It has been brilliant to have this time in the house before completing the purchase. We’ve had a chance to really get a feel for the place, problems that need addressing, what works and what doesn’t, what furniture to keep and of course start making plans about what changes to make.
Working out what we want to change and improve is the exciting part and we’re having all sorts of grand ideas. It’s also the expensive part, but reality, budgets, prioritisation and the like can wait for a bit. For now it’s about finding and agreeing our picture of how we’d like it to be.
We’ve been in touch with two potential building companies and already met one of them. The company we have not yet met asked us if we could send any plans we have, some photos and an outline of the work we want to do. I spent a lot of time compiling this into a document that I have stuck in the cloud and shared with both builders. It has been an invaluable exercise to document what we currently have and to get down on paper all the jobs and projects we have identified. We can now update it as we think of things and our ideas change.
In Italy you need permission for nearly everything you do to a house and you need a geometra to help you do that. They also help plan and oversee the work. They’re a bit of a cross between a surveyor and a junior architect. They know the rules of the local commune and how to get the required permissions. Obviously we want to find a good one that we can communicate with and the geometra we used for the purchase doesn’t fit the bill. The builder we have met came along with a local geometra they have worked with in the past. That may be the way to go but we’d need to be sure there was not too much of a cosy relationship there. He should be working for us and keeping the builder honest.
We have been advised that rather than doing a succession of smaller projects and getting permission for each, it is better to plan out everything you want to do, get the permissions and then execute in phases. Coming up with a master plan is a challenging thing to do. Back home, we’re more used to just deciding on what jobs we’ll do in the coming year. Still, we’ve made a start on a plan and we’ll need to get a better handle on how flexible things can be once we embark on the work.
One interesting thing we got from the geometra who visited is that there are currently a bunch of building bonus schemes funded by the government to kick start the building trade as Italy emerges from the pandemic. They are a kind of tax credit paid out over a 10 year period. For some, you don’t need to be a resident or even pay tax in Italy. The credit can be against someone else’s tax e.g. the builder. You can even sell the credit to a bank – they take a cut but you get the rest immediately. These schemes are generous (50%, 90% or 110% of the applicable costs), but time limited so they may influence the order in which we do work on the house.