Finally, finally, finally!

We were having breakfast on Saturday morning when the phone rang. It was the geometra. Could M come and sign the plans so they could be submitted on Monday?

 Could he sign the plans? Of course he bloody well could. I haven’t seen M get dressed so speedily before.

 So, the plans, which have actually turned out quite well, are signed and they’ve gone to the comune this morning. That in itself is cause for celebration. 

What puzzles me more than anything though is why money isn’t discussed until after the plans are submitted. Neither M or I have any idea as to how much this new progetto is going to cost us in terms of building materials, or how much we’ll end up paying both the geometra and the costruttore.  If I were in England, I’d have figured all that out before the building work begins but I’m not in England, I’m in Italy and I’m playing by the new rules that I haven’t yet understood.

 Let the fun and games begin.

Energy Saving in the Home

My apathy regarding the house has passed. Thankfully, I’ve had a reality check and know that soaking away in a spa tub with a bicchiere di vino rosso is not the best way to keep momentum moving. So I’ve decided to dedicate an hour a day to exploring the possibilities of making our house as green as possible.

 Interestingly, I read yesterday that the Brits are leading the way in eco gadgets and also about a Victorian house in Nottingham, in the UK, that has even got the goverment excited about the energy-saving devices employed.

Here are the links:

 The Recycled House

Green Gadgets to Save Energy in the Home - here you’ll find eco balls to wash your washing without washing detergent. M comes from a cleaning-obsessed family where la mamma gets up at 6.30am to start the daily routine. And yet I managed to convince him of the benefits. Result!

More Eco Gadgets - solar-powered ipod chargers, that type of thing.

 I haven’t found any good Italian sites yet so if anyone knows of any please let me know.

Guess the start date and win a bottle of Sardinian wine

I drove past the site of the odtrc-saga this morning which was silly of me really. I’m quite sane, I know the house isn’t there but I always hope against hope that my fairy godmother has arrived to transform a desolate plot of land into a shimmering white villa.

 Needless to say, she hadn’t. The plot is as it always has been.

Anyway, I’ve decided to turn into an improvised bookmakers.  Guestimate when building work will start and the person who picks the exact date or nearest to it, will win a bottle of Sardinian wine.

 What are you waiting for? Get those votes coming in….

Eeek! The plans haven’t even been submitted yet!

When we last had a meeting with the geometra 19 days ago, we were promised that the plans would be submitted for approval within a maximum of 10 days and that he would ensure that we got to the top of that waiting list.  

We bumped into the geometra outside the bar at lunchtime and the planning application is ready it now just needs to be submitted. But first he needs to solve the little problem of us not having sufficient car parking space. He needs to have a word at the council to find out whether we’ll be granted planning permission regardless due to our sob story of not having a house or whether we’ll have to modify the plans before we submit them.

Even G, the costruttore, is getting annoyed now because as much as we want a house to live in and I want a office to work in, he wants a new project to work on.  

Still there are plenty of horror stories around of geometras who don’t know what they are doing. Two friends of ours, B & A, from
Milan, are building a house just a few km along the road from us. A diligently chose his geometra after getting quotes and interviewing each one. Nevertheless, he has still ended up with a staircase that is far too low because the geometra miscalculated the number of steps needed.

It’s made me realise how lucky we are even if the house won’t be ready until the second half of 2008.

All too much

The odtrc-saga seems to have taken on a life of its own.

 Take last weekend for example. We’d casually popped into a couple of furniture showrooms in Olbia as we’d just done the weekly food shop and were on our way back to Arzachena. We saw a couple of kitchens that we liked the look of and before I’ve managed to stutter out hold-your-horses-we-haven’t-even-got-planning-permission-yet, our polished assistant had taken our phone and fax numbers and email addresses so that the architect and interior designer could come up with a design.

 And to their credit, in just three days they have. But they’ve got the works. Forget just the kitchen, we’ve got a chic minimalist shelving unit-thing for the living area, tv, two sofas and a chair and a coffee table and something for under the stairs. All very good but as much as I might have white minimalist fantasties as a I flick through house magazines, I am so not a minamalist and quite like the clutter of open shelving, driftwood and my Clarence Cliff china and old dotty Poole Potter that has miraculously survived student days and 10 moves around Europe.

The interior designer’s layout is chic, pristine and more sparkling than a showroom. But I can just see it now: either I’ll manage to spill my glass of red wine over the new settee and stain it for ever (and I still have nightmares from staining A’s mum’s prized antique lampshade with red wine when I was 17 ) or will excitedly whizz up some strawberry daquiris in the blender which will blob everywhere in a rendition of our housemate dinner back in 2001. So really, all in all, perfect white and I are not the perfect match.

I’d rather just enjoy the next few months not even thinking about how I’m going to decorate the house. Spending my weekends languishing about in one of the centro di benessere (spas) that are in Gallura or reading the Sunday papers while sipping frothy cappuccino and eating a warm croissant oozing apricot jam is, quite frankly, a lot more enjoyable.

