"Alpine Settler": July 2006

Friday, July 21, 2006

A surprise visit!

Meet my niece Gianfranca and her husband Renzo, together with one of thier grandchildren Alessandro (5)....(they have two daughters and two grandchildren).

They too live in Milano, but their holiday home is up near Monte Rosa in Piemonte - unlike 'Franca's two sisters who both have their 'second' houses here in Colico and my other niece who is up here too.

Renzo called me on Wednesday evening to say he would be visiting a company (client) in Delebio, the next village to me. He was going to bring Franca and 'Ale' too and spend the day with me. This was such a nice surprise and they took me out to lunch! They knew about the two visits by Expats GTG groups to Posallo and wanted to eat there themselves. This photo was taken under the outside 'portico' where we had our lunch. We were high enough on the mountain for the air to be pleasant - not cool - it was too hot a day for that. But it was a nice couple of hours there taking our time over a pleasant lunch and catching up with all that side of the family gossip.

Then it was back to my place to let 'Ale' play in the garden. A rare treat for him as he lives on the fifth floor of an apartment block and they only have a balcony.... He dug up some mole hills but never found the mole (!), watered all the large flower troughs using the hose pipe.... Honest you would have thought it was the very latest in technological toys - he was truly in his element. So much so, that when it was time to leave, he threw his arms round my neck and whispered in my ear "Zia Carole - can I come and stay with you for a holiday"? Wry smiles from pround grandparents and a promise that they would bring him back and get his Mum and Dad to come visit too!

All in all a pleasant day all round. They left about 6pm for home.

Neighbours house moves on - Slowly!

All the reinforcements are now in place, and on Monday morning this 'monster' arrived. Follwed minutes later by a constant stream of cement lorries.....

The task now was to pour the liquid cement in thechannels built for it and over the huge heavy steel reinforcements.

Believe it or not they completed the whole of the foundations in just under two hours....

And then onWednesday morning, with all the channel boards removed they began to lay what appeared to be plastic garden tables in the spage between the channels....
They kindly stood one on it's own next to the pile of those still to be laid so I could take the picture here below.

Once laid these were covered - once again - with steel reinforcement and liquid concrete poured over it all...
The idea is that these 'tables' form a huge air pocket under the building and keep the floors and foundations dry (like airbricks I guess. This is what they did to my house, but they had to dig under the whole house and 'prop' my walls up on bricks until the vespaia was set solid!!!!

I can understand now why houses take so much longer to build here than in the UK or North America.....The attention to detail is superb, and these houses don't come in prefabricated wood frame units that just need screwing together. Plus a 'work crew' here is - it seems - normally two men, with another one when jobs like the cement pouring takes place. That was the case thoughout the work on my place. I only saw more than two builders when they were putting the new roof on.... and was certainly why restructuring took a total of 13 months.....

One thing I did notice was that despite having the house described to me, it is really going to cover a lot of square meters. That in itself is no problem for me, as the only view it will block for me is that of the car park and offices behind (Hooray!!!!). My mountain views will remain intact!

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Bit's of the garden!

Here is the 'little corner' by the gateway. I have my rosemary and sage in this corner and a climbing jasmine against the wall. The heather and lavender is going well now too. The large tree trunk was found in the woods on the mountain and is chestnut.

And here is one of the hydrangeas....didn't think it would survive as the builders cut it right down to the roots to put their crane there for the building work. But now it has regrown, for some reason there are a few branches with pink flowers and the rest are all blue. There are two other large hydrangeas and their blue too!

Here you can see some of the orange 'something or other' lilies... they are beatifull too, and as you can see they grow in abundance.
And finally the last photo is of the lemon tree and 'non hardy' hibiscus

that are on the terrace. Nine little lemons so far - so who's for a nice G & T with 'ice and a slice'????

It's coming on -slowly!

Well the crane has arrived and now the 'building crew' (all TWO of them) are setting to work.

They've laid the cement base on which they will eventually start the reinfoced concrete lower walls.

What you can see here is the

structure being prepared to pour the liquid cement over the steel frames. You can see just how thick the base of the house will be. Non of the popular 'ercted in one day' building here like in many countries. Wimpy eat your heart out!!

The large space here to the left will be the underground garage, and behind it (photo below) a store room, stairwell and utility room/cellar.

I understand that there will be one floor and then in part there will be three steps up to the two bedrooms. The mountain of dirt they dug out will be put around the house on a slope giving the impression that it is on a grassy slope.
It should be great when it's finished!

They should, as I've said, get to the roof level by September. Then work will stop until they've saved some more money! (No morgages here in families like this) It's 'no money' no building'. They loathe owing even a cent to anyone!

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

"Amici over the Ocean" - Our New Forum!

Some time ago I became a Moderator on another forum along with two American/Italian ladies and an Italian lady from Liguria. That forum was quite small and I personally found it to be a bit stuck in a rut and restricted! It just did not seem to want to move with the times and it seemed the main emphasis was a continual urging from the Administrator to 'go out and get more members'....
Well, to cut a long story short, we 4 moderators got our heads together and decided that we wanted our OWN forum. So of course there was a lot of work put in over the next weeks to devise, build and achieve a formula for a forum that would be popular.

It is for that reason that I have not been around much 'anywhere' over the last couple of weeks. But it's now done! We're open for business. Yippee!!!!

So let me introduce you to:

"Amici over the Ocean"

Our aims are these:

"To promote friendship and discussion between like minded people from any background from North America, Oceania and anywhere in Europe"

We are very pleased with the results of our efforts and already have people fromAustralia, Scotland, England and of course several from America, Canada and naturally from Italy too.

The whole idea is that there are forum/threads where you can be serious and discuss World issues as well as a whole raft of other various subjects. You can be light hearted, daft, intelligent, inquisitive - or deadly serious. In fact anything you want.

So why not 'pop in - sit for a while' and relax with us.... We would love to see you and welcome you among our "Amici"!

You'll find us here:

http://overtheocean.forumup.it/index.php?mforum=overtheocean

Be seein' ya!

The 'Hole' at the bottom of the garden!

This was the situation last week!
As you can see, while excavating for the underground garage and house foundations - they came accross a 'natural spring'......

That threw a spanner in the works for a bit and following a site inspection it was decided that an inspection pit had to be sunk (see 3rd photo) to accommodate a chamber to redirect the spring water into the mountain 'run off' stream at the side of our property.

I had a laugh with my new neighbour (to be) Eros - and said that if he was going to open a 'spring water' bottling plant, then as the spring came in 'under' my land then I expected 50%of the profits..... At first he thought I was serious and a look of utter dismay came over his face - then it dawned on him that I was only joking!
This spring has really made this work much more expensive too... but better now, than a damp/wet house for the rest of their lives.
It doesn't affect me at all (thank goodness) as I'm up high it all drains away from me through the rock.