House update

Baby may be coming to live with us at the end of January, but that does not mean we'll be moving into our future home. That, unfortunately is still a long way off. Our future house is a lovely, old, stone building. I am not sure how old it is as we need to do some investigation into this, but about 50 years ago it used to be a school, a small school mind you, but a school none-the-less. Us living there is a long way off for 2 reasons: 1 we have only enough money at the moment to replace the roof, and secondly we have the world's slowest builders working for us. They have spent the summer taking off the old roof and they still haven't finished putting it back on. When people say you need patience to live in Italy they are NOT joking. These builders are slow because they take on more work then they can manage during the summer months. One day you see them working on your house, the next day at someone else's and it is not unusual for a week to go by and they don't do anything to your house at all. Annoyingly they cost less then other builders and when they get around to finishing do a good job...so for the time being we have to be patient.

When the builders started taking off the roof they found some unstable walls, so had to knock the walls down until they reached something secure. They then had to rebuild these walls, and also raise them as we want to have a usable 3rd level. Before it was not high enough to be a floor, but now it is.



Our house is obviously the one without the roof. It looks small compared to the beast of a 5-bathroom-who-knows-how-many-bedrooms-house behind us.

The builders have fitted all the wooden panels onto the roof and now just need to relay the old tiles, and add the drain pipes (or what ever they are called.) The bricks you see are where they re-laid the new walls, and it will have to stay looking like that for now. We can cover that at a later stage, but there is more important work to be done.



These photos were taken from our balcony as we use the zoom on the camera to spy on the builders from afar. I will take some more photos once they get around to laying the tiles. We then need quotes on how much it'll cost to relay all of the floors, as being old, most probably some of them will have to be destroyed and replaced nice, safe and evenly.