How it all started.
Growing up, the location where my house is was the barn for the entire community. In the barn we had chickens, rabbits, pigeons , a hay loft. Every day when I was 11, I would go to the barn and count the rabbits in the pen. Once day one went missing. I ran home and alerted my grandmother….”Nonna nonna one of the rabbits went missing. ” She said “Dont worry, its time for Sunday dinner” On the menu : homemade pasta with meat sauce. Three guesses as to what meat we were eating.,..
The barn was willed to my Mom by my grandmother Norma., In 1997, our region had a series of terrible earthquakes. The barn was rendered unusable. The laws for that zoning dictated that something had t o be rebuilt there within 5 years or it would return to a non buildable piece of land.
In 2001, my Mom decided to tear down the barn and build a house there for our family
Here are some photos of the original barn:
Here are some photos of the construction.
There were several significant issues with the construction., The ceilings in the garage and ground floor are 11 feet high. However, the ceilings upstairs where the bedrooms were are only 5’8 on average, Notice the height of the upper story windows. When you climb the stairs, the beam for the roof is at 5’4″. Doesn’t work well for someone who is 6’6.
If this was in the US no problem. We could have easily raised the roof `and gained additional height. since the roofs are all concrete it can’t be done in Italy.
We tried to get the developer to correct the error without any results. So the house sat there for 20+ years, unfinished.
Over the years, I tried to come up with a solution to the upstairs problem, without any luck.
In 2020, several events came together to restart the project. More on that in the next post.
Dave
