Alef Arendsen

I’m half way done with my little tour d’Europe as I write this from Rome, Italy. I’m here for a Core Spring course that lasts until coming Friday and will be heading back up to Valle di Gressoney after I finish here.

I drove down to our little place in the mountains last Thursday. I just *had* to get one a bit more skiing (or actually snowboarding) done this season, as the snow was so unbelievably good this year. So I left early morning from Utrecht to arrive late in the afternoon hoping to find the road to the house without snow. It all started very promising when I entered Valle d’Aosta. It was about 20 degrees Celsius down in Pont St. Martin and the drive up to the private road alongside which our house is was snow free a pretty long way. But then something unexpected happened. I found all kinds of trees lying across the road. They must have fallen under the weight of all the snow. So even though there was hardly any snow, I still couldn’t get up to the house by car and had to walk up again. I also did this in December and January. Whereas the last two times it took 30 minutes (December) up to more than an hour (January), this time it was easy to get up with the total walk taking only 20 minutes.

Friday and Saturday I did some snowboarding with Friday being kind cloudy and misty all the time and Saturday being an total blast. Nothing but sun and great conditions (although the snow is definitely not as powder’y as before).

Saturday night I went to Milan to hang out with some friends and after having a great pranzo (lunch) in Sesto San Giovanni (close to Milan) I went back up to Valle di Gressoney Sunday late afternoon.

At first, I was planning to go up to Staffal to ski again, but then I came up with a better plan. The weather was very nice without wind, and very clear sight, so I decided I’d try to climb up to Bec di Nona. Bec di Nona is a little pass straight up from our house reaching up to 2000 meter and should provide some great views over Valle d’Aosta on the one side and possibly Ivrea and the Piemonte area on the other side. The (current) background of this blog by the way is a picture of Bec di Nona taken this winter. A friend of mine and I have been there before in summer, but back then there wasn’t any clear sight. I took my backpack and went straight up. After 1 hour of walking I arrived at the area where the steepest climb began and this is also where you could clearly see the avalanches that had been wrecking the area.

I decided to steer clear of the avalanche slide path (that usually is a good idea I’ve been told ) and continued my climb upwards. About 50 meters below the top however I unfortunately had to turn back. The snow was getting too deep. The powder underneath was covered with a thick layer of ice and packed snow after some probing I came to the conclusion that the powder still way too deep to continue the last bits upward. There were also various layers of crust in the snow, which supposedly adds to the danger of snow starting to slide. Don’t want to get caught underneath a pack of powder I would say . Dissappointed I turned back to the house after having some fun sliding down the hills (no avalanche danger there, the snow was only about 20 to 30 centimers thick there with limited inclination). I arrived back at the house using a different route and ended up in our backyard, where I took a few pictures.

Later that day I drove down to Turin where I took a flight to Rome. This is where I am right now. I’m having some great fun giving a Core Spring course here with 12 people and after I’m done I’m taking a flight back up again to Turin to spend another day in the mountains. Then I’m off to Switzerland to visit a friend on Sunday. Monday I’ll be back home again.

p.s. although I did actually read a fair bit about avalanches before I drove down to Italy last week, this little tour made me decide to spend some more time reading up on the subject. Although it’s probably only going to be useful next season it’s a very interesting matter…

Last weekend, Giorgio, Margriet and I went for another short weekend of skiing in Valle di Gressoney. We skied on Friday and Saturday. This was my third (yup, sounds like I’m lucky this year) trip to Valle di Gressoney for skiing this year already (I was there for New Year’s and for a short trip with Peter a few weeks later) and this was yet a totally different experience than the previous ones.

