A PRIMA VISTAOUR JOURNEY TO BUYING & RESTORING AN ITALIAN HOME

GARY EDWARDS

Copyright 2017 Gary Edwards

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CONTENTS

Introduction

How our Property Chose us

Money Matters

Le Marche: The Jewel of the Adriatic

Signed, Sealed & Delivered

A Weight Off Our Minds

Engineering Your Plan

A Le Marche Town House

Floor Plans & Sample Boards

Builders

Kitchen

Sitting Room

Hallway

Bathroom

Our Unfinished Bedroom

From Terra Ferma to Terremoto

Aftershocks

A Winter of Discontent

Dreaming of La Dolce Vita

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“Your home should tell the story of who you are, and be a collection of what you love

brought together under one roof.”Nate Berkus, The Things that Matter

‘A ogni uccello il suo nido è bello.”

(To every bird, his own nest is beautiful.) Italian Proverb

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Gary & David restore vacation homes in Italy. David is a skilled craftsman and has spent 20 years specialising in historic building restoration and conservation. Alongside residential refurbishments in Spain and Italy, he has also worked on some of England’s most treasured buildings including St Paul’s Cathedral, Bath Abbey, Highclere Castle (Downton Abbey!) and royal residence Windsor Castle.

Creative Gary is a graduate of the British Academy of Interior Design, hands-on decorator and interior stylist with the practical skills to match his design flair.

Together they founded D&G Design and work in Italy and England - restoring, redecorating and redesigning. They have spent years working on other people’s homes, and this book is about the summer they spent restoring their own.

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www.dandgdesign.co.uk

INTRODUCTION

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We are nit-pickers.

David is a perfectionist, and I’m just fussy. I will gaze at shelves for what seems like hours, trying to balance objects so that they align easily on the eye. Then I will take everything off the shelves and rearrange. It’s like an OCD. David will restore, repair and rebuild until everything looks perfect. We appreciate old buildings, and subtle nods to an era gone by.

David is a building restorer and has worked on many, many beautiful old houses and some of England’s most treasured monuments. He’s been involved in restoration projects at St Paul's Cathedral, Highclere Castle (otherwise known as Downton Abbey), the Clifton Suspension Bridge and beautiful old Georgian and Victorian homes in Bath, England. He takes great care to restore these structures back to their former glory, without making them look too perfect or new, as he knows the importance in retaining the soul of a building.

I am an interior designer and have recently graduated from the British Academy of Interior Design. I love colour, and rooms that make the most of the light. I can’t stand dark spaces or dark rooms, and particularly loathe too much dark wood (and leather sofas). Actually too much of anything isn't aesthetically pleasing, so I like to mix light with dark, antique with modern, and most of all create liveable, functioning spaces.

When creating contemporary spaces, I give a great deal of thought to who and what the room will be used for. A hidden TV might look great in photos but who wants the hassle of moving furniture around every time you want to watch it? A table covered in beautiful objects and trinkets, no matter how much they cost, might look cool but what happens when the kids want to use it to do some painting or play with play-doh? (Do kids still play with play-doh? You get my drift.)

Transforming a building that is in a state of disrepair or a room that needs a makeover into something that the owner loves gives us job satisfaction. Creating a living space, no matter how large or small where families can eat, sleep, work or play is the most rewarding feeling

on earth. So after years of restoring and creating homes for other people, we finally decided it was time to work on a property of our own.

We both live in Bath in the UK, and David’s work has taken him all over the country and also to Spain, Gibraltar and Italy. I have lived and worked in Greece, Morocco, the US, Tunisia and Great Britain. We haven’t stayed in one place for very long, and thrive on the excitement of a new project in a faraway land. So, although much of our work happens to be in Bath, we wanted our home to be somewhere to escape to, somewhere that we both love, and we chose Italy.

David grew up in the South of the Italy and I have visited the country many times, envisioning myself living there with each trip. Buying a house there was a no-brainer, David speaks the language, knows the culture well, and I love pizza and wine. A match made in Heaven!

