Monthly Archives: November 2012

The Allure of Possession

30 Friday Nov 2012

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I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about why it is that ownership is such a compelling concept. Not only with respect to our general human love of acquisition and possession, but more specifically concerning houses. Certainly if you have any grasp of math and are at all rational, you’d realize that owning a vacation home is often not a brilliant idea, financially.

Let’s do a little quick math on Godzillavilla. A rough figure of total investment for the done thing: € 250,000. That sum was, until recently, around 50% bigger when converted to the currency we earn in (Canadian dollars), but let’s not even think about that right now. Let’s just assume that we would visit every year for 25 years, which is about how many I might still be agile enough to cope with the stairs – that’s a cost per year of about €10,000.  If we were there a minimum of 5 weeks a year, that could look fairly reasonable.

However, then we add taxes, maintenance, someone caring for the place when we’re not there, and emergency repairs due to acts of God or nature. Ah, you say, but if you rent it out all those things are covered and more. Yes, if you manage to rent it enough. Which will in turn create more maintenance, and the cost of a property manager to meet, greet and clean up after your guests.

Why rent this...

Why rent this…

You see where I’m going with this. Home ownership is expensive and relentless. You can make the numbers add up, and lots of people do. Then I look at people who are renting, year-round, lovely homes in areas similar to ours, for less than €4,000 a year. We used to do this ourselves, when we lived in Milan. We had a place in the hills around Levanto for €3,600 and one in Courmayeur for slightly more. We co-rented a country villa in Chianti for about the same.

When you could OWN this?

When you could OWN this?

So why on earth did we go and buy our own place – a ruin that that wasn’t even habitable?

It’s a darned good question, hence my lengthy contemplation of it. My conclusions about my motivations are not entirely flattering but neither are they entirely foolish, and I’ll bet they’re pretty common. I say ‘my’ because I don’t think I should speak for the rest of the family on this one, but I think I know what things drove me, personally.

One aspect had to do with transformation. I absolutely adore taking the latent beauty in a house or landscape and turning it into all it can be. As a family we’d done this for years, in fantasy form, with all kinds of abandoned houses in our travels around Italy. A ruined house of soft, old stone, a vine scrambling up the wall, the setting gorgeous, the view spectacular…it’s an absolute shame that such a thing is crumbling to pieces. I want to restore them all to their true beauty. I might have satisfied that need by becoming a contractor and doing it for other people, but in Italy as a foreigner that wasn’t really an option. And it wouldn’t satisfy reason number two –

Which had to do with nesting. When we bought the villa, we were renting in Milan. We’d been away from Canada for almost eight years, we’d sold our farm there, we’d lived in Milan for a bit, then the US, then back in Milan. Our rented house in Milan was lovely, even luxurious. Was I a spoiled brat for still wanting one that was our own, special place, regardless of where we might be earning our living? I wanted a place that made me sigh with the satisfied sense of truly being home, the moment it hove into sight. And that brings me to –

The biggest reason: the allure of possession. The (as it turns out, unfounded) belief that ownership bestows security – you will always have it, you can use it whenever you want, no-one can take it from you. The delicious idea that once you have restored its breathtaking beauty, it will be yours to have and to hold from this day forward. That you will forever have the opportunity to turn down its lane and heave that sigh, to walk through the door and greet its ghosts, to sit under the cherry tree and soak in the serenity of its valley.

I think it was a pretty good reason, actually. Even if it didn’t turn out to be true in our case. Even if it doesn’t make any sense. The dream of it still has great allure.

Because of feeling I get from this.

Because of the feeling I get from this.

Wine and Sweat

23 Friday Nov 2012

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When your so-called vacation home is more or less a pile of rubble, it does alter what you end up doing when you take time ‘off’ to visit it. Any vacation house takes some maintenance. Certain things, like the cleaning you do when you arrive after several months away – the opening up of shutters to let the light back in, sweeping up spiders and flies, shaking out the duvets and generally reclaiming the place as your own again – feel like happy gestures of affection. Like de-tufting the family cat. Or a gorilla picking lice off its mate. Not fun, exactly, but somehow gratifying.

With that kind of vacation home, once you’ve put in your bit of sweat, you still have plenty of time to kick back with the wine.

Hey kids, want to do some fun clean-up on our holidays?

With Godzillavilla, the work was so endless that physical effort was always part of the holiday agenda there. I’d go with some tasks in mind, and feel as though I had to complete them or it wouldn’t have been worth spending the money on the trip, as thought the labour rationalized the expense. I actually like doing this kind of stuff, so I found it pretty entertaining. The rest of my family, not quite so much.

Everybody did help out, and we did sometimes have a lot of fun and satisfaction doing things together (as in the Triumph of the Sledgettes Part I). But so much of the work was really gross, such as getting rid of the disgusting rotting mattresses, or apparently futile, such as hacking back monster vines only to have them reappear with greater vigor the following year, that it was hard not to be put off.

We did have our moments

As a family, we had no real method for dealing with this. No agreement as to what things we all wanted to tackle, how much time should be spent on them, when we could justifiably call it quits and just enjoy reading under the cherry tree. We kinda worked it out by feel, and it was never a matter of controversy or argument.

But here’s the thing: because I was the one who really enjoyed the work, and went there specifically to do some more, sometimes with like-minded friends instead of family, the project started to become more ‘mine’ than ‘ours’. I still got excited about the struggle of making it happen, while the rest of the family was just wishing we had a place that was already done. It could be said they came to a logical conclusion long before I did. Our collective commitment to the physical, financial and emotional effort involved in seeing the project through started to wane. My own efforts began to feel crazy in the face of the magnitude of the task.

