Martin took the tunnel (no P&O obviously) and drove to Aachen where he stayed in the now customary Brunnenhof hotel on Saturday night. Fenella, meanwhile, was in Colle di Compito but stuck in the house as she had tested positive for COVID-19.
On Sunday morning, Tim and Darren arrived in Colle di Compito and proceeded to unload the furniture and reconstruct a couple of tables that had been dismantled for ease of packing. They were done by 11:30 and headed off to the beach (not to swim presumably).
Meanwhile, Martin drove from Aachen to Winterthur in Switzerland where he spent a lovely evening with Dale (an old colleague from the Zurich office) and got to meet his fiancee Abigail and her teenage child Matilda.
On Friday morning (one week later than planned), Tim turned up in his van along with his rather hung over son Darren. We loaded everything we’d put on the packing list and then a fair bit more. They headed off to the tunnel at about lunchtime and expected to deliver everything to Fenella in Italy on Sunday morning.
Early on Saturday morning, Martin loaded up the car with this lot (and then some) and headed off on his three day drive to Colle di Compito.
Thankfully, Saturday was also the first day Martin tested negative for COVID-19 a full 12 days after first testing positive.
With the sale of our home and the purchase of our new flat in the hands of the solicitors, we decided to get a trip to Italy in before we had to get serious about moving.
We went through our London home from top to bottom classifying all furniture into three categories:
Take to our new flat
Ship to Italy
Rehome
We identified a van’s worth of stuff to take to Italy and got quotes from a bunch of companies. We settled on a courier recommended by others who had shipped stuff from the UK to Italy. They were cheaper than some of the larger companies with the added benefit that all our stuff would stay on a single van throughout the entire process (rather than loading and unloading as a part container shipment).
We arranged for a pickup on Friday 18 March after which Martin would drive the car (with more stuff) to Colle di Compito in order to be there to receive the shipment and help with unloading it. Fenella would follow by plane on Wednesday 23 March as she had a family funeral to attend.
Then Martin caught COVID-19 having dodged it for two years. We rearranged the van for a week later and spent a week avoiding each other and wearing masks in the house to hopefully make sure that Fenella didn’t catch it too.
Today Martin dropped Fenella at Golders Green where she caught the bus to Stanstead and then the plane to Pisa. There are a couple more days to get stuff ready for loading into van and car. On Friday the van comes and on Saturday Martin heads off to the Channel Tunnel (no P&O this year).
It’s been very frustrating so far this year dealing with Gino. I’ve been enquiring regularly about the progress with arranging the various inspections. Each time he indicates that it is all in hand and will be done in the next few days.
Now that he’s finally worked out that our arrival is imminent, he has at last attended at our house only to find that Paola has lost our spare keys. Does he let me know? Get real!
At 8pm last night, I received a WhatsApp message from a very stressed and embarrassed Paola informing me that she has misplaced our keys and cannot find them anywhere. I told her not to worry and that we would be out soon. Paola is obviously mortified and sent a succession of very apologetic messages. I eventually managed to put her mind at rest. I’m really hoping she’s still prepared to hold spares for us in the future.
So I contacted Gino this morning who agreed to reschedule as soon as we are out. Fingers crossed. We are dead keen to get going on some of the jobs that are not dependent on permissions (wiring, bathrooms, etc).
This spring, we put our house on the market and have been seriously looking for a smaller cheaper place to move to. The intention is to free up cash to help Rowan and Jesse get started on the housing ladder and to give us some funds to spend on making our Italian house into the home we envisage. We want to move now while we are still young enough to have the energy and we want to find a home we could imagine spending the rest of our lives in.
The sale has gone pretty well. We did a massive declutter and got the house looking pretty good for photos and viewings. We were lucky enough to get a few people seriously interested which helped push the offer we finally accepted a bit above the asking price.
On the purchase side, we came to the conclusion that our budget was not really enough to find a suitable forever home. We found a couple of interesting places in Belsize Park: a lovely bright flat in a mansion block and a very attractive mews house right next to Belsize Village. We put in an offer on the flat and it was accepted. It would leave us rather short of money for the Italian work, but would allow us to fulfil our commitments to the kids.
We had one final booked viewing remaining which we decided to go to anyway. This was primarily because it was potentially the Brewer’s old flat which I have fond memories of visiting often in my childhood. I contacted Jamie to find out if it was, in fact, their flat and it turned out to be the case. We had to go and see it and we arranged to take Jamie with us. We met Jamie in the Woodman for lunch and went for a rather emotionally charged viewing. The current owners had bought it from the Brewers about 25 years before and knew Christian.
The flat was lovely and really threw the cat amongst the pigeons. While the Belsize Park flat had lots of light in most rooms and a lovely bright double aspect living room, one of the bedrooms looked out onto a light well. It was a compromise we were prepared to make, but this flat in Southwood Mansions has no such issue. Every room has proper windows that look out on something. It also has a delightful kitchen that’s large enough for three or four to eat in and a west facing balcony to catch the evening sun.
So the Southwood Mansions flat is really nice, much closer to friends and family and considerably cheaper. What’s not to like. We went back for a second viewing next day and put in an offer there and then. Happily, it was accepted and we are all set for a much more local move that will give us the funds we want for Italy and then some.
Everything is in the hands of solicitors, the survey is booked and we are planning a trip to Italy before we have to get serious about actually packing up and moving.
