Our Vineyard...

Mr. You is A Vital Asset... on every one of his Inspection Tours of Il Poggiolo, he happens upon so many things I over-look... in my typical gardening fury. Here is one example... the other one on his latest tour was the dead bird... probably, massacred by a cat!!!... Mr You came across in what will be the Kitchen/Dining Room of La Casa Grande... anyway...

he found our vineyard!!!...

strategically dangling high over our mega-wall of the Cortile. Picking the grapes is going to be an interesting pursuit at Vendemia-Time. But, once done, we will have... at least... a beaker full of our own DOC!!! Cannot wait for that. Can you?

And A Side Note... our dear neighbor... she lives in the house right below our Cortile AND was born in Il Poggiolo...  said that her relations, who lived in Il Poggiolo during the Second World War, dismantled the arches and dug-out a space to hide food & provisions from the invading Nazis. However, they put their reserves behind only one of them. They wanted to fool the Nazis. And, it worked too!!! Gads.

Fiori...

A couple of shots of some of our fiori... or, flowers... in bloom here at Il Poggiolo...

We had a veritable boom of roses, peonies & other flowering plant life but, I was too out-of-it... thanks to Our Flooring Crisis... to have had the wherewithal to have photographed them. Next year. Gads. 

We May Have A Problem...

That thing nestled up on one of our beams of the Upstairs Apartment is... yes!!!... a bird's nest!!! And... yes!!!... there are tiny birds nestled in it!!! And, if you've noticed... yes!!!... we have begun to install our new windows!!! Those little creatures have just ten-days to grow and leave the nest or, we may have a problem!!! Gads.

They're Little Ol' Lady-ish, Mr. You...

This is Exhibit A of what Mr. You thinks is an appropriate Flowering Plant Life for the garden at Il Poggiolo.
 
What is that measly bouquet? Well... let us hark back to when you were in grade school... say, the Second Grade... and the Science Lesson was to come to class with a frigging flower & blue food-dye... procured at the local SAFEWAY... so your Second Grade teacher... I had a Mrs. Filbert, for cryin' out loud!!!... could preform a miracle!!! It needed a night's passing. Upon your anxious return to school, your frigging flower had turned... Oh! My God!!!... blue!!! However, the night before... while  your frigging flower was sucking up food-dye in a jam-jar full of water... you were too from a bowl of vanilla ice cream smothered in the same. It was so much fun making ugly faces at your sister with a blue tongue. Well, that dippy flower was a chrysanthemum and it ought to have staid back in a Second Grade classroom and not have matriculated into my garden. Dippy second-rate flowers. Mr. You, however, is in thrall. He says they grow & multiply... Like our weeds? I asked. There was no response. Gads. 

The Last Bit of Stucco Before...

Despite the down-pour of last week, the Work-guys worked away on slapping-up & sanding the last layer of stucco before we paint. Here are some shots, hot off the digital...
the Kitchen & Dining Area...

a niche opposite the Kitchen...

the Kitchen niche... an ex-fireplace...

the Living Area & short Hallway to Bedroom & Bath...

the Entrance Door, Living Area & short Hallway to Bedroom & Bath...

the Bedroom & Terrace beyond...

the Bathroom with the niche for the sink...

Pretty spiffy white, no? Yes, but it's going to be truly blue very shortly!!! Gads.

Railings...

I don't really know what to say. I guess I could relate that Mr. You insisted that these old railings I had bought from Our Esteemed Antiques Dealer clear on the other side of Italy from the Lunigiana... they're short too so, I believe, they came out of a cemetery... ought to be placed upside down!!!... and not as shown in the attached photos. Oh, Good Lord.  I almost fired Mr. You from any further intervention on Our Construction Project. I had to inform the Dear yet Recalcitrant Person that Everyone would make fun of us, if we did as he so wished because, as those same Everyone know, flowers grow up & NOT down!!!... for cryin' out loud. Mr. You insisted that doing it His Way would make the railings appear lighter. Lighter? I then had to invoke The Law of Gravity!!!.... dammit. What's shown is how I want them to be installed.... right-side up!!!... as God AND Any Laws intended it do be, thank you very much.
 

Oh! And, I can also say that we will have a wood hand-rail in place of those metal bars, acting in their stead in the photos.

And, there are eight pieces of railing, enough for the Terrace and... what hasn't been slaughtered for that spot... can fill in, artfully, please... one or two voids in the garden. Maybe where the chrysanthemums are, if I haven't zapped them into another Time/Space Continuum with the weed-whacker. Ha!!! Gads.

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.