The madness of an endeavour like Godzillavilla needs constant reinforcing (Yes, it’s OK to enjoy doing construction work on your vacation! Moving those moldy mattresses will be so gratifying! It’s good exercise to hack those vines back for the hundredth time with nothing but a machete!). It’s really hard to hang on to your commitment when the project takes so long and life changes along the way. And when that commitment goes, grim reality stares you in the face until you finally accept that this is a madness that is bound to follow the law of diminishing returns.

Advice: Most people don’t take on a project like this solo. I wouldn’t recommend it, in fact. The effort is huge and in times of discouragement you need someone who will either commiserate or bolster your spirits. But whoever you do partner with on a project of this nature, you have to be sure you are both/all totally committed to doing what’s necessary. It doesn’t have to be the same thing – one of you can like detail work, one of you can like the massive, destructive stuff, one of you can like dealing with the finances (as if!), or the electrics, or whatever. But everyone needs to have a role that will connect them to the process of renovation, engage them in it, and by extension connect them together with the common goal of building of a wonderful home. If you don’t do that, it starts to look a lot like it’s just the big, tough job of fixing a dilapidated house.

Aah, but what we did for the other 8 hours that day…

Climbing up the Learning Curve

12 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by in General, Learnings, Structure

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One of the questions I’ve been asked is this: Did you find so little information that you had to “re-invent the wheel”, for every little step, because there was no practical guide or information on what you were doing?

I come from a timber frame construction country. I understand that method of construction; how to build walls, how to run everything from hot air to water to electricity through them, and how to close them up with drywall, then hang a picture on them. Tah-dah, done. In Italy, you can’t even do that last step the same way. North American picture hooks don’t stick in plaster-over-stone, you have to use special little 3-pronged thingies. I guess that should have been my first warning that it would be a steep learning curve.

Although I viewed that as a point of interest more than an obstacle, it did involve an awful lot of research. Fortunately I have Italian friends, in particular DIY-inclined ones, who gave me tons of advice. I’m also language-capable, so I could read Italian renovation magazines and go to the local home shows to scout materials and learn about their use. And – this is really important – I could speak with our geometra, the contractors, and the product suppliers, to really understand the benefits and drawbacks of certain approaches.

That ceiling probably isn’t good anymore…right?

Not that it always worked out perfectly. My post on the ‘effetto cassata‘ (When is a House Like a Cake) is a case in point. I’d researched a fantastic external plaster product from Venezia, went to their head office to learn about it, found the supplier in Liguria and spoke with him, then discovered that the contractor who had real experience with that plaster wasn’t available, so we went with someone who’d never worked with it before. Plaster is plaster, right? Apparently not. The house still looks pretty good – and the plaster is fantastically hard, hydrophobic yet breathable – but the effort of working with its different texture practically gave the man a nervous breakdown. And it did look rather unfortunately like a cassata cake before it weathered in a bit.

At other times, for example when the entire roof had to be replaced right down to all the beams, I had to trust our geometra and the contractor. This is pretty much true wherever you are, though. I’d researched the materials and the construction methods, discussed a number of options with them, and we made a decision. Language was again key; I don’t know how I would have done this without speaking Italian.

I guess it’s also useful to remember that we had a lot of time between activities, so the research could be really thorough. If we’d been trying to do the whole thing in a few months, I think I might have been far less sure of it all.

Advice: This is true for any renovation project – hire people you trust to know what they’re doing, research the methods and products so you can speak with them intelligently, use a translator (again, someone you trust to be thorough in their translations) if you don’t speak Italian.

Then be flexible in your expectations. Not everything that turns out differently than you expected is a disaster. You might even learn a thing or two.

Your Most Important Renovation Asset

01 Thursday Nov 2012

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One of the questions I get a lot is whether I had a terrible time trying to work with Italian workers and bureaucracy on the villa project. While this may disappoint people looking for a more juicy post, the answer is no. Why? We went local, and we had a great geometra.

The geometra is, in my opinion, the single most important decision you can make on an Italian reno project. Good ones know their way around the myriad regulations and filings, they know which contractors are good at what, which suppliers have the best windows, plasters, rafters, etc., who has the time to really devote to your project and who will try to charge you too much. They run the show on you behalf.

Fees are usually a fixed percentage of construction. This is, of course, something you want to work out ahead of time. But it’s money so well spent, it’s the last thing you want to haggle over.

Majordomo Nadia, project Queen

So how do you find a good one? As I mentioned before, it’s not through your real estate agent. We spent some time in our local community, asking around at bars and our new neighbours, and they directed us to Studio Ginocchio and the capable Nadia Silvano. The fact that she was part of the local fabric was as important as her professional skills, because when you start on a project like this, you begin to build a web of contacts and interdependencies that are just like a spider’s web: strong and delicate at the same time. No-one wanted to let Nadia down, and by extension no-one would let us down, either.

Not that we delegated completely and then disappeared. That was another important aspect of being able to get things done reliably. If you don’t make an effort to be present as much as possible, to be part of the community when you’re there, to care about who’s just had a baby and whose mother has just died, then no-one will care about the progress of your house in turn. But the number of times someone from whom I needed help asked me who the geometra was, and the way they always made an effort to give me what I needed when I said it was Nadia, convinced me of the importance of her role.

Advice: Find the geometra everyone loves. Love him/her in turn, treat them with respect (this should go without saying, but you’d be amazed), appreciate their knowledge, listen to them. They are your most important renovation asset!