So... we've got some big, exciting news.
Videos, more photos & more updates to follow.
I’ve spent the past 24 hours trying to figure out how to write this post, and I’m still not sure I’ve found the words to explain my absolute joy, excitement & happiness, while also including the specific info everyone wants to know.
Four years ago, Ash & I started dating, and shared our dreams of one day owning a big mountain house, that we’d built together.
For our first Christmas together, he bought me this wooden house from the Aosta Christmas Market, and promised to one day make those dreams come true.
Three months later, covid hit, we hoped for the best & made the decision to stay out in Europe. Because of this, we managed to get our Italian residency before the major Brexit fallout happened.
We’ve spent the past year searching across Northern Italy looking for the perfect location to buy. We needed mountains, access to international airports, not in a ski resort but exceptionally close, great weather in summer & great snow in winter, a garden for the dog, spare rooms for friends, and a price we could afford.
We navigated Italian bureaucracy, weird property laws, mortgages that don’t actually cover the whole property, sellers who decided not to sell at the last minute & banks that didn’t complete their paperwork on time
And as of Wednesday 13th Sept, we became homeowners for the very first time
We’re not quite building it from the ground up, but we’re embarking on a mega-renovation project on the massive, 1869 farmhouse in San Marco, five minutes from the Via Lattea and an hour from Torino.
(We’ll have a couple of rooms ready for guests for this winter, so get looking for flights & locking in your dates, people. We bought a big house so our friends can enjoy it, too!)
Our two semi-detached houses sit together under one massive, very dodgy-looking, roof. Although technically, because of strange Italian laws, it’s actually three properties.
Also, for bureaucratic reasons, Ash has the deeds to 24A & I have the deeds to 24B, which means I’ve achieved my dream of living next door to, not with, my boyfriend (although he’s kindly letting me lodge with him as I have no electric, indoor toilet or running water in my half).
24A has electricity & a bathroom, but there’s no heating & the only method of getting hot water is through a wood-burning boiler.
Yes, we’ve been building fires in order to take two minute showers.
Thankfully, my wonderful mum has gifted us some money to buy a new boiler, so at least there’ll be a shower for her when she comes out in a couple of weeks.
And we’re also massively grateful to the old owners, who offered to come round to show us how to get the wood-fired boiler working in the meantime, along with pointing out where all the electrical cable & water pipes are, the walls that’ll be fine to knock down & the ones we absolutely shouldn’t touch.
Amazingly, they also found some old photos of their nonni outside the house.
As we hunt around basements & attics, finding weird & wonderful artefacts, it’s awesome to know a bit more about the family that owned this place for the past 200 years. We’ve swapped numbers & promised we’ll invite them back to see our progress. It’s an honour to own this building, and although I wouldn’t exactly describe us two as ‘safe hands’, we’ve promised to fill the building with life & love, friends & family.
The final, extra pleasant surprise, has been how lively our tiny village feels. If you’ve ever done the drive up to Sauze, you’ve probably only vaguely noticed San Marco because it’s where the road gets narrow, and there’s a building painted with a génépy advert on the side.
Both Ash & I assumed the Borgata itself would be pretty dead, and we’d have to travel up to Sauze to meet people and make friends. Turns out, by good luck, we’ve ended up living in a friendly village, where communal tables are put out in the summer & neighbours drop in on each other for aperitivo in the evenings.
It’s so hard to put into words how happy I’m feeling right now. How everything feels perfectly, incredibly, exactly as it should be.
Not only is the space mind-blowing, but we’ve already had neighbours welcome us with wheelbarrows full of wood (so we can heat water), fresh herbs from their gardens (to make sugo), aperitivo (so we can drink to our future) and offers of helping hands (so we can get some warmth in the place before the snow comes).
Even Wilson has made new village dog friends.
Ash’s mum, Julie, and her boyfriend, Tim have been absolutely awesome, too.
They looked after Wilson while we went to Crete for our friends’ wedding last week, then did the 14 hour drive from France over to us and immediately got stuck in hauling antique wardrobes, gutting the overgrown garden, fixing walls & telling us how the hell to install a new bathroom & boiler.
I’m going to post a video later, as it’s so hard to describe the layout, but here’s the overview -
Three gardens
Two outhouses (& an outdoor toilet)
One huge, domed roof cantina & a couple of slightly smaller ones
Two (currently uninhabitable) rooms downstairs in 24B
Three (currently uninhabitable) rooms upstairs in 24B
A separate garden ‘studio’ room, with coal fired heater, where Tim & Julie are staying as they show us how to get our renovation started.
A habitable apartment with a huge living room, two bathrooms, one bedroom, one kitchen, one dining room.
There’s also a massive attic space with amazing exposed beams and terrifyingly hole-y lucerne stones on the roof.
That’s it for now. I’m back in the UK for four days and I’ll update you when I get home on everything Ash has been up to.
Angie