Monthly Archives: October 2011

The Clean Team Attacks Godzilla

30 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in General

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Here’s where you get to see just how nuts we must have been to fall in love with this place. The most gross, animal-molested mattresses and other debris were in every room when we first saw the house. No ‘vendor to clean’ clause in the purchase; the stuff was still there when we became the proud patroni of our dream home.

Now I lay me down to sleep

The roof had fallen apart and the rain had rotted ceilings, floors, and several of the plaster walls. If you’re ever looking for an old house to buy in Italy, make sure the roof is intact; it will save you a heap of heartache and money. And grossness.

After we’d owned the house for a couple of years, the top floor still looked like this; we’d cleared the middle floor but hadn’t gotten any further. An Austrian friend came to visit the house with me one summer and announced that all the crap was creating negative energy. No guff!

Would Sleep Country take this one?

Amazingly, she also declared we should get rid of it ourselves, that very minute. She has a kind of ongoing crusade against negative energy. So we donned gloves, wore underwear on our faces as masks (what can I say, they work well if you don’t have a real mask and they were clean) dragged it all over to the windows and – with a lot of shoving and grunting – down it all fell, three stories. Crash, thud, splat. Sooo satisfying. You gotta love a friend who will do that with you. We swept; you have to be vigilant when it comes to negativity, so we were after ever speck. Then our ever helpful neighbour came over with his front end loader and took the nasty heaps away.

I have to say, it did make a huge difference to how the place felt. Suddenly it was not a cesspool of other people’s decaying debris, it was a tabla rasa of possibilities. Now we could glimpse the future in every room.

Kitchen of our dreams

View from the eventual shower

The Long and Winding Road

26 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Beginnings

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Somewhere along the way, all that fantasizing about renovating an Italian villa started to get a little, well, addictive. Then we started wanting something harder and our craving led us to actually looking at ‘for sale’ houses with a real, live agent.

Even that might have remained a kind of     souped-up form of entertainment had she not taken us one day down a rumpled laneway near Scurtabo, in Liguria…It was a classic, tree-canopied lane, with dappled sunlight on rutted ridges winding tantalizing out of sight. Right off the bat it felt magic. The lane led down a slight slope and past a rushing creek; after the bend, it opened up to a small hay field and continued to an old stone shed with roses, hydrangea and rosemary in wild profusion alongside. Beyond that, a large, handsome cherry tree, crazed, unkempt shrubberies, and The House: a great, three-storey lump of semi crumbling stone engulfed by ivy.

The building was not a thing of great beauty.

The deal clincher, believe it or not

However – at the front door was a stone terrace. And off that terrace was a view of the entire valley: vast, pristine, and breathtaking. The house sat on the furthest most point of a promontory, the last structure before the land tumbles down towards the valley below. Every room in the house has a piece of that stupendous view, a breath of its pure air, the music of its silence.

It was place more than structure that made us fall in love. The Italians have an expression for it: colpo di fulmine – a lightening blow to the heart. It was unequivocal; the house was ours before we ever signed a thing.

Is it Crazy to Love Italian Ruins?

16 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by in Beginnings

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Our love affair with Italian housing started off, innocently enough, as a family obsession with the thousands of beautiful, ivy-covered stone ruins that are scattered across the countryside there, the way strip malls are scattered across Ontario. It’s almost impossible to drive anywhere in Italy without coming across some fantastic, abandoned farmhouse straight out of central casting for Romantic Italian Movies.

Some renovation required

When we lived in Italy, our road trips took twice as long as they should have because we kept stopping every time we saw a place we liked. Road-side admiration wasn’t enough, either. Shamelessly, we’d all pile out of the car and wander over the property as though we owned the place, then through the ruined house (testing the floorboards to make sure we weren’t going to fall through), wiping cobwebs off battered stairs, peeking behind half-closed doors. The detris of abandonment was often peculiar. Among rotted armoirs and fallen walls we’ve found mouse-infested mattresses, a crumpled jacket in a corner, a pair of boots by the door as though the last person to leave had actually intended to return. None of this bothered us. We’d redesign the places in our imaginations, argue about it as though it were real, then be on our way again.

These weren’t properties that were for sale, mind. It was pure fantasy, so actual availability never entered into it. It was entertainment without intent, like checking out babes or hunks on the subway. Little did we understand what looking can lead to.