Whereas the previous two times we had quite some good weather, this time around it had been snowing for the full period we were there. We arrived late afternoon on Thursday and left again on Saturday around 5′ish. When we arrived it snowed already, and only on Saturday at 3pm, we saw the first bits of sun on the slopes. Sight was terrible on Friday and also on Saturday morning, with lots of mist and snow falling all the time. It still was a great weekend though, as going off piste didn’t really matter a lot: the pistes themselves were also covered in powder pretty much all day. The times I did go off piste a little bit (there were avalanche warnings all the time, so I didn’t venture quite far from the pistes to keep things safe) I was covered in powder up to my chest. Fortunately there wasn’t a lot of wind, which prevented things from becoming too cold.

We didn’t stay up in the house, as I figured with all the snow, it’s probably even more difficult to get there than two weeks ago. That time it already took us close to an hour to walk up there, but with at least another meter of snow, it would probably have taken even longer, not even mentioning the fact that I only have one pair of snow shoes and these are definitely needed this time of year.

Later on Saturday we went to Milano, to have dinner with Giorgio’s family (parents and grandpa of 96) and have a few drinks with friends of Giorgio. My Italian has definitely improved a lot this weekend, since I was basically surrounded by Italians all the time. Having a simple conversation definitely is not a problem anymore and I’m quite close to understanding a normal conversation as well. Vocabulary-wise I still have to do a fair bit of learning, but that’s going to be just fine as soon as I start reading newspapers (note to self: since you’re at MXP airport anyway right now, why not buy one).

All the locals in Valle di Gressoney are totally stunned by all the snow. All the records are broken, with almost 5m up in the mountains in the Dolomites. I hope it’s going to be snowing a bit more the coming weeks. I’m thinking about planning another short trip in March some time. As it looks, there will be skiing until the end of April or even the beginning of May this year, so even if March doesn’t happen, there’s still some time.

On my way to Oslo, from Milano, I sat next to a couple that coincidentally had been skiing in the Gressoney valley too. They stayed in Staffal, in a hotel called Ellex, supposedly quite nice according to them. One to remember. Also, this guy mentioned a website I had never seen before, called Gressoney Online. Lots of information about the Gressoney Valley.

I’ll post some pictures later on.

I did a little tour of Europe last week. Well, actually, it was just Italy and London, but it felt like I traveled all of Europe in just 6 days. Peter and I had a conference in Rome on Saturday. We left on Friday for Rome and had a little bit of dinner in place close by. In the university building of Rome, I met up with a lot of people the day after that I had only met before online, on some of the Italian Spring mailing lists for example.

At the conference I did a talk, which I thank was quite well received. We had some great Italian lunch after the conference and in the night, we had a simple dinner and went to bed early. The following day, we took a taxi to the airport to fly to Torino. We arrived at about 9.30 after which we took a car up to Gressoney, for my second skiing trip this season. The conditions during my trip in December already were excellent, this time around they were even better. Right before we arrived, there was a big pack of fresh snow and we had some great fun on the first day.

The walk up to the house, proved to be even more tricky than last time. It took about an hour (instead of 35 minutes, which it was last December) to finally arrive at the house. With at least 40cm more snow on the road as in December, it was quite rough.

The following days we skied (well, I did snowboarding, Peter had his telemark skies with him) in the Gressoney, Champoluc and Alagna regions. Every night we did the dreaded walk up to the house, but the second night, Peter got this amazing idea. He added some steigvellen (I have no clue what the word for this in English is, they’re things to put under your skies when going up hill) to his telemark skies and skied right up to the house instead of walking. so the next morning, he was able to ski downhill, right through our backyard, whereas I still had to walk down.

We had some amazing dinner on Tuesday night in restaurant Nordkapp in Gressoney, to which I’ll definitely go back. Surprisingly, after a bottle of wine, the walk up went even smoother than the nights before. That’s probably also because we had walked the road up a few times already and had trampled the snow a bit.

Sunday and Wednesday were days with clear skies. Monday and Tuesday were a bit more cloudy, but still with great sight.

I flew to London Wednesday night after quite a bit of delay (during de-icing, one of the windshield of the plane broke, at least, that’s what I heard the pilot say) and a plane change.

