The week started with another clean of the apartment for our next set of guests who were due to arrive later that day for a six-day stay with us. We were hoping for some nice autumnal weather for them when they arrived, which is what the forecast had promised up until the end of their stay.
The clean didn't take long as it hadn't been long since our last guests left, who had left it pretty spotless (thanks Allison!) - as such, there had been little time for bugs to sneak in and make homes and cobwebs so the place was ready for occupation by midday, meaning I could get on with some other jobs after lunch.
After lunch I decided it a good idea to put the security camera back up on the end of the house and reconnect it, having taking it down recently in a small attempt at tackling the exposed stone on the side of the house. Up until I had done so there had been cables running all over the side of the house to various places and security lights as well as the CCTV camera (which acts as Helen's office window, being connected to a TV screen in the office).
The job involved a lot of climbing up and down ladders while threading cables from the office, into the utility room, through a tube I had put in the wall and up to the camera in its new position on the house next to a new LED security light to illuminate our steps towards the "tradesman's entrance" (our entrance) at the back of the house.
Our guests arrived around 4pm just as I was finishing up, so we showed them indoors and had a chat for a while about the surrounding area and left saying that we would catch up with them one evening early in the week so that we could furnish them with some more local information.
With an hour or two of light left and Helen having clocked off from the office, we both turned our attentions to the patio work and that of the new steps up to the pergola before retiring indoors to light the fire and shower off the mud.
On Tuesday I went up to Vellano to do a morning's work with David at a friend's house, leaving Helen indoors at her computer as per usual.
David and I have a list of jobs to do over the winter at our friends Paul and Veronica's house in Vellano, the first of which is to repair some old movement cracks in the house. Phase one of that job was to remove a sufficient amount of old render to allow some steel mesh to be fitted over the cracks before re-rendering.
It was a lovely day for it and therefore a lovely day for our guests too, who were heading into Lucca today to see friends.
After lunch out under the pergola, Helen and I went back to the work on the pergola steps in the hope we could finish them and the new 'flower' bed alongside them, which is really a bed for Reggie to dig in - we're hoping that, having removed his previous digging spot, he will refocus his paws on this particular purpose-built spot rather than the new herb garden we made earlier this year.
Wednesday started with our first Italian lesson of the week here at our house - knowing that we had guests downstairs we decided it would be better to have the lesson here where we could keep an eye on Reggie than to go out and leave him indoors to bark all morning at every little noise he could hear from the apartment - although he barks plenty as everyone arrives for our Italian lessons, he very quickly settles down once everyone is seated, so it seemed a much better option.
The clean didn't take long as it hadn't been long since our last guests left, who had left it pretty spotless (thanks Allison!) - as such, there had been little time for bugs to sneak in and make homes and cobwebs so the place was ready for occupation by midday, meaning I could get on with some other jobs after lunch.
After lunch I decided it a good idea to put the security camera back up on the end of the house and reconnect it, having taking it down recently in a small attempt at tackling the exposed stone on the side of the house. Up until I had done so there had been cables running all over the side of the house to various places and security lights as well as the CCTV camera (which acts as Helen's office window, being connected to a TV screen in the office).
The job involved a lot of climbing up and down ladders while threading cables from the office, into the utility room, through a tube I had put in the wall and up to the camera in its new position on the house next to a new LED security light to illuminate our steps towards the "tradesman's entrance" (our entrance) at the back of the house.
Our guests arrived around 4pm just as I was finishing up, so we showed them indoors and had a chat for a while about the surrounding area and left saying that we would catch up with them one evening early in the week so that we could furnish them with some more local information.
With an hour or two of light left and Helen having clocked off from the office, we both turned our attentions to the patio work and that of the new steps up to the pergola before retiring indoors to light the fire and shower off the mud.
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| Filling "Reggie's digging bed" with soil. |
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| Reggie says "thank you". |
David and I have a list of jobs to do over the winter at our friends Paul and Veronica's house in Vellano, the first of which is to repair some old movement cracks in the house. Phase one of that job was to remove a sufficient amount of old render to allow some steel mesh to be fitted over the cracks before re-rendering.
It was a lovely day for it and therefore a lovely day for our guests too, who were heading into Lucca today to see friends.
After lunch out under the pergola, Helen and I went back to the work on the pergola steps in the hope we could finish them and the new 'flower' bed alongside them, which is really a bed for Reggie to dig in - we're hoping that, having removed his previous digging spot, he will refocus his paws on this particular purpose-built spot rather than the new herb garden we made earlier this year.
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| Two steps filled in and the back wall of Reggie's digging bed pointed. |
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| Reggie demonstrates that the steps work. |
Wednesday started with our first Italian lesson of the week here at our house - knowing that we had guests downstairs we decided it would be better to have the lesson here where we could keep an eye on Reggie than to go out and leave him indoors to bark all morning at every little noise he could hear from the apartment - although he barks plenty as everyone arrives for our Italian lessons, he very quickly settles down once everyone is seated, so it seemed a much better option.
