In previous posts, I document the process a little bit that we went through to buy a house in Valle d’Aosta, Italy. Last November, the moment was finally there: we got the keys for the house and drove up the mountain for the first time as owners of a little place there.

It was COLD! We knew it was cold, so we had taken the necessary clothing fortunately. We didn’t know however that is was going to be that cold. When we drove up the mountain, we saw the temperature dropping from +1 or so, to -5 or -6, and then it was only 5pm and it was still light out.

The first night, we lid a fire in the fireplace and drank a couple of glasses of wine to keep ourselves warm and we went to bed early (we had a bus with us filled with furniture, such as beds, blankets, et cetera). The next morning was terrible! We didn’t have running water (we could have ask some locals to turn it on for us, but we didn’t bother doing that for this weekend), we didn’t have electricity and the only source of heating was the fire. It was was too bad though that the fireplace didn’t work very well, causing the smoke to sometimes not go up the chimney, but into the kitchen . Anyway, we started working (cleaning, etc) and quickly got a little warmer.

Then, the most beautiful thing happened. The sun had reached enough height to reach our little plot of land and all of a sudden, the temperature started to climb very quickly (or at least, so it felt). So we had lunch in the sun, opened a bottle of good red wine and toasted on our newest acquisition.

Although it was cold, the remaining two days were very nice. We cleaned the whole house, we gathered a big list of things to do, spoke with a geometra (guy that can help us get local things done such as reconstructions and renovations) and more.

Hopefully (if the weather is okay), I’ll be going there again near the end of December, to speak more with the geometra and to start planning for the renovations.

I’ll keep you up-to-date. For more pictures by the way, look at the previous post on Casa Pura Vida.