Two kitchens, three ovens and lots of parties

Few countries in the world boast a culinary heritage like Italy so I guess it was only inevitable that our meeting with the geometra would veer onto the subject of food and drink.

We’d already discussed and confirmed the layout of the groundfloor, first floor and attic. All we had left was the basement, or cantina as it is known in Italian.

With 90 square metres, we’ve got lots of space to play with so there I was imagining my chic girly bathroom, along with a home cinema so that M’s baby (a huge 42-inch wide-screen tv bought when we moved to Sardinia) could geniously be stashed out of sight.

 But M and the geometra had other ideas.

“So we’ll be putting in the big cucina (kitchen) down here then, will we?” asks the geometra, to which M nods oh-so-enthusiastically and starts salivating over where he is going to hang his prosciutto and salsiccia, the olive oil our friends make us on their orto in Villacidro, and the organic formaggi that are made on a farm a few km away on the coastal road. Between them, they’ve also come up with having a double oven, a fireplace, a bar, a wine cellar and a huge table to seat all our guests.

Every sardo I speak to has also suggested the same thing, so I guess I’m outvoted on this one.

On the plus side, it means we’ll be having lots of parties. Watch out for that invite flopping through your letter box some time in the next few years.

Economy drive

It’s a good job I’m not the panicking type, otherwise I would probably have suffered a fair few panic attacks by now, worked myself into a perpertual state of anxiety over the odtrc saga and  have had many a sleepless night wondering how the hell we are actually going to afford to  build a four-storey house when we actually only had just enough money to renovate a two-storey house.

This time last year, I’d only just finished paying off my student and graduate loans and the overdraft and credit cards that come with getting through five years of study and obligatory trips abroad in that time to improve my French and Italian so that I didn’t get chucked of my course (yes, sadly, I really was that bad -  proof that if I can speak fluent gramatically-correct Italian and also bits of dialect, anyone can). And when the bank statement came through showing my balance as £0.00, I vowed I would never get into debt again.

So, clearly that plan has gone by the wayside. I could have coped with a mortgage. Everyone has a mortgage. But now we have to pay for the geometra and the costruttore and the building materials and furniture  – we’ve got most of it in storage, but we’ll still need a kitchen and all the appliances, a bed and at least one of the bathrooms done before we move in. M’s the accountant not me but even by my GCSE maths and Excell spreadsheets, I am well aware of the savings we’ve got to make.

Apart from paying the mortgage, we’ve also got the monthly rent to pay out on the apartment we are currently living in, plus we want to save an additional Eur1,500 per month so that when building starts work we already have sufficient funds.

On a real economy drive, we’ve swapped the weekly meals out for Sunday cappuccinos at a beach bar, and are having home-made minestrone quite a few nights of the week. Plus, I’ve also decided that I use the car far too much, so I’m back to walking as much as possible. It may not sound much, but I’ve worked out that that already saves us Eur200 per month which makes Eur2,400 over the course of one year.

But it’s amazing, how money appears just as you want it. I’ve just landed, completely out of the blue, an editing contract, a writing assignment and ongoing work as an international researcher for a couple of Sardinian companies looking to expand into English-speaking territories. And we are also busy with consultations.

I don’t know where the money is all going to come from but I do know that everthing will work out just fine.

Eur35m for a house by the sea

I fell in love with Sardinia all over again yesterday.

We were driving along the windy panoramic road from Arzachena to the island’s north coast. We saw the pretty villages full of granite-blocked houses with their wrought iron balconies, cinghiali (wild boar) suckling their young by the side of the road, and, of course, the jaw-dropping views of the sea and the snow-capped mountains of Corsica in the distance. It made me want to move Sardinia straight away – until I remembered that this is actually our home.

In the evening we were out with A, a geometra friend of ours, and his wife, P. Note that A can’t be our geometra because he lives in Olbia and not Arzachena. Even though Olbia is only 25km away from Arzachena, employing A would be seen as using someone from outside the area so our plans would be left languishing at the bottom of the pile for a long, long time.

In between bites of the most delicious pizzas ever (no soggy dough, but crisp-to-perfection bases and just the right amount of sugo, mozzarella and topping), we spent much of the evening talking about the spiralling property prices of the Gallura. A, for example, is currently working on a building project for a very rich Russian who paid Eur35m (yep, you read that correctly: thirty five million euro) for his villa by the sea. And that’s excluding the cost of renovation that is going to come to another few million. It’s totally over-the-top but that’s the price people are paying to have a home in this corner of paradise.

With affari like that going on, I know just how lucky I am to live where I do.

Commiseration rather than celebration

Well, we cracked open the bottle of Barriu yesterday evening but it was more for commiseration than celebration. Still, I did enjoy it.

Everything was going oh-so-well with Mr Geometra last night and we finalised the details of our project to ensure we would get planning permission. I was on such a high at this point that I fully expected a positive response to my question: ‘So, just how long are we going to have to wait then?’

He walked over to the filing cabinet (to get the full effect, imagine the walk in slow motion accompanied by that ominous music you get in movies when something oh-so-bad is about to happen) and pulled out a thick orange file.