That afternoon was spent in the office: while Helen worked to pay the mortgage, I snapped away on the camera all afternoon.
Since all of our belongings arrived here in Italy over three years ago, there had been two remaining large packing boxes still to unpack until very recently: one was buried in a cupboard in our bedroom and had recently been sorted, the contents mostly thrown away and the space reclaimed. The second was a MUCH more demanding task altogether as it contained greetings cards (it was full of them), cards for birthdays and Christmases gone by, which couldn't be simply thrown away and as such I have been spending a few spare hours here and there scanning them and putting them onto the network hard drive for posterity.
Scanning was turning out to be a hugely laborious process however, so last week I decided that photographing with Helen's DSLR would be much a quicker process - and it was!!
Although much quicker I spent the entire afternoon, the second of two, snapping cards, inside and out and ended up with a sore thumb for the privilege, having pushed a drawing pin through hundreds of cards, 798 images in total!
This job had been haunting me for many months, and unlike the packing box upstairs that had been out of sight, this box had been living behind my office chair and at such a proximity that I often reversed into it when at my desk, so the relief when all these cards were finally immortalised in digital pixels was HUGE.
That evening we invited our guests up to sit by the fire and share a glass or two of wine with us - yet again we were blessed with lovely, interesting people as guests, and after an hour so they left us to our evening and to go and enjoy theirs, with some maps of the local area in hand and a couple of route suggestions from us to think over.
On Thursday morning we decided to go a little 'off piste' with regards to the usual routine and we decided to go out and buy a rug for the office.
Having put a rug from our bedroom down in the office this summer when my son Ben was using the office as his bedroom, we really liked the difference it made to the room - it turns out that, while the OSB we currently have on the floor in the office isn't offensive, it is far from cosy, and covering a large area of that with a woollen rug had made a huge improvement. However, once Ben had left, I had reclaimed said rug for my own feet in our bedroom, and as such we were in need of another one. But where to buy a rug from?
I am yet to see a carpet in any house here, and I can see why - living in a rural setting like this, a carpet would be destroyed in no time, especially with a dog like Reggie (who is as I type, whining to go outside into the rain for the fourth or fifth time this morning, returning each time with even more muddy paws).
So where to buy carpets and rugs from? It felt like the early days when we had no idea where to acquire what we wanted - after the initial 18 months or so we felt that we'd pretty much found a place to buy everything we needed, but rugs? No.
After an (unsurprisingly) fruitless search on Google in the local area I decided to put a post on one of the local Pescia Facebook groups, and sure enough, within ten minute,s someone had replied to say there was a huge rug store in Traversagna, which is between Pescia and Montecatini Terme, so off we went.
We had driven through Traversagna many times (usually on the way to Obi), but the turning towards the rug warehouse was one we had used only a handful of times and we had never noticed a rug store down here. We kept our eyes peeled and, sure enough, we spotted a sign for 'tappezeria meacci', turned into what seemed like an abandoned industrial estate, wound our way through a couple of bends and then found ourselves outside a store frontage that we'd seen numerous times from the autostrada, which was now right behind us, so we HAD seen a rug shop before, just not registered it.
We entered into a huge warehouse which was filled with stacks of rugs on shelves, rugs on the walls and rugs piled up on the ground, and were instantly greeted by a old guy who was soon telling us with a twinkle in his eye that he used to have a girlfriend in Pietrabuona when he was young.
An entertaining 45 minutes ensued as we were shown first the Persian rugs, then the Asian rugs, followed by the Russian rugs and the the Turkish rugs with various explanations as to the history behind some of the designs and techniques, as well as which design sold well in which parts of Italy!
I think he would have been quite happy if we had walked out empty handed - he seemed happy simply to have someone to talk to - but we found our new rug, two thirds of the way down the fifth stack of rugs we looked through, the price of each stack getting more within our budget (Persian and paws would not have been a happy combination).
With the rug purchased and the morning largely gone, we headed home for a quick bite to eat before Samantha arrived.
Reggie really does enjoy Samantha's weekly arrival now after almost two years of her doing so, and that's probably in no small part down to the tactics she employs, in the early days she would bring him some bread from the shop to eat, he then got bored of that so she would then bring cheese flavoured crisps, which were a firm favourite, until she upped the ante by bringing the end pieces of the prosciutto legs from the shop - once they become to small to slice and are of no saleable use at the shop, rather than throw them out she brings one with her for our very pleased puppy.
As soon as she's safely parked her car we open the gate for him to go and see who it is and not a bark is heard. He follows her all the way to the house and then jumps onto the sofa to await his treat, a fist-sized piece of meat, bone and fat. Needless to say, he then disappears with it into the garden and we don't hear from him for ten minutes or so while he demolishes his gift, then comes in to jump back on the sofa and dish out kisses to all, including Samantha, before settling down for a snooze on the sofa.