I am a compulsive traveller, nothing feeds my soul or excites me quite as much as being in a new land. When I get off of a plane, all my senses kick in - the climate, fragrance, language I hear and what I see in front of me excite me and I instantly connect to wherever I am. What is beyond the airport and what life is going on beneath those city lights in the distance? In hot countries the humidity or warm air softens the noises of other planes and traffic on the road outside, the smells of fresh air or flowers can also be overwhelming, people speaking a multitude of languages.... these are the things that make me realise that I am somewhere new, where life is a million miles from the one I know. These sensations ignite my soul.

With that being said, and with so many countries and places to visit, how on earth can anyone put down roots in one place? If I like being in different countries all the time, why did I buy a place in Italy, or at all?

Here's the answer - a vacation home doesn’t have to be a place for you to grow roots. It can be a place to call home (or one of them), but the beauty is that it doesn't mean you have to spend 12 months of the year in it.

Home can be wherever we are, and it doesn't have to be only one place.

It’s important to decide why you want to buy abroad. Have you fallen in love with a place and are now looking for a ‘home away from home’ there? Or a place to retire to where you can live and have the family visit? Or are you like us and want to see the world but need something to fund your adventures? Buying an Italian casa and renting it as a vacation home can be a good investment.

We had a few reasons for deciding to buy in Italy.

1. Our LOVE of the country.

2. We LOVE restoring old houses and wanted our own project.

3. An investment opportunity - to rent it as a vacation home while we travelled or worked in other countries.

Whatever your reasons for wanting to buy, I will share with you some helpful information on how to do this - and hopefully my advice can save you money and you will pick up some design tips along the way.

We are not conventional ‘second home’ owners by any account. The house we talk about in this book is our only home. But it’s not as costly as you might think, if you do your research and are aware of what is in front of you.

It is challenging and rewarding, exciting and infuriating. But most of all, as you will discover as you read on, it’s a lot of fun, gave us a great sense of achievement and fed our souls.

And really, if a pair of nomads like us can do it then believe me, anyone can!

This then, is our story…

CHAPTER 7 A LE MARCHE TOWN HOUSE

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The house had been neglected for years. Built just before 1900, it had once been a family home, its last owner being a Priest. He had lived here and worked at Force’s church, but after he died his sister had lived alone in the house until she moved to the coast to be near her daughters. Since then the house had stood empty, and had been on the market for around five years when we discovered it.

Time and neglect had taken its toll. The roof was made of asbestos and leaked, the walls had weeds and moss growing out of them, pigeons were nesting on the balcony and between loose bricks, and a cornice holding up a section of roof on the front wall was coming loose. The council had sealed off the area outside the front doors where the cornice could fall, and many many people were put off of buying the property because of the large amount of work they would need to do.

When we first visited it we were able to envision exactly what needed to be done, and how it could look once we had fixed it up. Many people are not able to do this, but being designers we can see a house stripped bare, repaired, and redecorated in our minds, which is what we did with this one. It would take a great deal of work, but we were confident that we could bring this beautiful home back to life.

The house itself is simple in layout. A central staircase runs through the middle, with a landing on each floor. One room goes off to the left and one room to the right of each landing.

There are three floors including the ground floor, and a garage and cellar below.

The ground floor has a sitting room to the left and a kitchen to the right.

The first floor has a bathroom on the landing, a bedroom to the left, and a room to the right that can be used as an extra bedroom, a reception room, or a large entry way as it has a side door leading to a narrow street. This room was used by the Priest for meetings with his congregation, and he had apparently set up a desk in there where parishioners could visit him using the side door entrance.

The top floor has a bedroom with an en-suite bathroom to the right, and a bedroom with a small outdoor balcony to the left. Finally, right at the top of the house, the attic is accessed through a hatch in the bathroom ceiling and is a large space that can one day be converted into another room. As I don’t like heights I have never set foot inside the attic, but David says that the views from the holes in the roof are fantastic!