In London, I attended and spoke at the Spring Exchange about Spring 3.0, met up with lots of colleagues and had some nice beers. I missed my flight back home, because of a screw up in my schedule, so finally I only flew back on Friday morning…

I might go one last time to the valley this season for skiing, just for a short weekend. After that, it’s waiting for the road to be clear of snow, before we can drive up again.

Last December I went skiing for the first time in the Monte Rosa Ski area. I figured I would do a little write-up about the area. The Monte Rosa Ski resort is spread over three major valleys: the Valle di Gressoney (the central valley), the Valle d’Ayas (the West-most valley) and Valsesia (the East-most valley). In total there is about 180km of piste, but (especially on the Valsesia side) with a lot more off-piste areas to explore.

Major villages

The major villages from which you can enter the resort are Gressoney La Trinité and Staffal in the Valle di Gressoney, Champoluc in the Valle d’Ayas and Alagna in Valsesia.

Pistes and lifts, snow and weather

There is about 180km of pistes here and all of them are well-prepared. The lifts are modern (as modern as it can get IMO) and some of them have recently been renovated. There is some blue here and there, although not abundant, a lot of red and few black pistes. Especially the ride down from Passo Salati to the village of Alagna is a challenging one. Plenty of pistes will take you through bits of forests and have plenty of breathtaking views. Generally speaking, the weather in this part of Europe is great with a great amount of sun. Snow conditions are generally good, although Austria and Switzerland will give you better conditions generally speaking (this was definitely not the case this season, as the conditions are great at the moment).

The off-piste areas in especially the Alagna area are very good. It’s not without reason Alagna is called the free-ride paradise. There’s also some very good possibilities to do some off-the-beaten path skiing in the region. The picture above for example shows the Bec di Nona pass (on the right you can see skiing tracks coming down). This interestingly enough passes right by my house in the area. On Hotel Jolanda Sport“>Gulliver.it you can find some reports from people that have been doing off-piste ‘expeditions’ in the region. Let me know if you’re planning anything in that region for off-piste alpinismo skiing. I’m always interested to hear your experiences and if I’m in the neighborhood, I might even join .

Below you can find a snippet of the map of the region, linked to the map provided by the official Monte Rosa website.

Skipass

Up-to-date information on the prices for a skipass can be found on the official site for the Monte Rosa Ski resort. At the time of writing (season 2008/9) a one-day skipass will set you back €36,=. Three days will cost €102,= and 7 days €211,= (all in the peak of the season). This will give you access to all the lifts in the main areas, as well as in the smaller areas such as Gressoney St. Jean and Antagnod.

Schools and baby-parks

There are ski schools in each of the three main villages (Staffal, Alagna and Champoluc). As far as I know, all have English speaking instructors, although you have to ask for them. There are baby-pistes and also enough blue to get you going. There are also some baby-parks in the region (Staffal, Gressoney La Trinite) to keep the kids occupied.

Accommodation

I don’t have a lot to say about accommodation in the region, as I’m staying in my own house in the region (half an hour driving from Staffal). I’ve heard good stories about Hotel Jolanda Sport; they definitely have good food! Another interesting option would be to stay at the Rifugio Guglielmina, (one of) the highest permanently occupied hotels in Europe. I don’t have a clue about prices, the website also doesn’t give a lot of information. I might try to found out more later on when I go there in a week again. Another hotel I heard good stories about is Ellex in Staffal, right next to the lifts that go up to both the Champoluc and Alagna area.

Food, entertainment and night life

Food on the pistes generally is very good, as you can expect from an Italian ski resort. Lunch times can get a bit busy at some of the rifugios, but generally very much worth the wait. Not a lot of places as you will find in Austria, with music pounding all the time, but relaxing places instead.

