From bikini to snow

I may not have a house to build, but there’s plenty of other stuff to distract me like this freezing weather.

I cannot believe I was gloating to everyone back in the UK and US about being in flip-flops and bikini. Yesterday the temperatures plummeted by at least 18 degrees as I was regretting my decision to pack up my winter gear and store it at Mario’s parents’ because it was icy. It was actually hailstoning and in  some parts of Sardinia it was snowing.

Yikes. It’s officially springtime and it seems more winter-like than winter was. I hope we get sunshine and t-shirt weather again soon.

Twiddling my thumbs

Ho hum. There’s still no news on the house. For whatever reason, the brother-in-law isn’t doing his brother-in-law duties because the costruttore doesn’t have a job so our house is still confined to being just a ink sketch on paper.

I was talking to my dad on the phone last night. Mum and Dad were with me when I saw the house for the first time. In just over two months they are out here again. Last year, they thought they’d be out to make the garden all nice pretty and impart some of the pollice verde (green fingers) that sadly I don’t have. But obviously they won’t be. They’ll be out to see just a stark plot of land (sob, sob, sob). And perhaps when they come out next year, they might just get to see the foundations.

Also, just to clear things up. I’m so not depressed about the house falling down. Granted, I’m not enthusiastic about the project at the moment but what’s there to get enthusiastic about? I’ve stopped flicking through house magazines and also looking at what solar panels etc to get because by the time our house gets built, who knows what the situation will be.

 Still, if I don’t have to project manage the house, that leaves me plenty of other time to get on with How to Italy stuff.

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.

A parallel universe

Oh the joys of living in Sardinia where time works in a totally different way to the rest of Europe.

Last Tuesday when we met the geometra, he was going to have the new plans drawn up this week but, unsurprisingly, that hasn’t happened. He still has to go to the comune (town hall) to sweet talk to his friends into letting us have some leaway on the building regs. Then once he’s sweet-talked them, he has to sweettalk the neighbours who ended up with a roof in their house. He candidly told us this in a meeting tonight when she should have been discussing the next step. Clearly 24 hours in Euro-time is about 1 hour in island-time.

In the meantime, I’m collating as much information as possible on eco-housing. The upside of not having a house and being able to build from scratch means that we can make it as ecologically sound as possible. With the new finanziaria, or budget law, from Prodi’s goverment having just come into play, renewable energy attracts 50 per cent tax deductions which makes it a far more attractive option. I’m also tempted by the idea of a living roof. However, that translates as ‘tetto verde’ in Italian, or green roof, so I suspect they may just think we intend to paint the roof green.

I just can’t believe how non-green Sardinians are. We have temperatures of 20 degrees in winter and endless days of blue skies and sunshine – all ideal conditions for having solar panels. And yet eco-friendly building just hasn’t come into play. But I guess that is only to be expected on an island where they leave empty wine bottles, crisp packets and cigarette ends on the beach. I’m going litter-picking tomorrow to stop it washing into the sea.

Thank you

Crikey. I got up this morning to do work on the new www.howtoitaly.com website but didn’t because my inbox was full of emails from people all over who have evidently heard about the odtrc saga – though maybe that’s not so surprising given its dominating every conversation I have – and who have offered to help in whatever they can.

So, in answer to some of them: Paul – thanks for the tea and sympathy but today, being bright and sunny, I’m actually finding the whole scenario fairly amusing and am now sufficiently over it to be able to go to the bar to relax with a frothy cappuccino which has just the right amount of coffee to give you a much needed caffeine injection and just the right amount of froth to leave you with one of those milky moustauches. That, and popping down to the beach and paddling in the sea – oh you can take the girl out of England but you can’t take England out of the girl.

Tia – thank you, thank you, thank you. Our builder really is a lovely man and he’s managed to save the pretty, traditional Sardinian fireplace that was in the upstairs bedroom and also got a huge digger in (well, we parted with the Euros, obviously) to excavate the old lemon trees that were in the front garden. He’s put the lemon tree on his terreno (allotment) and is also looking after the fireplace until its ready to be put into our new house when the odtrc saga is over. But being able to bat some ideas about via internet would be wonderful. I’m not worried about the outside of the house, I know that that will look fabulous. It’s more how to utilise the space that we have inside.

Shirley – I envisaged myself as a gust of wind, whirring through the dream home last night. Unfortunately, it was galeforce winds at the time, so I limited myself to being just a gentle breeze. Great idea, though not sure I can convince rational, serious, accountant M to do the same, unless I first ply him with a bottle or several of the best wine from the fantastic Capichera vinyard down the road.

The before photos are on my other PC so I’ll upload those tomorrow.

Can dream homes really come in small sizes?

It was despressing going to see the geometra the other night. Homes here and in nearby celebrityville are either tiny apartments which leave you feeling cooped up because you don’t have enough outside space or huge villas. Forget your two-up, two-down that you might find in Liverpool, Manchester or some other city centre, these are sprawling estates with 28 bedrooms, with split-level swimming pools, wine cellers and heliports for when you want to fly in unseen by the papparazzi. That’s all very well but it makes our humble 12m by 12m plot seem like a birdnest in comparison. And it only got worse when the geometra was talking about the challenges of building small houses and how his current project was far easier. At this point, he pulled out sheets of plans and showed us the three-storey villa with basement he was working on. And I swear that our house would have fitted into one of the myriad of rooms.