Le Marche has many hilltop towns like Force, each nested into the mountain with buildings literally stacked higher and higher behind each other, and the entire town is usually surrounded by an ancient wall. Built during medieval times, these towns were idyllic communities and their elevated location offered protection from invading enemies.

This house is built alongside the town wall, and where the ground slopes steeply, steps have been built to create a public walkway that leads up to a narrow street that runs behind the house. Due to the incline, the cellar is below ground and built into the rock. The kitchen sits on top of the cellar and is partially below ground, its windows at floor level from the outside, which keep the room cool during the summer and retain heat in winter.

The house is a traditional Italian stone house, a good solid structure built with hundreds of sand coloured bricks, presumably by hand, long before power tools were invented. It is awe-inspiring to see entire ancient towns built this way; How on earth did the builders manage to bring materials up a mountain and build these structures, with great detail in stone carvings and in some cases (like the house next door), painted frescoes on the ceilings?

Altogether, the house has 14 windows, the four at floor level are covered with beautiful black iron grills, and the rest with green shutters which have clearly taken a battering over the years, with faded paint on the outside (although due to the fact that they’ve been closed for years the insides are in perfect condition) and some have broken pieces of wood that need fixing. I love shutters on windows, I think they add a charm to a property that we don’t see much of in the UK. They remind me of cute little cottages that you might see in some movies set in the Middle Ages, with window boxes lined with flowers, and people opening their shutters each morning and looking out onto a sunny meadow. The iron grills take some getting used to. Although lovely to look at, I always imagine a house must be in a bad, crime ridden area if it needs bars over the windows. But in Italy and most of Mediterranean Europe, where most houses have these on lower floors, it’s usually an insurance requirement.

The lower outside section of the house had been covered in cement, presumably to stop damp from getting in. When it rains in the mountains, it rains hard, and the steep steps outside of the property literally turn into a waterfall as water gushes from the top of the steps into the drain at the bottom. All of that rain hits the front wall, so a covering of cement has helped keep the water out over the years.

Now, most of the cement has cracked and blown, creating holes that the water travels through, so the ground floor walls were very damp, musty and smelly.

Once we bought the house, we set about planning the interiors and when the scaffolding was erected, we worked on the outside areas. We had wanted to repoint and repair the exterior walls, but as this initial project would last three months, we simply did not have time. We decided to repair where needed, and would repoint the outside walls at a later date. Repairing the walls made a huge difference, as well as removing the swollen cement from the outside. We tackled the exterior over the course of the three months, doing bits and pieces when we wanted to be outdoors and enjoy the sunshine at the same time.

! The house had stood empty since the 1980’s, and it showed!

! The side door opens out onto a narrow cobbled stone street, cement had been

slapped onto the lower section of the front walls so we set about chiselling it all off

! The floor plan from the 1930’s showed windows once stood where the alcoves in

each room now are

! With the cement removed from the exterior, we mortared the bottom of the front wall

to prevent rain water from coming in

! Chiselling off the cement from the bottom section of the outside walls made a real

difference in just a few days

! How could we not love this old house?

CHAPTER 10 KITCHEN

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! Kitchen sample board

We both love country kitchens, they have so much character and are usually warm, inviting places. This old house needed a country kitchen. After all, it had views of rolling hills, tiny cobbled stone streets and field upon field of cattle, horses and flowers so it made sense to try to replicate the type of kitchen you would find in an old farmhouse. We wanted cosy and practical with plenty of workspace, great storage and light.

The most important thing for us was that we could move around it easily and have everything we needed to cook with to hand. Just like any farmhouse kitchen, ours would become the centre of the house - an inviting space where visitors could pull up a chair, have a coffee, chat or read a book and get comfy. We also wanted to add a couple of modern twists at the same time.

To achieve this, a couple of ‘features‘ had to go.