I don’t have a lot of recommendations on the restaurants in Valsesia as I’ve never eaten there. Below you can find a short but good list of restaurants that you might find attractive in both Valle d’Ayas, Valle di Gressoney and the main valley (Valle d’Aosta). The restaurants in the Valle d’Aosta are all a bit of a far drive (the Valle di Gressoney is about 40-something km long, so expect to drive down in about 30 to 45 minutes, depending on traffic).

Restaurants in Valle d’Ayas

• Breithorn Hotel and Restaurant in Champoluc

Restaurants in Valle di Gressoney

• Lo Stambecco in Gressoney St. Jean, highly recommended
• Hotel Jolanda Sport in Gressoney
• Nordkapp in Gressoney St. Jean, also highly recommended

Restaurants in the main valley (Valle d’Aosta)

• Ramo Verde in Carema
• Da Marino in Quincinetto

As some reviewers on Snow-Forecast.com also comment, there is not a lot of entertainment going on in Gressoney La Trinité during the night. Apparently, Champoluc and Alagna have a bit more to offer, but if you’re going to for some big apres-ski, obviously Austria (Anton, Ischl) are your better bets.

Traffic and getting there

By car from West or North-West Europe, getting the to Valle d’Ayas or Valle di Gressoney is a matter of taking the Swiss route, through the Great St. Bernard tunnel, linking Switzerland with Italy or the Mont Blanc tunnel linking France with Italy. Valsesia can best be reached I think via the St. Gottard tunnel, linking Italy with Switzerland, but then a bit further East.

For Gressoney and Champoluc, flying in is best done through Torino airport (TRN), which is about an hour drive from Gressoney La Trinité for example. Milano Malpensa (MXP) is a good alternative for those two places and probably the best option for Valsesia. Cars are generally not very expensive to hire. A small car for a week will set you back about €200,= to €250,= (snowchains are about €50,=).

Important links

• Official website for Monte Rosa Ski
• Snow Forecast.com on Alagna
• Snow Forecast.com on Gressoney
• Snow Forecast.com on Champoluc
• Gressoney Online

As Christmas approached, I figured I should end the year in style and spend the last days of the year abroad. I could have lazily spend them at home, but hey, what’s better than looking at the weather predictions, finding out there’s going to be a whole pile of snow coming in the Alps and booking a last-minute ticket to Milano. At first, it looked like I would be able to talk a few friends of mine into joining, but the ended up going nowhere, so on the 28th of December, having slept for only 3 hours after a nice party in my hometown Utrecht, I woke up at 6 and took a 9am flight to Italy.

For those of you following me, last year, we bought a little place in the Northern parts of Italy, close to the French and Swiss borders. We did lots of renovations in the last 8 to 10 months, such as installing electricity, water a bathroom and giving the entire ground floor a paint job. This means I didn’t have to arrange place to stay and only had to book a flight and rent a car.

There’s one slight little issue with the house though. The last 2.2 kilometres (1.4 miles) of the road to the house are not publicly accessible but owned by a consortium instead. This has two major consequences and one minor one. The minor one is that the road is not maintained as well as a public road. This is not much of an issue. Granted, the road gets a little bumpy in places, but nothing your average little Fiat 500 rental car won’t survive. The first major consequence is that the road is not cleared of snow. This is a problem of course.

The house is situated at 1150 meters above sea-level and it’s obviously not unlikely that there’s snow at such an altitude. Problem number two is that there’s no communal water system and that the privately owned water system is shut down in winter times to not allow it to freeze up. In other words: getting to the house by car is (if there’s snow) not an option (unless I’d have a big Range Rover or anything similar, which I don’t) and second, once at the house (by foot or in the best-case scenario by car), there’s no water.

Fortunately, I had anticipated the second problem. The last time I was there (in September) I hauled about 50 liters of water to the house (mineral water that is), so any cooking- and washing-wise I’d be okay. One of the basements is below the ground so the water would not freeze up (I hoped). The first problem (the road) is obviously a bit more fundamental, so I figured, let’s reserve a hotel for the first night and see what happens.

