For various reasons, Mr RR, little man and I are out in Italy right now, staying in the building the renovation of which inspired this blog. It's lovely to be back: really touching to be offered such a warm welcome by so many who have become a part of our day-to-day lives out here - the ladies in the deli, dear neighbours, those who recognise us from the beach, and so on. It's also funny to see how little things change: just a few days here and the woman who lives round the corner has already accosted us at our front door to complain about "
l'aqua nella strada!" complete with accusatory finger-wagging!
It's really not ideal timing to be away from BH's renovation while it's in these final stages. It's hard to be direct with the builders, trying to drive the project on, when they know you are calling between trips to the beach! And for me it's tricky finding the balance between letting go, enjoying a relaxing break away, and monitoring the progress so when I return I'm happy with all the micro-decisions made in my absence. All this whilst trying while I'm here to avoid the extremes of appearing like I don't care or like I am some control-freak, sat on the beach fretting about grout!
The way I see it, if I'm not able to switch off completely, and I think it would be foolish to try to, then I may as well get progress updates from the builder to help me feel reassured when I'm thinking about it, that things are going as well as I would hope.
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| Skinny minny en suite! |
As an example, here is a situation where I could really do with being on site. This en suite bathroom is only 85cm wide (it's fitted into what was originally space allocated to a staircase!). The plan was to have the basin recessed into the wall to maximise space to get round it, but it can only be recessed 6cm! Apparently the gap's more or less 50cm between it and the back wall but it doesn't look much does it? Sometimes there's no replacement for being on site walking back and forth testing how a space works, especially when said space has pointy corners jutting out into it!
Following on from the last post on tiling, here's a little introduction to the wonders of underfloor heating! We have never had piped UFH before, always electric, but seeing as we have had issues using electric UFH in large areas before and I have been assured less can go wrong with piped, we thought we'd give it a try in BH's kitchen and hallway.
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| Specialist matting to secure the water pipes |
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| Here's the controls for the whole system |
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| Fully piped, self-levelling screed going over |
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| So so so much of this stuff to fill all the gaps! |
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| Beautiful greigy tiles, diagonally = so happy! |
Of course, at every stage, I can always count on little man to make sure things go smoothly!
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| Someone's got to tidy up the site! |
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| Checking stability of the walls! |
P.S. The builder thought it was hilarious I let him get so dusty! Seriously, this kid was rolling around on the floor having the time of his life! What's a renovation ragazza to do?! It's just dust, right?!
