We decided to make a short trip to Italy after our Italian lessons finished for the term. This nine day trip just about uses up our current Schengen allotment for this year.
We flew into Pisa, hired a car and headed straight to IKEA to buy duvets. A couple of oil filled heaters and some food shopping later and we headed to the house. It was a lovely feeling driving along familiar roads and up through the village to our home. The vines and the trees are losing their leaves so the area looks rather different, but it also feels much the same.
We opened up the house, unloaded the car and switched the heaters on. The house was freezing and the heaters made very little difference. What a waste of money they were. Not only that, the electricity kept tripping (not individual trip switches, the whole bloody thing at the meter). Since then, we’ve bought three cheap convection heaters (much better) and disconnected Martin’s wiring for the security cameras (in case that was causing the trips).
Apart from the cold, the house is in good shape and little sign of damp penetration. Thankfully, the walls of the house are slowly warming up making it easier to keep warm. Cold walls like this remind me of childhood holidays in our house in Winton, Cumbria. The tripping of the electricty reminds me of holidays in Benabbio (where you had to turn off the water heater if you needed to boil a kettle).
While we’re here we will meet our geometra to try and get things moving in terms of improvements to the house. Heating will certainly be on the agenda. We’ll do a bit of gardening (tidy the front at least) and have a bit of a holiday too.