Since all of our belongings arrived here in Italy over three years ago, there had been two remaining large packing boxes still to unpack until very recently: one was buried in a cupboard in our bedroom and had recently been sorted, the contents mostly thrown away and the space reclaimed. The second was a MUCH more demanding task altogether as it contained greetings cards (it was full of them), cards for birthdays and Christmases gone by, which couldn't be simply thrown away and as such I have been spending a few spare hours here and there scanning them and putting them onto the network hard drive for posterity.
Scanning was turning out to be a hugely laborious process however, so last week I decided that photographing with Helen's DSLR would be much a quicker process - and it was!!
Although much quicker I spent the entire afternoon, the second of two, snapping cards, inside and out and ended up with a sore thumb for the privilege, having pushed a drawing pin through hundreds of cards, 798 images in total!
This job had been haunting me for many months, and unlike the packing box upstairs that had been out of sight, this box had been living behind my office chair and at such a proximity that I often reversed into it when at my desk, so the relief when all these cards were finally immortalised in digital pixels was HUGE.
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| The 'Studio' |
That evening we invited our guests up to sit by the fire and share a glass or two of wine with us - yet again we were blessed with lovely, interesting people as guests, and after an hour so they left us to our evening and to go and enjoy theirs, with some maps of the local area in hand and a couple of route suggestions from us to think over.
On Thursday morning we decided to go a little 'off piste' with regards to the usual routine and we decided to go out and buy a rug for the office.
Having put a rug from our bedroom down in the office this summer when my son Ben was using the office as his bedroom, we really liked the difference it made to the room - it turns out that, while the OSB we currently have on the floor in the office isn't offensive, it is far from cosy, and covering a large area of that with a woollen rug had made a huge improvement. However, once Ben had left, I had reclaimed said rug for my own feet in our bedroom, and as such we were in need of another one. But where to buy a rug from?
I am yet to see a carpet in any house here, and I can see why - living in a rural setting like this, a carpet would be destroyed in no time, especially with a dog like Reggie (who is as I type, whining to go outside into the rain for the fourth or fifth time this morning, returning each time with even more muddy paws).
So where to buy carpets and rugs from? It felt like the early days when we had no idea where to acquire what we wanted - after the initial 18 months or so we felt that we'd pretty much found a place to buy everything we needed, but rugs? No.
After an (unsurprisingly) fruitless search on Google in the local area I decided to put a post on one of the local Pescia Facebook groups, and sure enough, within ten minute,s someone had replied to say there was a huge rug store in Traversagna, which is between Pescia and Montecatini Terme, so off we went.
We had driven through Traversagna many times (usually on the way to Obi), but the turning towards the rug warehouse was one we had used only a handful of times and we had never noticed a rug store down here. We kept our eyes peeled and, sure enough, we spotted a sign for 'tappezeria meacci', turned into what seemed like an abandoned industrial estate, wound our way through a couple of bends and then found ourselves outside a store frontage that we'd seen numerous times from the autostrada, which was now right behind us, so we HAD seen a rug shop before, just not registered it.
We entered into a huge warehouse which was filled with stacks of rugs on shelves, rugs on the walls and rugs piled up on the ground, and were instantly greeted by a old guy who was soon telling us with a twinkle in his eye that he used to have a girlfriend in Pietrabuona when he was young.
An entertaining 45 minutes ensued as we were shown first the Persian rugs, then the Asian rugs, followed by the Russian rugs and the the Turkish rugs with various explanations as to the history behind some of the designs and techniques, as well as which design sold well in which parts of Italy!
I think he would have been quite happy if we had walked out empty handed - he seemed happy simply to have someone to talk to - but we found our new rug, two thirds of the way down the fifth stack of rugs we looked through, the price of each stack getting more within our budget (Persian and paws would not have been a happy combination).
With the rug purchased and the morning largely gone, we headed home for a quick bite to eat before Samantha arrived.
Reggie really does enjoy Samantha's weekly arrival now after almost two years of her doing so, and that's probably in no small part down to the tactics she employs, in the early days she would bring him some bread from the shop to eat, he then got bored of that so she would then bring cheese flavoured crisps, which were a firm favourite, until she upped the ante by bringing the end pieces of the prosciutto legs from the shop - once they become to small to slice and are of no saleable use at the shop, rather than throw them out she brings one with her for our very pleased puppy.
As soon as she's safely parked her car we open the gate for him to go and see who it is and not a bark is heard. He follows her all the way to the house and then jumps onto the sofa to await his treat, a fist-sized piece of meat, bone and fat. Needless to say, he then disappears with it into the garden and we don't hear from him for ten minutes or so while he demolishes his gift, then comes in to jump back on the sofa and dish out kisses to all, including Samantha, before settling down for a snooze on the sofa.