Firstly, what looked to be a non-supporting wall had been built, presumably to create a large dining area and a tiny cooking area. Within this small space stood an antique oven complete with gas canister, a small fridge and a free standing sink with taps fixed to the wall. Cooking for an entire family in here must have been quite the challenge! At the other end of the kitchen was a large fireplace with a pretty awful surround that we would do some work on and put our table in front of to create our own dining area. We would hopefully be allowed to knock down the non-supporting wall and make a large kitchen / diner all in one.

The other thing that had to go was the 1970’s dark wooden tongue and groove cladding that filled an entire wall. This was high fashion in its era, when dark spaces were somewhat

bizarrely popular. However, as we wanted a bright, airy kitchen this dark wood had to go. We wondered what was beneath it and hoped it wouldn’t be too much work to get to the stone wall and expose it.

Beautiful stone walls are a typical feature in Italian vacation homes, but mainly in country farmhouses where the whole structure is built using stone bricks, mortared together to create walls.

Many of the medieval towns in Le Marche, such as Force, have used this technique to build houses. Inside, the walls are plastered over so that they are solid and retain heat. This also helps to keep the bugs out. Even in Italian farmhouses these internal stone walls were not traditionally exposed, it was only in barns and stables that the stone remained uncovered.

We wanted our kitchen wall to be a feature wall - just this one, as although stone looks beautiful it does not reflect the light. I have stayed in some Greek villas where all four walls have been completely made of stone and although it looks authentic and rustic, it can create the feeling of coldness as it does not reflect light, so the room ends up dark and feeling damp. It’s like sleeping in a stable.

One wall in our kitchen would be enough to have exposed stone, and we hoped that we could restore whatever lay beneath the cladding.

! A 1970's wooden cladded nightmare

The kitchen has two windows, a small one in the far corner of the room and a larger one in the centre of the wooden cladded wall. This window looked right out onto the street, so the glass panes were frosted to enable some privacy, but made the room even darker. We would replace these with clear glass and hope that people wouldn’t peer in as they walked past! Outside of both windows were beautiful wrought iron grills that had at one time been black but now had rusted.

A little cupboard door at the far end of the kitchen lead to a hatch that hid a staircase. These stairs lead down to the vaulted basement and garage where the previous owner had installed a sink and washing machine. This gave us food for thought, but for now we would have all of our kitchen appliances upstairs and in one place.

A small fuse box containing only two fuses powered the entire house with electricity. I guess this was all that the previous owners had needed, with a gas cooker, no microwave (which were yet to become popular the last time this house was occupied), and perhaps they just knew better than to use the TV and washing machine at the same time!

We quickly realised that two fuses would not cut it for this room alone, let alone the whole house! We had an electric oven, a large fridge freezer, a kettle (not a popular appliance in Italy but we need instant coffee), a coffee pot (for the times when we want our coffee not-so-instant), a microwave, juicer and sandwich toaster. And that was before we had even switched on a light, vacuumed a floor, watched TV or charged a phone.

So this kitchen, with its energy sucking gadgets would need its own fuse box, which would mean channelling walls to lay new electrical wires, then refilling them and plastering them over. This room would need a huge amount of time and work. One thing that did not need much attention was the floor. Tiled in white with light brown edging, this would do for now and went pretty well with the colours that we had chosen for the kitchen. As we did not have the time to rip these tiles up and relay flooring, it was a relief to see that they were in good condition.

So, where would we begin? With so much to do in the kitchen, we were somewhat overwhelmed. We had also created some extra work for ourselves as when we had first arrived, we’d dumped almost all of the contents from the van in here as we unloaded it - so now the room was full of wood, bags and bags of tools, paints, fillers, toiletries, appliances, cushions, pillows, clothes, bedding.... general ‘stuff’.

We moved everything into two rooms - we used a table and dresser to create a mini kitchen in the sitting room, shifting the fridge, microwave, plates and cutlery into the room. Then in the upstairs balcony room we put most of the rest, leaving the paints, fillers and sealants in the hall.