 ”See that,” says Geometra. “The planning department is just reviewing this application now. We submitted it on July 15 last year.”

Errrr…..what…..how……help…..arrrrrrrgh. Did I really hear that correctly?

 Unfortunately, I did. I saw the date stamp. So that’s nearly six months and permission hasn’t even been granted yet. Apparently, and Geometra should know having previously worked in the planning department, there is a backlog of more than 500 applications with only two technical bods employed to look through them all. They manage to get through between one and four projects a day,  and sometimes not even that if they have a big hotel complex to approve. That can take four or five days.  I haven’t even bothered to work out how many months we are going to have to wait if our application doesn’t get pushed to the top.

Of course, we’ll be writing a full sob story sympathy letter that makes the council aware of the fact that we bought a house to live in back in August 2006 but through no fault of our own we don’t have it any more. That we are currently paying for a huge mortgage and also rent. That living in an apartment the size of a postage stamp means there is no room to have an office which was all part of the plan and therefore professional engagements are compromised. That we can’t live permanently in a house built as a holiday home and without heating and air con for much longer.  And that I’m very good at being menacing. Ok, I made the last point up but I wish I could give them a big inelegant kick up the backside in order to get things moving.

 Building work is probably not going to start until October or November and we’re unlikely to be in the new house until summer 2008.

Looks like this blog is going to continue for a long time yet.

What I’ve learnt so far

Clearly, it’s not been my week. First the laptop dies on me and the other laptop I was using had some kind of bug and just wouldn’t let me post on this blog.

I was so excited on Monday. Finally the geometra has spoken to his amici (friends) at the town council and I now know, off the record, that our project is going to be approved. So now all we have to do is  finalise the details and then hand in the plans for formal planning permission. This calls for a celebration. We’ve got an appointment with the geometra tonight at 6pm so once we’ve finished, it will be time for a slap-up dinner in my favourite restaurant, or at the very least a bottle of the Barriu, my favourite red wine which comes from a vinyard just a few km away from the site of the odtrc saga.

Although I’ve not been able to write on here for the past few days, I have been thinking about the ups and downs of homebuilding in Italy and what I’ve learnt so far.

So this is my first list of what I’ve learnt since we bought our little house back in August last year.

1. Just because of the house was there before, it doesn’t mean it will be a simple case of building a new one more or less the same. Building regulations change. For example, our house will have a total of 574 cubic metres (excluding the basement and covered verandas) and new planning laws mean that we need to allow for three car spaces even though we don’t have three cars. However, that in itself isn’t a problem. What is somewhat irking is that that takes up most of the  garden. And we are going to have to have electronic gates to get the cars in and out. That means that I can’t have my little wildlife paradise filled with trees and shrubs because I have to allow room for the cars. Had we only renovated the house, I could have had them because the property would have been considered old and we would not have had to allocate adequate car park spaces. 
2.   Before you even think buying a house to do up or a plot of land in a built up area of Italy, hire a local geometra to go to the town hall on your behalf and find out about whether or not they are in a conservation area. I thought I would be able to paint my house a nice impractical white like some of the houses further along the road, but we are restricted to the sludgy browns, ochres and beiges that surround our house to ensure a uniform approach.

1. Take time off work if you have to in order to look for property here. Most property is sold via word-of-mouth and talking to the right people and you need to walk around with a cheque for Eur5,000 in your pocket ready to block a house you love as soon as you view it. Properties here get snapped up faster than a pair of Jimmy Choos in the winter sales so there is no room for being indecisive.
2. Make sure your geometra and costruttore (builder) are local and held in high esteem. You don’t want a builder who offers a cheap quote but who the locals can’t stand. When work started on our house before the roof collapsed, our new neighbours all had some kind of connection with either the geometra or costruttore or both. One neighbour let us connect up to their water supply and another allowed the team of builders to work on their land. Little things like that go a long way in Italian villages.
3. I’ve lived in Cannigione, which is part of Arzachena, for the past couple of years, so I’ve seen all the new developments taking place. However, if you fall in love with a place while you are on holiday in Italy get to know the area well before making any rash decisions.  That quaint little village that has worked its magic on you m ay be earmarked for massive development in an effort to tripple the number of inhabitants. Don’t think that will happen? Think again. It’s exactly what’s happening in Arzachena. In 2000, the town had a population of just over 10,000 but there are plans to increase that to over 20,000 within the next five years. I’m happy about it though. A new theatre is being built with plans to attract top Italian theatre companies.
4. If you intend to build a house in Italy, be prepared to wait and wait and wait. There is lots of Italian bureaucracy to get through and you won’t be able to start work for months. For example, we fell in love with our house at the beginning of June last year and blocked it with a deposit the very next day. But we didn’t get the keys or sign the act until August 5. And we couldn’t start renovations until November. Now, even though our plans are being pushed to the top of the file,  work is unlikely to start until the Autumn.  When you find a builder you like, ask them about their availability and whether he or she (but likely to be a ‘he’ given Italy being very traditional) has enough builders to work on more than one property at the same time.