After a productive lesson, Helen headed into the office and I headed over to Mara and Franco's to measure up what is to become their new apartment on the side of the house so that I can draw up some working plans for them. After almost three hours and two coffees with them, I headed home in the dark to find a fire warming the house and the small of dinner filling the air.
Before we knew it, the end of the week was upon us. I spent the morning out and about with David pricing up some materials for the job in Vellano, as well as buying some to make a start with on our next visit. While we were out we also bought 10 new olive crates and, somewhat optimistically, we booked a pressing at the olive mill in Pescia in the hope that, between us, David & Sarah, and a few other trees we have access to, we can achieve the minimum 150kg for a pressing of oil.
While Dave and I were out and about, Sarah and Helen spent the morning catching up while maintaining a toasty fire in the wood burner (heat that Reggie would spend the rest of the afternoon letting out through the door each time he opened it to let himself out of the garden).
After lunch, I headed out to do the weekly shop at Esselunga, as is the routine most weeks, to enable a chore-free weekend, after which we re-lit the fire and enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine before dinner and an episode of Inspector Montalbano, having recently received the latest pair of DVD's to add to our collection.
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| Plenty of olives ready for pressing at the mill |
While Dave and I were out and about, Sarah and Helen spent the morning catching up while maintaining a toasty fire in the wood burner (heat that Reggie would spend the rest of the afternoon letting out through the door each time he opened it to let himself out of the garden).
After lunch, I headed out to do the weekly shop at Esselunga, as is the routine most weeks, to enable a chore-free weekend, after which we re-lit the fire and enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine before dinner and an episode of Inspector Montalbano, having recently received the latest pair of DVD's to add to our collection.
On Saturday morning, after walking Reggie and giving him his breakfast we headed out for our own breakfast in the form of cappuccini and pastries at one of our favourite haunts, this time at 'Le Chicce' over towards Montecatini. After our morning dose of caffeine we went to and the household/hardward shop Maury's, where they have the best work gloves we have yet found - we wanted to stock up ready for when our friends Kathryn and Steve return for a working weekend (their idea of a holiday apparently!).
With gloves purchased as well as a few little bits from Obi, we collected bread and something cooked for lunch from Samantha and Amanda in the village and headed home to let Reggie out - he would be quite behind on his barking quota at this point in the day so would have some ground to make up.
After a pleasant lunch on the patio we entertained ourselves repairing a couple of sections of Reggie's anti-climb defences that he had damaged over the last year and cleaning out the chickens before going back to the pergola steps once more.
Sunday was, as we had hoped, a rainy day. We have been promised such a rainy day on a few occasions since summer but have always been let down - we both secretly look forward to the valid excuse to stay indoors and relax (maybe me more so than Helen) but we'd not been given that chance until today and, as promised by the weather man, it was raining when we got up and it rained all day long - that meant: a cosy fire, Italian homework, a visit from Paul and Kathy with a delicious home made banana cake, some lunch, a trip to Esselunga to buy some bits for a soup-making session, and then of course a soup making session. What bliss to have the means to do so guilt-free, although by the time it was bedtime we were both feeling ready to get active again - a full day it seems is just a little too much for us to be happy being sedentary.
With gloves purchased as well as a few little bits from Obi, we collected bread and something cooked for lunch from Samantha and Amanda in the village and headed home to let Reggie out - he would be quite behind on his barking quota at this point in the day so would have some ground to make up.
After a pleasant lunch on the patio we entertained ourselves repairing a couple of sections of Reggie's anti-climb defences that he had damaged over the last year and cleaning out the chickens before going back to the pergola steps once more.
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| Happy chickens. |
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A snoozy sofa kind of day.
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On Monday there was yet more rain, but it being a school day we both had more purpose and Helen worked on the computer while I made a start organising and tidying, and where possible throwing away. I had decided that there must be a more optimal layout for the office to make it a better setup for a bedroom when needed - which is rarely, but Helen's friends were due to arrive in just 4 days' time, and with four people to accommodate the extra bedroom space would be needed.
After lunch, and after Helen had finished her work, we set to work creating chaos, much to Helen's despair.
It wasn't easy work moving a bed, two desks and a large bookcase around without taking any of it out of the room, but we got there in the end and gave everywhere a good thorough clean while we did so. It took hours and we called it a day in the early evening having not quite, but almost finished the reorganisation.
On Tuesday morning I headed up to Paul and Kathy's rather than head to Vellano with David - the rain, although much lighter today, was still falling and therefore not good for working in.
After a coffee and a chat and a play with Paul and Kathy's new air compressor they'd bought for their olive picking this year, I left them to head home for lunch with Helen who had already put in a solid morning's work at her desk.
Around mid-afternoon we headed outside to see if we could move the guest pergola between us. With the big fir tree that stands in the corner of the guest patio area due to be taken down at the weekend, the pergola itself needed to be moved out of the way. We had had several offers from kind friends to come and assist with the moving of the pergola, so we decided just to see if it would be movable before dragging everyone down to help out.
