Holiday rental in Puglia, Italy
Naturally all is now on hold in Italy due to the Corona Virus. No building work and definitely nobody working at the Comune to approve the pool permit.
But in the scheme of things, this is not really of much importance. All I see on the news are the desperately sad pictures of the country we love in absolute shut down.
All we can do right now is to offer our full support and our best wishes and to say that we are thinking of you all as we head into fairly uncertain times ourselves.
We really liked these tiles for the walls in the new bathroom. The aim was to try to bridge the gap between the old and rustic and the sleek and modern. These seemed to do that nicely.
Slight problem! This is the wall of the shower which just happens to be curved. The thing about big wide tiles, as nice as they are, they don’t bend around corners. €800 says they’ll cut them into smaller, mosaic -style squares and get around it that way. But that seems incredibly steep and at some point on these projects you do have to start putting a safety net over the bottomless well of expense that they become. Plus we figure this is an oversight on the builder’s part rather than ours. We await a solution.
On a more positive note the floor tiles have arrived and are now in the process of being laid to match the style of the original floor. There was a slight problem again here. And here is a word of warning to anyone thinking of embarking on a project like this from afar. It’s these small details that you sign off when you are present that can come back and bite you on the proverbial when you’re not around. The tiles chosen for the en-suite were a slightly smaller depth than those we chose for the bedroom floor. Which means there was a step down and a potential tripping point when re-entering the bedroom from the en-suite. The decision was taken, therefore, to floor the bathroom in the same tiles as the rest of the floor as shown here. Remember that bottomless pit of expenditure we spoke about earlier? These tiles of course are €20 per square metre more than the previous ones. And so it goes on but the end result will be a whole lot better.
Last time we were at the house in January, the builder took me to one side and explained that the rendering of the outside of the new building would have to wait until May when the weather had improved. We were pleasantly surprised therefore to see this picture that shows that they appear to have done it already. We don’t know whether they had a particularly fine spell of weather that allowed them to do this or if the original excuse about waiting until May was a bit of a fabrication. But for these small wins, we shall be grateful.
Our next visit is due mid-March but at the time of writing Italy is suffering more than any other country in Europe with the Corona virus outbreak. At the moment the North is the worst affected and we hope that they are able to contain it in time for us to still go. Fingers crossed for all.