A Much Over-due Update...

I have an excuse for My Absence of the past month from the Blogosphere... 

Both Mr. You & Myself were held hostage to A Deadline dictated not ONLY by Our Builder BUT ALSO by Our Geometra regarding A Search & Find of an affordable & stylistically acceptable wood flooring for the Upstairs Apartment. We risked holding up The Works!!! Thankfully, said Deadline went whooshing by severals weeks ago. However, The Stress of Finding A Flooring  remained. Here are the gripping details...

In these Lunigiana parts, flooring is either castagno... or, chestnut... or larice...  pine. Yet, may I? Why live in pine-floor hut much like The Seven Dwarfs, irrespective of Snow White's cleaning expertise? 

Any wood for flooring needs to be stagionato... or, aged. Stagionato can run from oven-baked... NO!!! YOU DON'T WANT THAT!!!... to literally aged over years & years & years abandoning the wood to the whims of the elements of fresh-air, rain, wind, summer heat, winter cold & so on and so forth until the wood finally surrenders. YES!!! THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT BUT, IT COSTS!!! A square meter of castagno stagionato... think a yard for a meter... costs around $75. Larice stagionato costs around $45. You choose, if all you want is planking running underneath a rug. 

Mr. You & I arrived at aged rovere... or, oak... as a financial compromise. It costs less... mid-stream between the two price-poles of castagno & larice. Oak is standard stuff for flooring in the US. In Italy, it's not. Yet, we can have wide planks and not those thin, miserable strips of honey colored oak boards in those houses pulverized so easily by a tornado in Joplin MO. 

Off I went to every wood supplier known to man in these parts to find us an oak flooring.  No such luck!!! Three weeks of stressful failure as the Deadline loomed. Oh, there were tons of oak flooring, if a thin parquet flooring is what you are after. 3 millimeters of oak bonded to something resembling balsa-wood. NOPE. NOT FOR US!!!
Then, Mr. You & I fled to Istanbul for Mr. You's birthday. 

Upon our return, Our Builder was waiting for me. He needed to know about the flooring. We got in my little sports-car, dangerously leaking brake fluid... I thought that little lighted symbol meant the hand-brake was on the blink... in 95+ heat, with NO AIR-CONDITIONING and truck fumes galore on the autostrada to hit two suppliers for oak flooring in two disparate spots in Tuscany. Our tour took all day!!! I came home with a massive case of bronchitis AND two examples of oak... affordable & stylistically acceptable.
Then, Reality struck...
Example A... a lovely rough hewed boarding costing ONLY $40 bucks would cost me triple for the installation of screwing the planks down on a specialized sub-flooring... thanks to being oven-cooked. We suspected so much when the supplier refused to give me un Certificato di Stagionatura... or, a Certificate of Aging. Let's do the Math... $40 x 3 = $120 x 70 square meters = $8,400.
Example B... a naturally aged planking... from far-off Romania... a decidedly more spiffy product than Ex. A costing $55 bucks and naturally aged... five years of rain, wind & sun... meaning we can glue the planking down with very little preparation of the sub-flooring. The Math says... $55 x 70 = $3,850 + $1,400 (= $20 x 70 for gluing, etc.) = $5,250... a saving of $3,150!!!
And, you know what? Besides the obvious financial savings for us, no one will ever know the difference of whether the planking has been glued, nailed OR screwed. It doesn't matter. You never see the glue OR the nails OR the screws anyway!!!
So...
the walls will be Truly Blue...
the doors will be Burnt Toast...
and the flooring will be Natural Oak.
I think the apartment will be stunning.
We are now left with hoping all will be complete by June 30th... contractually speaking. Gads.