On the afternoon of Monday 10 January, Riccardo got in touch with this message:
A Lucca estate agent (LuccAbita) had posted our house for sale on idealista (Italian equivalent of RightMove). The pictures were presumably from an earlier listing before we purchased and included the misleading pictures of the swimming pool we had seen at that time. My guess was that they were re-posting our house to get enquiries from people who they could then tell that the property was no longer available and go on to suggest alternatives that they actually had on their books. Apparently, this is a marketing technique known as Bait & Switch.
My response to Riccardo was:
For fun, I did use the iealista web site to request a viewing. LuccAbita responded the following day by email asking me to call them (as I had withheld my number from the request). I explained that I was in the UK and asked them to let me know how long the property had been on the market and to confirm it was available for viewing now. Their response to that was to apololgise and inform me that they had checked with the vendor who told them it had been sold.
Seeing as how the vendor is a friend, I contacted Domenico to ask whether they had, in fact, been in touch. It turned out he had been contacted, but not by LuccAbita. One of their competitors (Immobiliare Il Baluardo – that he had used previously) had spotted the listing and contacted him to ask if the house was for sale again. When Domenico replied that the house had been sold, this agent suggested that maybe the new owners had put it up for sale. In Domenico’s email, he said “For a moment I became sad, but now your message has reassured me”.
The listing was taken down on Wednesday so everything is back to normal. Not good practice by LuccAbita, however, who listed a property they did not have for sale and then misled me about contactacting Domenico.
Interestingly, the blurb posted with the listing contained this text: evocative building of 1870 formerly “La Pace” inn
Domenico has previously told us that the house was a kind of restaurant run by his family and this tidbit of information from the listing reminded me that he had agreed to write us a brief history of the house and his family’s association with it. I reminded him of this and hope to receive it next time we see him and Paola.
On Wednesday afternoon I received a call from our neighbour Riccardo. Apparently, some telecomms contractor has a crew in the village laying fibre for TIM (Telecom Italia). As we already have a junction box for the regular phone from which a number of neighbours receive their lines, TIM wants to install a PET junction box for the fibre connections in the same place.
You can see the current setup in these pictures. The thicker cable is coming from the telegraph pole across the street and the three or four more lightweight cables are running off to neighbouring houses. There is also some cable coming up from the ground in old metal trunking. It looks a bit of a mess to me.
The reason Riccardo has called me is because TIM needs our permission to install the new PET junction box on my house. He explained that he wants fibre at his house and is trying to persuade the contractor to continue the cable run up the street as far as his place. The contractor has agreed to do that provided Riccardo helps them to get our permission for the PET box.
So they want to install the PET junction box next to the existing one and need to dig a trench across our front garden to do that. They are trying to reach the existing pipe that is carrying their cable on the side of our house.
Do we have to agree? No.
What happens if we choose not to? They will terminate the cable further down the village and: a) our neighbours will not have the option to get fibre broadband. b) we will not have the option to get fibre broadband. c) Riccardo will not be able to get the fibre extended to his house.
Most of our close neighbours are rather old and probably not that bothered about fibre broadband. In fact, Riccardo informed me that Mariagrazia has told the contractors she’s not even prepared to allow them to put their ladders on her property to do the work on ours. So the main person (apart from us) that would suffer would be Riccardo himself. He works from home a lot and really wants to get a fibre connection. He’s also becoming a friend and has been extremely helpful to us when we have needed it. Of course I agreed that he could send the consent form through and that I would discuss it with Fenella.
The following morning, he sent this picture he had received from the contractor’s manager to illustrate the work they intended to carry out.
My response? “I’m not impressed with the quality of their work” You can see the cable running untidily next to the existing trunking.
So I suggested: “If it’s completely independent they could stick it on this pole”. This is the telegraph pole across the street from us.
So Riccardo went back to them and said the quality of the work was unacceptable. They responded with this picture of what they “really” intended to do (to replace the existing metal pipe with new plastic trunking and to run both cables through it).
We spoke in the evening and I said we were prepared to agree provided the work was like this second picture and that they didn’t damage the roots of our Myrtle tree. I changed the text of the consent form to include the following conditions in English and Italian:
The new and existing cables are contained within a single pipe where attached to my house.
The route of the underground cable follows the line marked A in the attached diagram and this is done without damaging the roots of the Myrtle tree. If this can’t be done, the underground cable can follow an alternative line marked B
I sent it first to Riccardo for a sanity check and then to the contractor’s email address.
I’m a bit nervous that the work will be carried out without us being there to monitor it, but I guess that’s something we’ll have to get used to. Riccardo will monitor for us and we’ll have to opportunity to get a fibre to the home connection ourselves (potentially better than the fibre to the cabinet connection that we have in London).
We’re heading home tomorrow so we are already packing up.
It’s been a good trip. The house is in reasonable shape. We had a good meeting with the geometra. We’ve tidied up the front garden to show the locals we’re caring for the place. We also placed a pot strategically to prevent people parking with their tyres on our grass.
We think it has been a good thing to show our neighbours that we haven’t bought the place just for summer trips. We’ve even used our improving Italian language skills to communicate with Laura and also Enrico and Paula to an extent.
There’s been a bit of a faff around the return trip as the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has hit while we’ve been here. As a result, we’ve had to cancel the lateral flow tests we’d already bought and schedule day 2 PCR tests instead.
This afternoon we went in to Lucca for a bit of Christmas shopping and a walk round the walls. We also went along to a bar where a bunch of English speeking expats meet for a drink on Monday afternoons. We finished the evening off in a rather odd restaurant galled Ubaldos that was suggested by one of the guys we met there.
Tomorrow we will close up the house, have lunch at La Cecca and head to Pisa to catch our flight home.
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