I arrived on the 28th and immediately drove up to the house (or at least, I tried to). The snow was worse than expected (good for skiing though) and the private road was indeed not accessible, even not with snow chains. So I walked up to see how far that would get me. All together it took me about 30 minutes of plowing through half a meter snow. The electricity worked, the heating system (electricity-based) also worked, so that meant that if I was willing to walk half an hour up and down every day, I’d be okay.

I decided to make it an easy first day and take the hotel owners up on the reservation that I made. The remaining days I did stay at the house. An impression of what went on during those few days:

Heating-wise, I didn’t manage to get the living room warmer than 15˚C with all three heaters turned on. During the night, I only had one of the heaters turned on (the one that doesn’t make a lot of sound) which resulted in a temperature in the early morning of 7˚C. While out for New Year’s (I stayed at a friend’s place in a different valley that day) I turned off all the heaters and when I came back it was 2˚C in the house. The kitchen was left unheated and it didn’t get above freezing there (neither below I think).

Water-wise, I could only flush the toilet by taking a bucket of water from a spring 200 hundred meters up the hill. Now this is already a lot better than last year, when we had no toilet at all, but when you have been living in luxurious hotels the six weeks before that with room service, a freshly made bed and bathrobes, this is obviously a big difference. Also, I couldn’t take a shower, but that’s where the pool came in. Nope, there’s no pool in the backyard… There’s a pool on the way to the skiing resort including a Russian bath and all that… So that’s where I had my evening routine every day: first swimming, then a session in the Russian bath and after having showered, back home. Also, I learnt that melting snow to survive does not help you a lot. It’s a lot of work for a very tiny bit of water. I can definitely understand now that surviving in an ice age is pretty much impossible…

Exercise-wise, I had to walk up the hill for about 30 to 40 minutes (depending on how many groceries I brought) every evening and 20 minutes (taking shortcuts by walking straight down instead of following the hairpins in the road) down every morning. In addition to that, I skied for the first three days and for the second three days I took some snowboarding lessons. I had never boarded before and all my kiteboarding friends called me a loser when I told them I only skied. So I also took the occasional beating while learning to go down a hill dude-wise…

Last but not least, I celebrated New Year’s in Valle d’Ayas. Normally, driving up to Valle d’Ayas (and specifically the place friends of our own there) takes a lot of time (Valle d’Ayas is really long), but this time I could take a shorter route, which was quite cool. By taking up the ski lift and skiing down, it only took me 45 minutes to get to Champoluc instead of the normal 2 hours. Unfortunately I had to wait for the Navetta (the shuttle bus that takes you from various places to the skiing resort and back) and this took another 45 minutes. But well, skiing there is obviously way cooler than driving there (hiking might even be a little bit more cool, but I’ll leave that to coming summer or so).

I took plenty of pictures, some of which you’ll be able to find in this blog post. Others can be found in the web album for this trip.

p.s. when I look at these pictures, I realize I really should clean my camera, there are dust honkers all over the place

I just had my worst travel day ever. I was travelling back from Perloz (Italy) to Utrecht. Everything went fine until I entered the A5 to Milano. Due to the fog there was a big traffic jam and I ended up at Milano Malpensa airport an hour later than expected, at about 7pm instead of 6pm. I had expected some heavy traffic, so fortunately had anticipated this already and my flight was only leaving at 9pm anyway, so it was all cool.

Then I entered Malpensa airport. Everytime I get there I seem to have forgotten how bad the food is at this airport. It’s weird that in the country of nice pizze, great antipasti, the best coffee and their utmost focus on food, at the airport you can’t get anything else than what seems like American-style pizza slices and other warmed-up pieces of bread. Granted, the coffee is still great, but that’s not surprising, given the fact that even the coffee in the gas stations is better than anything you can get in Holland, or anywhere else for that matter.