With the kitchen now free of clutter, we set about dismantling and removing the owner’s old furniture, taking the cupboards off the wall, moving the ancient oven to the van, but leaving the sink for now, and took the rest to the local dump.

Gabriele, our engineer, inspected the non-supporting wall and checked the original building plans (where it did not appear) and deemed it safe for us to knock down.

Now that we had permission to go ahead and get rid of this, we were ready to begin kitchen renovation 101!

WOODEN CLADDING

During the 1970’s, it was popular to wood panel over walls to give a Swiss chalet kind of feel to a room. This was height of fashion at the time in the UK and as it would appear, in Italy also. While the UK favoured lighter, highly glossed wood, the owner of this house went for dark wood and an all-out Swiss feel, even adding a cuckoo clock next to the window.

Having no idea what lurked beneath this wooden wall, a tell-tale hole next to the radiator that was fixed to it revealed damp, flaky cement that we hoped had just been put there to hold the radiator pipe in place. Armed with hammers and chisels, we began knocking this wood off. Thankfully, most of it came off relatively easy in long strips, and piece by piece we were able to take it down. As we had already added the kitchen units to our floor plan, we were aware that we needed to keep some of this wood to create edges for certain units, so removed each strip as gently as we could during our chiselling frenzy!

Two days later all of the wood was off, and beneath it lay more horrors - the entire wall had been covered with a mixture of cement and lime plaster that had created a solid wall over the original stone bricks. Some of this was damp and flaky so came off easily enough, and we chiselled hard at the more solid sections that were tightly cemented to the stone. For a few more days our chiselling continued, and we took great care not to damage the brickwork that lay beneath. There were numerous damp patches where rain water had seeped in from outside and soaked into the cement, and all these layers meant that it had never been able to dry completely so the room smelled of years and years’ worth of damp. Lovely.

Slowly, we were able to expose the stone wall and as we carefully removed the large chunks of cement, we revealed beautiful sand coloured stone bricks, albeit covered with chalky white plaster. This would need to be cleaned, but we were making progress.

A spider’s web of wires and electrical cables lay all over the stone, held together by junction boxes that routed each one in different directions. We would figure out what they were all for and which cables we would keep later on.

! David chisels off the plaster from the kitchen wall, exposing beautiful stone beneath

! The kitchen wall is exposed

! Removing the wall in the kitchen was a fun job

! Channelling the kitchen walls to lay new electricity cables

! Pointing the kitchen wall

WINDOWS

It was therapeutic to expose the stone work around the window frames, where the cement was particularly wet and blown. Bugs lived behind the damp plaster and as we pulled huge pieces off, mounds of dirt, dust and even weeds fell through the large holes that were now exposed around the windows.

These areas would need some repairs. Two beautiful old wooden lintels held the window frames and the wall above them in place, long pieces of thick timber that were covered in nails and bits of plaster - who on earth would want to cover these lintels up?

We would clean these and stain them to bring them back to their former glory. The damp had not gotten to them and luckily they were in great condition. Below them however, the windows were a different story altogether, with rotten frames and large cracks in the wood which were embedded with more dirt, dust and quite a few insects!

We would need to build some kind of channel on the outside window ledge to direct the rain water away as currently it hit the house and soaked into the window frame and into the wall.

As we dug the cement out from around the frame, the rotten wood broke away and caused the window to fall in! Oh well, we needed to repair the frame and replace the glass anyway…

DIVIDING WALL

Once the stone wall was exposed and the dust and plaster had been cleaned off, it was time to attack the non-supporting wall. This wall rested on top of the floor tiles so would not leave a gap in the floor where it stood.

We took mallets and literally smashed it up. The plaster on one side was cracked and flaking, while on the other side it was tiled. The wall itself was made of terracotta bricks which were light and easy to break up.

It did not take more than a couple of hours to knock this wall down, and we filled rubble sacks with its remains as we went, taking care not to damage the floor as it fell.