When we constructed the pergola we did so by concreting a length of five-inch waste pipe into the ground, inside which we put an inch or so of gravel, then stood the leg of the pergola onto the gravel, the idea being that, like this, the legs never get waterlogged and when they eventually do rot, they can be simply pulled out of the tube in which they sit and be replaced.
Well, by now, gravel had made its way inside the tube in between the legs and the tubes, jamming them in place as effectively as if I had filled the gap with mortar (which was always the plan)- seems I need not bother.
Two of the legs moved a little, and we decided that, with extra hands, they would come out, but the other two were stuck fast. Rather than risk a hernia, we gave up on that approach and decided instead to unscrew the roof from the legs, leaving the legs in place.
Sadly, we couldn't unscrew the legs either - not even with my powerful 18v Makita impact driver, the three days of rain had swollen the wood to the extent that the screws were not going to move. That left us only one option: cut the roof off with the chainsaw, meaning we'd need to extract the then too short legs somehow afterwards and replace them - not big cost, but a shame we couldn't simply walk the entire pergola out of the way as we'd hoped.
After that was done, Helen went into the apartment to clean it ready for when her friends Jenny, Kath, Becky and Lena arrived Friday lunchtime, while I built a narrow set of storage shelves in what I'll rather grandly call 'the cloakroom' part of the house in an effort to tidy that area up by having then space for all of Reggie's detritus and some handbags etc. I had started this job months ago as a wellington boot space but after realising the space available was too narrow I stopped and abandoned it until today when I realised it could again be useful as storage.
Wednesday morning was once again our lesson with Johnny, but up in Vellano this week as we were now guest free we had no worries of Reggie annoying anyone but Florence back at home.
After lunch I headed out to buy a couple of sheets of plasterboard and some screws with the aim of finishing the plasterboarding of the built-in wardrobe in the guest bedroom - something I started earlier in the year but then stopped short of finishing as my mum was then staying in the room for a couple of weeks in the summer. Now, having friends coming to stay and needing to clean the bedroom, I decided to first finish the plasterboarding.
I had planned to do just that AND clean the room before the day was out, but I had underestimated just how long it was going to take, not accounting for the wooden beams I would have to work around, so finished the day just short of completing the plasterboard - tomorrow was another day and there was a little wiggle room left before everyone arrived (or so I assured Helen).
On Thursday we both headed into Pescia after breakfast, Helen had a doctor's appointment and we needed to do the food shopping a day early as her friends would be arriving the following lunch time. With town dealt with it was home just in time for a quick lunch before Samantha arrived for our second lesson of the week, and one for which we were fully prepared for having done our homework courtesy of the rain the previous Sunday.
Just after we'd waved Samantha off, and were about to swing into action for the final push of cleaning the house and finishing that plasterboarding, Helen's phone buzzed, only to reveal an email from Lena to say that the girls' flight had been cancelled due to a national transportation strike in Italy!
We were gobsmacked, and spent a frantic hour or so trying to work out if there was any other viable option for the long-planned and long-awaited weekend to still go ahead, but to no avail. There was nothing coming into Pisa or Florence (or even further afield) the next day, no viable way for them to get into Italy that night, and flights on Saturday were both too expensive and too late, with the girls all needing to be back home on Sunday. Gutted. We'd both been looking forward to seeing all the girls and I know that Helen had been excited to welcome her friends here and show them all our little piece of Italy, as well as do some much needed and long overdue catching up with them all. It's the first time we've really fallen foul of the Italian nation's propensity for strike action - nothing you can do about it, which just makes it all the more frustrating and hugely disappointing.
Feeling as if the rug had been pulled from under our feet, we went into slow motion and gave up on the house cleaning - until we realised we still had visitors coming round that evening! Having initially thought that we might need help moving the pergola, we had tentatively invited our "pairs of hands" to stay for aperitivi after their help today - in the end, having completed the pergola task ourselves on Wednesday, the spare hands were no longer needed, but with Kathy having made some 'nibbles' to bring down, we weren't about to let her home made food going to waste, so Paul and Kathy came to us for an evening of drinks and a what turned out to be a delicious mini-Indian buffet, (so generous that we needed no dinner and struggled to finish it all).
We spent a lovely few hours chatting the night away until Dave and Sarah joined us around half ten having just finished their yoga class in Pescia - it turned into a late night, needless to say, but went some way to helping soothe the day's disappointment.
On Friday, since Helen had been meant to be taking the day off to greet her friends and spend time with them, she decided to take (most of) the day off work regardless and try to make the most of a disappointing situation. We therefore started the morning by both heading into Pescia to drink a cappuccino at Franco's before relieving the ATM of some cash and picking up a tarpaulin at Frateschi - to put down over the gravel in the guest pergola area to keep the needles from getting all over the place when the fir tree was taken down the next morning.