Since I’ve been travelling like crazy lately, I’ve been awarded the dubious status of being allowed in lounges of airport a while ago, so at least I could spend the two-hour wait in a cozy atmosphere instead of amongst screaming kids.

On to the flight… The fog didn’t only bother the cars on the highway, but apparently our plane had arrived late from Amsterdam and we could only start boarding at about 9.20pm which was about 20 minutes after our schedules departure time. The plane finally left more than an hour late. We gained some time on the way, but then the pilot announced we would be landing at the Polderbaan, which is the runway furthest from the terminals at Schiphol airport. I’ve even heard a pilot once make a joke about it: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve just landed in Brussels and are now on our way taxiing to Amsterdam Schiphol airport.’ It’s about 20 minutes taxiing, which made us end up at the gate at about midnight (about an hour later than expected).

On to the baggage claim. Normally I travel light, so don’t bother with it at all, but this time around, I had my skiing gear with me and a bunch of other things (laundry from the house in Italy, et cetera), so I had to pick up two suitcases. Baggage claim used to be quick in Amsterdam, but lately it seems to be quick a challenge to get the bags in the claim area within 20 minutes. At about 0.25am I had my two bags. The priority tags (that’s another one of those ‘benefits’ you get when you travel frequently) did work this time, so my bags where among the first to arrive.

Next, the train. I had to use the night service, which is not so bad. Normally the train from Amsterdam Schiphol airport to Utrecht takes 33 minutes, the night service uses an extra 19 minutes, nothing to worry about. This went all smooth. Then I walked home and figured I should find the keys to my house in my suitcase. I have no clue what happened to them, but after having searched for 15 minutes everywhere, I simply couldn’t find them. So, at about 2.15am (the train left at 1am and arrived at 1.50am, walking from the train station takes 10 minutes) I finally concluded that I wouldn’t be able to get into my house and had to wake my neighbor. Fortunately he was at home and he was kind enough to let me in (note to self: buy him a bottle of wine) an there I am about 2.5 hours later than expected, writing a little blog entry to clear my mind up.

The trip itself was great. I’ll write more about that later on, but the conditions were awesome, spending time in the house in some quite extreme conditions was cool too (to give you an idea: I just came home and looked at the heating control: it was 15.5 degrees Celcius, about 2 degrees warmer than the warmest I’ve been able to get it in the house in Italy) and capodanno (New Year’s) was way cool too with some friends from Milan.

Okay, that’s it for now, tomorrow I’m off to the (quite) early start (giving the time of the day right now). The pictures are all from the house, from various locations (not modified for white balance and such yet, have to work on that later). As always, click on them for a higher resolution version.

p.s. just read Jo her comment about my posting plane-travel experiences… Well, here you go

I’m speaking at the JavaDay in Rome early next year. The event takes places on the 24th of January. I came across their website just now and this ad struck me as typical Italian.

Also, Andrea del Bene ha scritto: are you planning to give your talk (”Spring == XML therefore Spring == Sucks??”) in Italian?

Andrea: ahhhh, parlare di Spring in Italiano?? Penso di no … Come se dice Dependency Injection in Italiano, iniezione di dependenze? Hmmm, I don’t think it’s gonna work .

Anyway, looking forward to seeing all of you in Roma!

Femke recently advised me to look at LiveMocha for language lessons. I had a look at it and it works out quite alright! People help you correct spelling mistakes, et cetera. It’s a true Web 2.0 collaborative experience. I wonder how they ever will make money though .

Anyway, I came across this nice little picture during the course. Typical Italian, to speak about French fries and calamari fritti as cibo economico (cheap food).

By the way, I’m probably going to Italy between Christmas and New Year’s for a few days of skiing. I heard the Valle d’Aosta is completely snowed under right now (or at least, at 500m and higher, there’s snow). So there will be no way I can ever reach our house by car. I’m thinking of doing it on foot, although I left my hiking shoes in the house, so that’s going to be a little hard then I guess. Anyway, I’ll probably book a hotel for the first night and then see what happens after that.