PLUMBING

Now that the wall was gone, we had a nice large space to work in. We drew the outline of the units on the kitchen walls, and we began to reroute some of the water pipes so that they would connect to the new position of the sink. David plumbed in all the pipes for our kitchen.

We bought plastic ones which bend and move with water pressure (our pressure is very high). One thing we didn't anticipate were the pipes in the wall being made of steel and not copper (despite Force being famous for its copper) so as David dug into the wall to take off some tiles, he hit a steel pipe and a fountain sprayed water fiercely from the wall!

Our stop tap is below the house in the garage so while I tried to stop the leak with a towel he raced down to the garage to turn off the tap. Great fun!

POINTING THE WALLS

As there were only two fuses for the entire house, putting a new fuse box in the kitchen and channelling the walls to feed the cables through would be a lengthy job.

Digging the channels into the walls was hard work - the walls were thick and solid so it was tough tunnelling into them with a wide enough channel to fit cables in. This took almost a week and there was nothing enjoyable about this part of the job, so we were pleased once the channels were in place and ready for cables to be fed into. We would give each appliance its own fuse, while the plug sockets we added would share one, that way there would be plenty for all of the appliances.

We then needed to find the correct fuses and box, which seemed a bit of a minefield - the same amp fuses can vary in price from shop to shop. They are more expensive than in the UK, and a new fuse box with five fuses in cost us €130 - this was the cheapest we could find. Wires can be cut to desired length in a DIY store - we just supplied the fuses, box and channelled the walls and a certified electrician ran the new kitchen fuse box off of the main box in the hall.

LIME WASHING WALLS

With the stone on the main outside wall exposed, the timber lintels cleaned up, and the wires and cables that we were going to keep in place, it was time to bring the wall to life. The wall had been covered up for decades and each stone had faded to grey.

To begin with, we repointed all of the raked out joints between each stone with a lime mortar mix that we bought in powder form locally from a builders’ yard in 25 kilogram bags. We calculated that each bag would cover three to four square meters so estimated that four bags would cover the wall.

Mixed with water, this mix becomes a thick substance that is easy to apply into the gaps between each stone, and once left to set it then hardens. These mixes come in a variety of colours and the builders’ yard had a colour palette from which we chose our desired shade. We picked a sandy colour that matched the original mortar and would have been used when the house was built. Once applied, and right before the mix dried and solidified completely (called ‘curing’ time), we pushed the now hardening mixture back with a pointing spoon and brushed off the excess so that it sat neatly within the joints.

This process makes the wall look finished and solid, with no gaps between each of the stones. When this had dried, the wall looked complete and all that was left to do was give it an injection of colour. Applying two coats of lime mixed with pigments over the entire wall and leaving it to try, we achieved the original sandy stone colour and our kitchen wall instantly had a new lease of life.

The damp patches were gone and the stonework blended seamlessly into the sandy yellow colour that the lime had given it, and was now able to breathe again.

THE KITCHEN UNITS

Kitchens in Italy seem to be far costlier than they are in the UK, but only seem to cover half the space. A few cupboards and appliances, from what we saw, were more expensive when compared to UK prices. Our kitchen is 22 square metres and although we didn't want surfaces and units to cover the whole area, we wanted a large kitchen to fill the space and allow a few people to use it at the same time, should we rent out the house.

eBay was a good starting point - used kitchens are usually great prices and the owners only list them as a convenient way to get someone to come in and take them off their hands. You have to shop around, search through the listings and wait for the right one for your space to come up. We wanted something that resembled a country kitchen as we already had ideas of how we wanted our kitchen to look. We found a great one in Surrey that looked well looked after, and we won the auction for just under £400 - including oven, fridge and dishwasher!

We ordered countertops from Wickes and managed to get two large wooden ones on special offer for £60. Job done!

Obviously if you have a higher budget then you can take measurements and have a kitchen supplier draw a layout for you, but being designers we re-imagined ours and made a few adjustments, using extra wood to create the units we wanted.