What do you do when your plans have been scuppered thanks to a national strike and your friends can no longer come to visit? You take your disappointment out on something with a chainsaw, for a start. So, after lunch, Helen and I took tools and chainsaws up onto the upper terraces.
As you look up the terraces from the house, along the left-hand edge there is a gully that runs from top to bottom, almost to the driveway, we assume for some sort of drainage purpose. The gully has been made by building a low stone wall a metre or so from the edges of the terraces, and on this stone wall is what remains of an old animal fence which encircles the entirety of the terracing - something we'd love to to reinstate, although it will be a mammoth task.
Before we can consider this though, we need to clear the gully. While Allison was here last month she and Helen did an amazing job of cleaning the terraces on the left to the point that we can now say that they are reclaimed, but the gully was a stretch too far at that point, a job for another day: today.
There are a lot of long dead chestnut trees along this gully so the work is largely felling, logging and moving it all so that any last odd patches of bramble between the terraces and fence can be cleared.
After a couple of hours work we made a good dent in the work required, but another couple of shifts will be needed before this part of the project is finished.
Saturday was to be the day we finally got the dead fir tree nearest to the house cut down. Alessio (the guy coming to do the work) said he would be here at 08:30 to start work, so at 07:50, Helen took Reggie out for a walk while I thought about putting coffee on. I hadn't even made it to the hob when my mobile rang, it was Alessio, who was already at the gate, half an hour early.
I opened the gate and then in a panic phoned Helen who was in the woods with Reggie. Thankfully they were not quite at the driveway, and Reggie had actually listened to Helen when she realised what was happening and he had sat and waited for her and then watched the truck go past while she held him firmly. Disaster averted!
The guys wasted no time in getting started, they refused a coffee, took the tarpaulin from me and got to work. Thankfully, with the help of Allison last month, we had also widened the path to the apartment for access for the platform truck - it couldn't have been tighter!
Reggie handled the presence of the three guys remarkably well - he went out often to bark at them, but we called him away easily enough with the promise of tummy rubs.
The boys had finished just before eleven, leaving an incredible powerful and delicious aroma of Christmas tree, along with a very neat and tidy pile of fir tree on the guest patio. After forcing a coffee on them and chatting briefly they headed off to leave us to do our part of the job: burn the branches and split the trunk.
After lunch, and after Helen had finished her work, we set to work creating chaos, much to Helen's despair.
It wasn't easy work moving a bed, two desks and a large bookcase around without taking any of it out of the room, but we got there in the end and gave everywhere a good thorough clean while we did so. It took hours and we called it a day in the early evening having not quite, but almost finished the reorganisation.
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| A new view for Helen's work station. |
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| Reggie's bed cover needs a wash! |
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| Bit more tidying to do. |
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| The seal of approval? |
On Tuesday morning I headed up to Paul and Kathy's rather than head to Vellano with David - the rain, although much lighter today, was still falling and therefore not good for working in.
After a coffee and a chat and a play with Paul and Kathy's new air compressor they'd bought for their olive picking this year, I left them to head home for lunch with Helen who had already put in a solid morning's work at her desk.
Around mid-afternoon we headed outside to see if we could move the guest pergola between us. With the big fir tree that stands in the corner of the guest patio area due to be taken down at the weekend, the pergola itself needed to be moved out of the way. We had had several offers from kind friends to come and assist with the moving of the pergola, so we decided just to see if it would be movable before dragging everyone down to help out.
When we constructed the pergola we did so by concreting a length of five-inch waste pipe into the ground, inside which we put an inch or so of gravel, then stood the leg of the pergola onto the gravel, the idea being that, like this, the legs never get waterlogged and when they eventually do rot, they can be simply pulled out of the tube in which they sit and be replaced.
Well, by now, gravel had made its way inside the tube in between the legs and the tubes, jamming them in place as effectively as if I had filled the gap with mortar (which was always the plan)- seems I need not bother.
Two of the legs moved a little, and we decided that, with extra hands, they would come out, but the other two were stuck fast. Rather than risk a hernia, we gave up on that approach and decided instead to unscrew the roof from the legs, leaving the legs in place.
Sadly, we couldn't unscrew the legs either - not even with my powerful 18v Makita impact driver, the three days of rain had swollen the wood to the extent that the screws were not going to move. That left us only one option: cut the roof off with the chainsaw, meaning we'd need to extract the then too short legs somehow afterwards and replace them - not big cost, but a shame we couldn't simply walk the entire pergola out of the way as we'd hoped.