If anybody is in the region after Christmas, let me know.

I just got back from my parents’ place and saw the pictures from the bathroom. My parents (and uncle and aunt) were so nice as to drop by in Italy last week to fix the tiling in the bathroom in the house.

The bathroom is pretty much *not* like your ordinary bathroom in the sense that it has all kinds of weird angles and little cracks. Lars and I went to Italy a few weeks ago to prepare the floor. There were some cracks that needed to be fixed and other than that it was level at all. A bathroom floor shouldn’t be level (the water needs to flow to the drain) but it was almost like we had we the Alps right in our bathroom…

Anyway, my parents, uncle and aunt were there for a week and other than visiting Turin and a few other places (the Matterhorn, or Mt. Cervina as it’s called in Italian) they spent three days working on the tiling. As you can see in the pictures, it’s quite done now. It’s not the biggest bathroom ever, but well, there’s hot water now and we can take shower inside instead of outside (that was romantic though ).

I might still be heading to Italy for a weekend or so this year, but if that doesn’t work out, I’ll be there in February again, to check out the ski pistes. Supposedly there are some quite nice areas there to check out.

Ah, my parents also had one of the local farmers drop by. He has his cows graze our land and he wanted to pay us for it. I think getting twenty euros for that is silly, so instead he came with a nice fontina cheese… Great stuff!

If you click on the pictures, you end up at the Picasa Web Gallery. There’s even a movie of the bathroom (with my mom giving comments ).

It’s been a little while since I posted an update on Casa Pura, our humble house in the North of Italy. I just returned from a very short trip last weekend and the renovation is going quite well I can say.

Let me start where I left you: beginning of March. As I said back then, we were in the process of gathering proposal from various suppliers, such as the elettricista, the tubista and the muratore. The main goal for 2007 was to install the electricity, water heater and the tubing / piping for the water (both hot and cold). If possible, we also wanted to make a passage from the first floor to the second floor (at the moment, the only way of getting to the second floor is from the outside–which is a little cumbersome in Winter).

Part II – April/May 2008

As I said earlier on, we prepared detailed documentation of where we wanted the electricity installed. Finally, after having visited Italy in March and after having communicated a lot by email and phone, we had an appointment late April to start installing the electricity. Although we had documented everything very thoroughly, it is vital to be present when the elettricista first arrives. The documentation gives some guidance, but in no way gives him enough of an idea about the specifics of what you want. So, be there when the guy starts his work.

In two days, the elettricista did all the milling in the walls and got the electricity working. Not with all the fuse boxes and sockets and all, but the basic stuff was working. After having done this, the muratore would have to come and fix the tubing in the walls. Then, the elettricista would finish his job, by installing all the sockets, the fuse box, et cetera.

So far so good. Beginning of May and we had the first part of the renovation behind us: electricity is installed.

Then the second part started: looking for a tubista and a muratore. During the week in which the elettricista finished his work, a tubista and a muratore were also contacted to look at what needed to be done. The tubista was okay with all our requirements and we set an approximate date for the works to start. The muratore also came to look at the house, but wasn’t particularly interested from the looks of it. While the geometra was inspecting the house with his, he was smoking cigarettes outside. Well, maybe that’s how things work here in Italy we thought.

Part III – June 2008

Anyway, about 6 weeks later we had planned two weeks on site and that’s when we had also set up appointments with the tubista (or idraulico as others seem to call it), muratore and elettricista. We had planned for the muratore to first arrive. He would have to fix the tubing of the elettricista after which the sockets and the fuse box could be installed. Next, the tubista could come to install the tubing for the water and gas.