We added the kitchen to our floor plan and followed this so we knew where everything would go. Once all of the plug and electrical sockets were in place, we were able to assemble the units and fix them to the walls. Where there was a gap, we made a wine rack, and where there were edges, we used the tongue and groove from the cladded wall and painted them white.

We made a unit to hold the fridge, and another cupboard with brackets inside to secure our hot water tank to. We originally intended to put the sink in front of the kitchen’s main window, as it’s better to have a nice view to look at while you're washing up… however we didn't anticipate having to stand on the countertops in order to open and close the window! So we moved the sink to the left of it, and turned the large window ledge into a cosy seat which I think looks better.

LIGHT FIXTURE

As the room only gets direct sunlight until lunchtime, we built a ceiling fixture that would house three light shades. The lintels were now back to their original oak colour, so to pull all the wooden features in the room together we rested our light shades on a long strip of wood that we painted match. We lowered it slightly so that it was not flush with the ceiling and bought three modern chrome shades that matched the cooker extractor fan and backsplash.

Harsh overhead lighting can actually highlight the fact that a room is naturally dark. Instead of flooding the space with fluorescent lighting, we chose our artificial lighting carefully so that it looked as natural and pleasant as possible. Three lights would ensure a light kitchen even in the afternoon, and we added a table lamp in the dining area where there was no ceiling light to reflect light onto the ceiling and walls, and diffuse light all over the room. This reflected light provided a soft, overhead glow which minimised harsh shadows.

FIREPLACE

The fireplace was in good condition, but pretty nasty to look at! It was quite wide and the surround was tiled in brown with a hint of orange. Surrounding this were strips of grey granite that formed little ledges for the mantel to rest on. The whole thing was very well preserved, so for the time being we painted over the tiles with white tile paint and stained the mantel the same colour as the rest of the wood in the kitchen. We painted the little granite ledges the same colour as the wood to give the effect of the whole thing being wooden.

There was a huge collection of jugs left in the kitchen so we picked the best of these and filled them with plants and flowers and lined them up on top of the mantel. Above it we made a mirror to reflect the natural light from the window, this would keep the area lighter during the day. Inside the fireplace was a collection of iron coal shovels and brackets that we cleaned up and stained black, leaving them in the fireplace to add character to our country kitchen. The fireplace works but needs relining as when it’s lit the smoke seeps through to next door! It will do for now though.

We collect vintage postcards wherever we go. I love the fonts they use and the drawings that capture a glamorous era gone by. I bought cheap white frames from Ikea at only 80 cents each and lined them up on the wall above the dining table (lay them out on the floor first to see which order looks good, then align them with the wall and measure the distance between each one so you know where to put the nails). I think they look great. It gives the dining area a retro-cafe type feel.

CHOOSING COLOUR

As the kitchen is half submerged below ground, and is East facing so does not get sunlight in the afternoons, a warm colour was needed for the walls. We would use it in the morning when the sun was directly shining in, but also in late afternoon and early evening when there was no direct sunlight, so a colour that maximised the light all day was essential to keeping the room as bright as possible.

We had decided to keep the floor, which was light brown and white, and the kitchen units were white with brown wooden countertops, so we picked a colour to match. We went with yellow as it’s perfect for a darker room, and would add to the country kitchen feel we wanted to create.

Most DIY stores in Italy will mix paint at about half of the price that you would pay in the UK. Paint brands sold in the UK are hard to find in Italy, so not being familiar with other brands we decided to trial the store’s own mixes. Just pick the colour from a colour chart in store and they will mix it up for you. Tell them how much square meterage your walls cover and the store will mix up enough for two coats. Always get some extra so that you can touch in areas that might chip (or if you are like me at hitting nails into walls, more than a little extra!)

TILE PAINTS

These come in an array of brands and prices, all promising to create a perfect finish in two coats. In our experience we found this not to be the case. We started with a cheaper brand that covered the kitchen wall tiles in two coats, but when applying this to the sitting room and bathroom floors, they chipped easily and flaked off.