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| Decapitated pergola. |
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| Shortened legs. |
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| Soon to be gone fir tree. |
After that was done, Helen went into the apartment to clean it ready for when her friends Jenny, Kath, Becky and Lena arrived Friday lunchtime, while I built a narrow set of storage shelves in what I'll rather grandly call 'the cloakroom' part of the house in an effort to tidy that area up by having then space for all of Reggie's detritus and some handbags etc. I had started this job months ago as a wellington boot space but after realising the space available was too narrow I stopped and abandoned it until today when I realised it could again be useful as storage.
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| Plaster board beading doubling as shelf supports |
Wednesday morning was once again our lesson with Johnny, but up in Vellano this week as we were now guest free we had no worries of Reggie annoying anyone but Florence back at home.
After lunch I headed out to buy a couple of sheets of plasterboard and some screws with the aim of finishing the plasterboarding of the built-in wardrobe in the guest bedroom - something I started earlier in the year but then stopped short of finishing as my mum was then staying in the room for a couple of weeks in the summer. Now, having friends coming to stay and needing to clean the bedroom, I decided to first finish the plasterboarding.
I had planned to do just that AND clean the room before the day was out, but I had underestimated just how long it was going to take, not accounting for the wooden beams I would have to work around, so finished the day just short of completing the plasterboard - tomorrow was another day and there was a little wiggle room left before everyone arrived (or so I assured Helen).
On Thursday we both headed into Pescia after breakfast, Helen had a doctor's appointment and we needed to do the food shopping a day early as her friends would be arriving the following lunch time. With town dealt with it was home just in time for a quick lunch before Samantha arrived for our second lesson of the week, and one for which we were fully prepared for having done our homework courtesy of the rain the previous Sunday.
Just after we'd waved Samantha off, and were about to swing into action for the final push of cleaning the house and finishing that plasterboarding, Helen's phone buzzed, only to reveal an email from Lena to say that the girls' flight had been cancelled due to a national transportation strike in Italy!
We were gobsmacked, and spent a frantic hour or so trying to work out if there was any other viable option for the long-planned and long-awaited weekend to still go ahead, but to no avail. There was nothing coming into Pisa or Florence (or even further afield) the next day, no viable way for them to get into Italy that night, and flights on Saturday were both too expensive and too late, with the girls all needing to be back home on Sunday. Gutted. We'd both been looking forward to seeing all the girls and I know that Helen had been excited to welcome her friends here and show them all our little piece of Italy, as well as do some much needed and long overdue catching up with them all. It's the first time we've really fallen foul of the Italian nation's propensity for strike action - nothing you can do about it, which just makes it all the more frustrating and hugely disappointing.
Feeling as if the rug had been pulled from under our feet, we went into slow motion and gave up on the house cleaning - until we realised we still had visitors coming round that evening! Having initially thought that we might need help moving the pergola, we had tentatively invited our "pairs of hands" to stay for aperitivi after their help today - in the end, having completed the pergola task ourselves on Wednesday, the spare hands were no longer needed, but with Kathy having made some 'nibbles' to bring down, we weren't about to let her home made food going to waste, so Paul and Kathy came to us for an evening of drinks and a what turned out to be a delicious mini-Indian buffet, (so generous that we needed no dinner and struggled to finish it all).
We spent a lovely few hours chatting the night away until Dave and Sarah joined us around half ten having just finished their yoga class in Pescia - it turned into a late night, needless to say, but went some way to helping soothe the day's disappointment.
On Friday, since Helen had been meant to be taking the day off to greet her friends and spend time with them, she decided to take (most of) the day off work regardless and try to make the most of a disappointing situation. We therefore started the morning by both heading into Pescia to drink a cappuccino at Franco's before relieving the ATM of some cash and picking up a tarpaulin at Frateschi - to put down over the gravel in the guest pergola area to keep the needles from getting all over the place when the fir tree was taken down the next morning.
What do you do when your plans have been scuppered thanks to a national strike and your friends can no longer come to visit? You take your disappointment out on something with a chainsaw, for a start. So, after lunch, Helen and I took tools and chainsaws up onto the upper terraces.
As you look up the terraces from the house, along the left-hand edge there is a gully that runs from top to bottom, almost to the driveway, we assume for some sort of drainage purpose. The gully has been made by building a low stone wall a metre or so from the edges of the terraces, and on this stone wall is what remains of an old animal fence which encircles the entirety of the terracing - something we'd love to to reinstate, although it will be a mammoth task.
Before we can consider this though, we need to clear the gully. While Allison was here last month she and Helen did an amazing job of cleaning the terraces on the left to the point that we can now say that they are reclaimed, but the gully was a stretch too far at that point, a job for another day: today.
There are a lot of long dead chestnut trees along this gully so the work is largely felling, logging and moving it all so that any last odd patches of bramble between the terraces and fence can be cleared.
After a couple of hours work we made a good dent in the work required, but another couple of shifts will be needed before this part of the project is finished.
