen who was the other side of a four-inch wall trying to work, wearing ear defenders but still struggling to cope with the noise level) and I was off to Frateschi to load up with concrete and steel mesh in the hope I could get the concrete down before lunchtime.
(You'll need the sound turned up to appreciate this video clip which gives you a taste of Helen's day):
I chatted with Paolo briefly to confirm Danilo's recommended method of flooring and loaded up with 200kgs of lightweight but super strong structural-grade concrete and slung a sheet of steel mesh on the roof before heading in to pay.
Back home and with the car unloaded, I was yet again wishing my mortar mixing drill hadn't died on me last year as I looked at the stack of concrete that needed mixing by hand - but there was nothing else for it but to get the spade and get stuck in.
As lunch approached and having successfully laid the first half of the floor I put tools away and tidied in readiness for a quick lunch before Samantha arrived for Helen's lesson.
(Not wanting to rub it in, but lunch was yet again outside in the sunshine.)
Having finally finished the homework Samantha set me three weeks ago, I spent a good half hour or so sitting in on the lesson, having it marked and corrected before I left Helen and Samantha to get on with the real work while I headed outside to tinker before I needed to head off to Pisa airport to collect Dave and Sarah who were returning from a trip to England.
It was an uneventful journey along the toll roads to Pisa, and as I approached the exit for the airport I saw the orange tail of the plane pass in front of me to land ten minutes early which meant only a short wait in the arrivals area before we all hopped in the car Pescia bound.
After dropping our friends to their car in Pescia I headed home to get the fire lit - spring may have sprung, making daytime temperatures in the high teens of late, but the evenings once dark are still chilly and it will be a few more weeks yet before we can stop using the wood burner of an evening.
Wednesday started with our group Italian lesson at our house, Johnny getting the usual greeting from Reggie although he soon settled into a snooze once we were all seated and drinking espresso.
It was a fun lesson, the major part of which was just conversational, as much as we could manage in Italian, before moving onto a comprehension exercise that Johnny had prepared for us on the invention and history of the famous Moka caffetiere, a fascinating end to the week's lesson and topical as the inventor, Signor Biagletti had recently died.
After a quick tour of the destruction in the utility room and apartment we had to usher everyone off the property so that Helen and I could dash to the bank before they closed for lunch to pay Anton the plumber his third instalment, having all but finished the job.
After the usual ten-minute saga of form filling and keyboard tapping that is required for us to be able to deduct the costs of the new installation from Helen's tax liabilities (it being an energy efficiency improvement to the home), we left the bank to walk Reggie along the river in town before heading home for lunch yet again in the sun. I can't tell you the difference this week's weather has made to our lives - all of a sudden winter is starting to seem like it was ages ago and that summer is just around the corner.
After lunch, I left Helen in peace for the afternoon and headed to Vellano to give Dave a hand pouring another concrete garden step to add to the 7 or 8 that we've been working on over the last few months - due to the weather since Christmas this was the first we've been able to do since December!
On Thursday, Dave yet again came to give me a hand for a couple hours and it was back to taking up concrete flooring and disrupting Helen's work environment.
The concrete was yet again tough going, but the fact that I had Dave helping remove the mess as I was making it made a huge difference and by the time midday arrived we had got almost the entirety of the concrete (in this room at least) up and out of the way.
Not only that but we finally stacked rain collection tanks 4,5 and 6 on top of 1,2 and 3 - something we'd been waiting to see done since they arrived on the back of an Albanian flat bed lorry almost a year ago, so something of a milestone although it will be some time yet before they are operational as I need to link all six tanks together next then divert the rear and front runs of guttering into an as yet non-existent 'first flush' system, after which it will fill the tanks (I'm sure by this point we'll be due an uncharacteristic dry spell).
I'm sure you're now bored of hearing about it but we ate lunch out on the patio before getting back to taking up the remainder of the concrete.
With the concrete finally up and sitting in a pile next the house it was back to Frateschi for more materials and a 25kg sack of seed potatoes ready for the weekend's planned planting.
Once Helen had had enough of the office for the day, we headed up to the quarry track above Vellano together with Reggie to give him a good run around, before popping into Amanda's shop to collect some vegetable peelings for our compost.
Friday was much the same as the other days: more work in the utility room, another visit to Frateschi, lunch outside on the patio and another afternoon spent in Vellano with David laying another concrete step. I came home at the end of the afternoon to find Helen weeding the veg beds after having cleared up the latest pile of rubble from the apartment floor. At the end of a dusty, dirty, noisy week we were both looking forward to getting out of the house and into the fresh air on the veg terraces for the weekend!
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