Use the cheaper brands for wall tiles, but unfortunately the decent floor paints cost as much as laying a brand new floor. As we did not have many tiles in the kitchen to cover, a cheaper brand would suffice.

! We laid out the kitchen units and got to work!

! Our finished kitchen

! Our finished kitchen

! The dining area before and after

! Our finished kitchen

! I love this window seat!

! The kitchen was completely transformed

! Our window seat

OUR ADVICE

- Plan where you want electrical sockets to go in advance. Think about the gadgets and appliances you have and where you want to put them. Plug sockets in Italy are normally sold in pieces - the frame, backing and actual socket are all sold separately. And they aren't cheap. The electrical component alone be €14 so buying many of these can add up. Think about how many you need and shop around. We bought our light switches and sockets in the UK where they are significantly cheaper.

- If bringing electrical appliances from the UK, ensure that they work well with Italian fittings. It took us a while to find a small part that would connect the gas pipe to our hob.

- Have an electrician advise you on what fuses need to be added and which appliances can run simultaneously on your electricity package.

- For any gas works, you will need to contact a plumber. Strange, but true.

DECOR

- Bring light into dark rooms by adding mirrors (opposite windows where possible), lamps and bright ceiling lights. We built a ceiling fixture using three lights and wood stained the same colour as the window lintel.

- Expose window lintels in old houses as they bring instant character to a room. We stained ours to match the fireplace mantel and the ceiling light fixture so that it pulled all heavy wooden items together.

- Paint the ceiling white. If the room’s ceiling is painted a dark colour, or has dark wooden beams, it is probably casting a pall over the entire room. Buy a tin or two of white paint and give the ceiling a fresh coat. The bright white will reflect light instead of absorbing it, and you'll be amazed at what a difference it makes.

- If you prefer to use colour on the ceiling instead of plain white, try a pale yellow, mint or cream.

UTILITIES

Electricity in Italy comes in different tariffs, and which tariff you choose depends on how much electricity is wired to your house. Should you want more than the standard amount, an upgrade fee of €200 must be paid and each unit of electricity is around 10% higher than a standard package. We asked around and most people find that a basic package is enough, it just means that a large appliance like an electric oven will use all of your bandwidth (not a huge problem for us, but we did have to remember to turn off the electric water heater if the oven was on!)

The worse that would happen is that the switch in the fuse box would trip, so it was fun to see which appliances could and couldn’t be used simultaneously.

The electricity company did upgrade our meter so that we could see in real time how much we were using, and warning messages would appear on the screen if we were going over our maximum usage.

Luckily we had a gas hob as otherwise we wouldn't have been able to roast a chicken and boil potatoes at the same time! If you leave the house empty and switch the electricity off, there will still be a charge for the services, but it will be minimal. Expect bills to be slightly higher than they are in the UK.

We also paid €90 to change the electricity bills from the previous owner’s name to ours.

The TV licence fee is added on to your electricity bill and charged quarterly. Our bill comes out every two months, and four times a year the licence fee is included.

Gas As in the UK, there are several providers of gas, including most electricity companies. You only pay for what you use so there are no service charges or fees in having it connected to your house, providing the gas is turned off when you leave for long periods. We paid €16 to have the bills changed from the previous owner’s name into ours, along with a large estimate included in our first bill - despite the fact we had used no gas whatsoever.

A qualified plumber will test gas fixtures and fittings for you, and connect it to your oven or hob.

Water There are several companies that also offer combinations of gas, water & electricity. We have just kept ours with separate companies as that is what the previous owner had, so we paid a small fee to change her name to ours. Tariffs are comparable to those in the UK, and our bills are set up to view online and pay by direct debit.

Be sure to send the water company your meter readings via their website, otherwise they will estimate the charges.

THANK YOU

Thank you for downloading this ebook sample. We really hope you have enjoyed it. If

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