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| Helen had quadrupled the size of this pile a couple of hours later. |
Saturday was to be the day we finally got the dead fir tree nearest to the house cut down. Alessio (the guy coming to do the work) said he would be here at 08:30 to start work, so at 07:50, Helen took Reggie out for a walk while I thought about putting coffee on. I hadn't even made it to the hob when my mobile rang, it was Alessio, who was already at the gate, half an hour early.
I opened the gate and then in a panic phoned Helen who was in the woods with Reggie. Thankfully they were not quite at the driveway, and Reggie had actually listened to Helen when she realised what was happening and he had sat and waited for her and then watched the truck go past while she held him firmly. Disaster averted!
The guys wasted no time in getting started, they refused a coffee, took the tarpaulin from me and got to work. Thankfully, with the help of Allison last month, we had also widened the path to the apartment for access for the platform truck - it couldn't have been tighter!
Reggie handled the presence of the three guys remarkably well - he went out often to bark at them, but we called him away easily enough with the promise of tummy rubs.
The boys had finished just before eleven, leaving an incredible powerful and delicious aroma of Christmas tree, along with a very neat and tidy pile of fir tree on the guest patio. After forcing a coffee on them and chatting briefly they headed off to leave us to do our part of the job: burn the branches and split the trunk.
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| Positioning the platform. |
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| Going up! |
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| Still going up! |
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| Top piece off. |
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| The allure of tummy rubs was too great. |
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| A very tidy and professional job |
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| Maybe a slightly bigger tarpaulin next time |
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| The smell was like being in Christmas tree heaven. |
Helen and I then set about starting the clear-up operation, moving the logs to a splitting station, where Helen started splitting them, and moving all the smaller branches to a suitable burning spot in the car park area. An hour into doing work my phone rang, it was Paul and Kathy who were at the gate in work gear ready to help out!
While Kathy and I moved the branches to the car park ready for burning, Helen and Paul split wood, knotty wood at that!
We broke for a light lunch on the patio, after which we lit a bonfire that Kathy looked after while I took a chainsaw to the wood we couldn't split, and Helen and Paul kept swinging axes.
By the time Paul and Kathy left at 4pm that afternoon to clean themselves up ready for an art exhibition, we had more than broken the back of the clear-up, a huge help indeed, we're thankful to have such a great group of friends around us in the valley, always ready to help out.
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| The entire trunk was like this, eaten away by young grubs before burrowing deeper into the tree for winter. |
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| Strange blue/grey staining in the wood |
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| All clear! |
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| One fewer firs in the row |
Once they had left and the gates closed, I took Reggie for a second walk in the woods before getting back to work with Helen and by the time darkness fell, we had burnt everything we needed to burn and had only half a dozen pieces of trunk to deal with, an entire 20 metre fir tree almost dealt with in one day - we were knackered, but very pleased with the day's work.
On Sunday we had something akin to a lie-in and didn't surface until around 9am, at which point we took Reggie out for his morning charge around in the woods before then escaping for coffee while he was demolishing his breakfast.
After a cappuccino and a vanilla rice pudding each we went back to Obi, this time to buy a new TV aerial.
It took us over two years to get around to putting up a TV aerial (we had way more important things to do before we had the luxury of the time required to do so) and when we did, the aerial we put up was one that I had bought from a nice old bloke who has a little electricals store in the piazza in Pescia.
Our signal has often been problematic though, and often we have to re-tune the TV each time we switch it on.
We had limped along like this until now because well... it worked, of sorts. That was until Friday evening.
At 9pm Friday we switched on the TV to tune into the Italian version of Bake Off, a program we enjoy watching as the context of the show helps us follow along with subtitles. Helen was considering it one small consolation of her friends not coming that we would be able to watch BakeOff Italia (without any form of recording device, and not wanting to subject our friends to it either, we would otherwise have missed it).
Now the channel this program is on is often one that disappears, and this evening was no exception, except that, after re-tuning, there still no channel, and after moving the aerial and re-tuning... still no channel. We tried adjusting the aerial and re-tuning for around half an hour before finally giving up, we clearly need a bigger digital-specific aerial.
We stood in Obi for half an hour trying to decide just how much of a gain in dB we would need, and therefore which aerial to buy, before leaving with a mid-range offering which seemed to be the best compromise between price and extra dB - as yet it is not fitted as rain scuppered our plans later in the day, so watch this space!
After lunch we went back to finish off the wood splitting and then start loading it all into the tractor to take along the drive and stack in the quarry for next year. This involved five or six loads and trips along the driveway, but just as we were stacking the penultimate load the rain started and we got soaked. We put the tractor to bed under cover and ran indoors to get dry and light the fire for the evening.
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| We planted 120 leeks, we harvested a nine, voles ate the rest. |
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| Vibrant pink berries of the spindle tree |
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| Thanks to the deer, it was a pathetic sweet potato harvest. |
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| Fungi also busy at work this time of year. |
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| Final harvests for the year... maybe. |
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| The last of the leeks and beetroot at least. |
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