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The stultifying heat has finally let up, so yesterday afternoon I strapped on the kneepads and laid clay tiles on the terrace. It got me thinking about how much time I’ve spent on the floor in the last year.
Even at the beginning of this restoration project, when there was still so much to be decided, we knew we wanted terra cotta floors. The price seemed reasonable, the clay is quarried and fired locally, and they look fantastic – nothing would be more appropriate to the house. But the reality was much more complex and it involved a hell of a lot more time, expense, and stress than we imagined.
There’s another fridge discussion at No Impact Man, where he’s asked for ideas on how to keep milk fresh. In one of the comments, someone pointed to a passive ice box that freezes about a cubic meter of ice in winter and keeps your food cool the rest of the year. Kick ass. Unfortunately it looks like it requires much colder winter temperatures than we get here in Marche.
Someone else mentioned the Mitti Cool, a passive clay refrigerator invented in India. That’s more like it!
I was lamenting in a post about compact florescent bulbs how I didn’t know where else we could significantly cut electricity consumption. Then I saw this post from Greenpa. Turns out I wasn’t thinking hard enough.
Three months late, Gioele and his father finally brought the worktops last night. I didn’t believe they’d come and hadn’t bothered to un-plumb the makeshift kitchen sink we’d been using all this time. Suddenly I had to hop to it with a couple of spanners while they brought in the two shorter sections. The porphyry (if that is what it is) was beautiful: deep grey with whirls of yellow, black, and blue flecks and larger blobs of light grey.
It took all three of us to lift the longest piece off the truck and carry it into the house. We’d fixed the undermount sink with brackets and silicone and Gioele’s dad had just started gluing the two long pieces together when I noticed that there weren’t any grooves where the drying rack goes – the little canals that conduct the water back into the sink. These grooves were the reason we’d waited all these months. Gioele had told me he couldn’t do them without the CNC machine, a machine that would take two weeks to install and a month to get to grips with, so we’d waited. And waited.
I wasn’t going to settle for less than what we wanted. Not after all this time of preparing dinner on a £5 piece of B&Q faux marble worktop and reaching straight into the drawers without having to open them. So we lugged the long section back out again and put in on the truck. Gioele cut his hand and I couldn’t have cared less except he was bleeding on my lovely floor.
Today they came back with the canals cut. They’d cut them with a large saw blade, by the way, not with the CNC machine, which I haven’t told Tessa but which made me want to cry. But it’s installed now and all’s forgiven. It goes fantastically well with the maple kitchen and it’s like we’re house sitting for people with excellent taste. There’s just a 3cm upstand at the back to silicone into place, which I’ll do this evening. So much work and worry has gone into this kitchen but it’s nearly finished now and turned out brilliantly.
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