So the challenge is on: I may not be able to afford a chic villa nestled in the hills and overlooking the stunning coastline, but this is going to be our dream home despite its rather small 12m by 6m limitations. Taking into account the mansarda (attic) and the basement, we should have about 196 square metres to play with.

Our mortgage only covered the cost of the house as it was before and we had enough money set aside to complete the renovations. However, now that we have to unexpectedly build from scratch, we’ve got to get the extra cash from somewhere. This also means that we can’t afford an architect – they don’t have architect your home services here and the firms I’ve contacted in London aren’t interested – so it’s a case of going it alone and getting the geometra to draw that up into a proper plan. Only, I’m not very good at technical things and, though I know we have the space, I’m not sure how to arrange it so we have a decent ground floor office that opens out into the garden, an open space sitting room cum kitchen/diner, stairs, bathroom and then three bedrooms and one with ensuite. Like I said before, we will have a basement that will also have windows in so it can be used as guestbedroom or chill out area and we can build a small mansarda (attic) with roof terrace because that doesn’t take up any of our cubic volume but after that….aiutoooooooo. Help.

My library only used to consist of copious novels and business books but it’s rapidly expanding into building and interior design and everything designed to make the most of small spaces. It’s just a case of trying to figure out which titles will prove the most useful.

The damage revealed

So this is was the state of the roof when the odtrc saga occured and the roof careered into the house next door – just as well the builders had the foresight to see what was about to happen and get out before the roof went awol. Lucky, too, that no one was on the street below. That really would have been bad.

The reason that shaking your shoulders in a very Italian fashion, going ‘boh’ and being very calm about it all is not an adequate solution is because the roof collapsing is just a part of the calamity. The odtrc saga should really be called oh-dear-the-roof-collapsed-because-a-hollow-wall-that-shouldn’t-have-been-a-supporting-wall-was-a-supporting-wall-and-this-fooled-everyone-including-the-geometra-the-builder-and-the-engineer-and-we’ve-had-no-choice-but-to-knock-down-the-whole-thing-because-since-the-odtrc-saga-we’ve-also-found-out-that-there-aren’t-any-foundations-and-that-the-owner-built-his-house-on-mud saga. The irony is that we aren’t two foolish expats who don’t know what we’re doing. We’ve been living in Sardinia for years. I speak fluent Italian as does Mario, being Sardinian. And irony of ironies, is that Mario is a management consultant to the biggest builders’ merchants in Arzachena/Costa Smeralda and we have access to the best of the best.

I know I have to grow up, stop acting like a spoilt brat and just get over this: after all, it’s the roof that’s come crashing down and not my world but that’s how it feels, the drama queen that I am. Renovation work was suppossedly going to be relatively quick meaning that we would have decamped to the house by now and I would have had the home office I’ve been dreaming of since I set up www.howtoitaly.com back in 2005. As it is, I’m going to have to be a patio table entrepreneur for at least another year.

Why we bought where we did

Okay so here’s the lowdown: we’ve just climbed onto the property ladder. We are both first time buyers. As a very poorly paid journalist in the UK and just out of university, there was no way I could afford a mortgage with all the student debt I was in and mum and dad weren’t in any position to give me any. And in Italy, once I was no longer a staff reporter, no bank was going to give me a mortgage on a lavoro a progetto because I was one of the ‘precarious’ workers, plus Mario had just gone self-employed so couldn’t prove his earnings either. And tfor a couple of year that pushed us out of the property market which was spiralling upwards.

What made it worse is where we were looking. The Gulfo di Arzachena is such a sought-after area that it’s like all that bitching and shoving in the New Year sales. You see a place, and you go and view it and you fall in love with it and you want to buy it. But before you do, someone else barges in and snatches it away from you just when you thought it was within your grasp. Only here, forget literal shoving. They come in waving Eur150,000 in cash. In cash!!!!! Like how are we, first time buyers without large desposits from mummy and daddy (me) or mamma e babbo (mario) going to get that money from unless we rob one of the banks on the Costa Smeralda?

And after that goes on for a long, long time you start to get pretty desperate. This isn’t a holiday home and it isn’t a buy-to-let. It’s our home where we’ll be living on a day-to-day basis. That means that we can’t choose cheaper areas down the road because we need to be where we are for work purposes and we can’t live where we live now in Cannigione by the sea because a) the flats are smaller than postage stamps and b) there isn’t internet.

We did see a beautiful place out in the hills in the middle of nowhere. There were olive groves and a glimpse of the sea, too. It was such a beautiful plot of land but I work from home all day. If I lived out in the hills, I’d turn into a hermitess, my hair would grow down to the ground and I would never talk to anyone. Urgh, not a pretty sight. I want to be pulling on my glad rags, slapping on the make up and dining and wining in the best restaurants, oh and going for my lethal-but-necessary caffeine shots in the local bar. And for that, town is the only option.