We arrived in a Saturday and had expected the muratore to arrive first thing Monday morning. Before that happened we first decided to tear down the wall separating the two small ‘living rooms’. The prior owners used one of those rooms as a bedroom and the other as a living room I think, but we wanted to get more light in there and start using it as a living room. Tearing the wall down was done in about half an hour, but taking the rubble down to the garage (we’re storing a lot of rubble there we gather all over the place) took us about 6 hours. The end result was good though.

Fast forward to Monday morning. Apparently, the muratore had figured since we were going to be there for two weeks anyway, he might as well just come in the second week. In other words, he didn’t show up! Hmmm, this screwed up our entire game plan. Second problem: the tubista that was originally planned for didn’t want to come anymore. He had a different gig somewhere else. Nice going!

Luckily enough, the geometra was able to arrange a new tubista on the spot and on Tuesday the guys started to install the tubing. This was done in two-and-a-half days and that was all for the first week

Then the quest for a new muratore began. I dropped by the geometra who was not able to find a new muratore at first. I dropped by the local flower shop (the owners of the flower shop own the house next to us) and asked for a muratore. They knew some, but all of them were busy. I then dropped by at the hotel in which we stayed for a while before the house was ours. They also knew a few guys that could get the job done, but all were occupied. Just as I was thinking I was out of options, a guest in the hotel overheard our conversation and chimed in. He told he knew a muratore. He gave me the phone number and off I went, back to the geometra. Long story short: Monday morning (after first having promised Saturday, but one of his guys was ill) he turned up with four guys and in little under 8 hours, he had fixed everything. Phew…

The next two days were great. It was the connecting the dots: doing a little painting, having the elettricista install the sockets and the fuse box, having the tubista do the hot water. Almost half a year of preparation resulted in a massive change in the looks of the house (internally at least) within a few days.

Other things we did in the two weeks we were there: a lot painting (not just inside, also outside), cleaning the garden, buying tiles for the bathroom, buying a toilet, buying a natural stone kitchen surface.

Part IV – July 2008

The next major challenge was the bathroom. We had originally planned for my dad to drop by in the two weeks we were there to do the tiling. But due to a family emergency, he wasn’t able to come. My mom and dad however did want to go to the house, so they planned for two weeks of holiday in July. Right after the party for my 30th birthday they left and took all the stuff with them that was needed to do the tiling. In two weeks, they took care of installing the tiling, cleaning a lot more and fixing three little supporting walls on which the kitchen surface would have to be fixed.

Together with my dad I fixed the kitchen surface this month in a short weekend trip to Italy and also did some more painting. Unfortunately my dad wasn’t able to get the tiling on the bathroom floor done, but this is not such a big deal as for now, we take a shower outside. We’ll probably fix the tiling on the bathroom floor somewhere later this summer.

All and all, I think the renovation is going quite well. We’re still on schedule to getting most of it done and over with by the end of the summer, or at least, before the winter season. One thing we won’t be able to get done is the inside stairs. Well, it’s okay to have this wait until next summer or so.

Money-wise we’re going slightly over budget, but it’s not more than 5% or so, so we budgeted things quite realistically. I’ll try to post a budget overview later on.

Some lessons learnt:

• Always confirm appointments twice, thrice or four times. Be sure to confirm appointments two weeks in advance, one week in advance and also one, two or maybe three days in advance. This helps at least making sure the workers turn up
• Don’t rely too much on prior documentation. Ask for price lists, hourly rates and do the calculation yourself. A fixed price offer: forget it
• Be there when the workers first arrive. This is when you need to explain what you want, where you want your tubing, et cetera. Even though workers might have seen the house before they start working, you need to make sure you’re there to finalize the specifics of the works

p.s. note that the old pictures have been taken with my Pentax K10-D and the new pictures with my iPhone, so the old ones are of way better quality than the new ones. I think the contrast with the old situation is even more than the pictures show.

p.p.s. A big thanks to my dad and mum: they’ve been great in helping out so far!!!