Blog

We found an amazing garden store that still had a full selection of veggie starts so we spend the last two days clearing more ground and this morning were done with weeding and Thomas laid down some stones and I planted the seedlings.

We now have tomatoes, cucumbers, egg plant, peppers (sweet and hot), zucchini, 7 different types of lettuce, white cabbage and some greens for cooking. I still have 4 artichokes, 1 caper bush and a bayleaf shrub to plant but I need to do some research on where to put them since they are perennials here. I also saw peanut seedling in the store but restrained myself and left them for later. Overall I am pretty proud of what we have accomplished in a little over a week. Can’t wait to start harvesting.

We also got another Ikea delivery so now we have a desk and chair which makes working on the laptop a lot easier. Still missing one recliner and the daybed we ordered has at least one million parts and is still in pieces in the living room. All the furniture will go in the guest rooms in the future so it’s not a wasted effort.

Our container delivery date changed from June 10th (which we never believed) to July 19th, so it will probably be end of July/early August until we have our furniture here. Good thing we took the 9 bags with us, we have most of the things we need on a daily basis.

It is interesting would you can cook just in the oven, Yesterday we had chicken drum sticks, spinach and potatoes without a stove. Today, I cooked Osso Bucco and rice and all in the oven. I was skeptical cooking rice just in the oven but it turned out well. The whole dish was delicious.

Later this afternoon, I discovered with my realtor that our house has a methane detector in the boiler room. Apparently, sometime last weekend it triggered a shutdown of the gas to the house. I didn’t realize that there is a small button, I have to pull out to restart the gas. Everything is no working fine and I can fully utilize the kitchen.

Yesterday, we dug up some of the weeds and planted the veggies we had bought a few days ago. It’s not much compared to what we are used to but it’s a start. The soil is a joy to dig in and even the weeds are fun to pull. Whereas in Boulder Thomas had to do most of the digging, here I can just use a little hand trowel to make a hole. Within no time we went from all weeds to a nicely planted garden.

We also let the cats out for the first time and they immediately went over/under the fence to explore their surroundings. They came back after 2 hours and spend the rest of the morning sleeping. I was relieved that they already know where their home is.

My brain was completely fried by Sunday. Even little things like buying laundry detergent take a lot of mental effort and Google Translate. For example, I spend at least 15 min looking for laundry detergent sheets. I was happy to see something that looked like them but after translating the package I discovered they are sheets you put in the washer in addition to the detergent to “catch the color” ??? . So I had to put them back and continued searching. I finally was successful and already did a load of laundry. Unfortunately, I forgot that I didn’t have a drying rack any more and the one in the boiler room turned out to be insufficient so now our underwear and socks are spread out in the living room. We spend the rest of Sunday watching tennis and doing nothing which felt really good.

Today it’s back to gardening for me and Thomas is trying to get gas to the house and somebody to come out to repair the boiler. I definitely are having more fun than he does.

Thomas promised me a trip to another big garden center if I setup my Italian bank account. Something that took him a full day and several chats with the help center. They want the Italian insurance card in addition to the passport to verify somebody’s identity. But since we don’t have one yet the help center person told him to uploaded his tax code, which then gets rejected but after uploading it three times it gets accepted. Thankfully he had figured all of that out already so it only took me 10min and the bank another 30 minuted for them to verify the account. So I am ready for my reward trip to the garden center. Still hoping to find some more vegetable starts but I will be happy if I find some lettuce seeds and a cherry picker. The cherries are ripe but the tree we have is at least 20ft high so most of them are not accessible.

On Friday night I noticed that there is no hot water. I had to shower with cold water. I investigated that on Saturday and found that our boiler now has an error message. My research indicates that one of the pumps may have failed. This can wait until Monday since I discovered that our solar warm water system will provide us with hot water. Unfortunately for Karina, I discovered that after she had a cold shower.

Saturday night the next surprise happened. I was ready to prepare dinner, sword fish with garlic spinach and potatoes, and turned on the gas but there was nothing. Something must have gone wrong with the transfer from the new owner to a new provider and they shut our gas off remotely. I wasn’t aware that modern gas meters can do that. This also will wait until Monday. We went out to Delphino blu for a great dinner.

Day 3 was not successful at all, we didn’t get garbage bags from the town administration but we filled out a bunch of paperwork and they will contact us. We will see when that happens, not sure what they expect us to do with our garbage. For now we are storing it in the empty garage. The store that was “similar to Ikea” didn’t have anything we needed, so to combat our frustration we had some gelato. Mine is a size “piccolo” which is the smallest I can get. I usually get brain freeze from too much ice cream but so far I was fine. I also expanded my ice cream flavor range from hazelnut to sour cherry with amaretto and it was very tasty.

Yesterday things looked up, we had hired a cleaning company to deep clean the house (it looked like it had been neglected for years, not just the last few weeks) and they did an outstanding job. I immediately felt more at home and wasn’t afraid to touch anything or sit on the floor. I am a lot pickier when it comes to cleanliness that I thought – live and learn.

Our sleeping accommodation also has improved significantly. From camping mattress the first day, to mattress on the floor the next and now we have a real bed, after spending a few hours assembling it.

The cats are slowly exploring the house but they are not happy about all the activities going on, especially the cleaning. I still have to look for a pool float or something so that they don’t drown in the pool when they fall in and after that we will slowly introduce them to their new yard. We have a small clowder (we have seen three so far) that regularly visits our front yard and demands food so I fed them ones but we are rethinking that. They are all well fed so the woman that lived here was probably not the only one feeding them. I rather not have cat fights in my yard.

I couldn’t be happier. Yesterday we found a giant home improvement store and not only did we get a hammer drill, lamps and some smaller stuff like bath mats and toilet brushes (very important) but they also had a few vegetable plant left. I already had gone to a nursery this morning and the woman just shock her head and said “verdura niente”. Even with the little Italian I know I immediately understood. It’s definitely a little late in the season but I am hoping we still get some tomatoes and peppers later in the year.

We rewarded ourself for 3 hours of shopping with a nice dinner at one of the smaller lakes in the area.

This morning I already unpacked all the tools so now we can start gardening and installing the lamps we bought.

Today’s challenge is signing up for trash service and getting our recycling supplies from the city of Ranco. We already know from the trash calendar that we have to separate our trash in 5 different categories, we are just unsure of what goes where. Luckily, I enjoy little challenges like this and it will be very satisfying when it actually works.

Yesterday was the big day. At 6am we put the cats in the car and started our trip to our new house. They weren’t excited about another trip but when we let them out of their carriers they did ok.

After 6.5 hours with 2 quick stops to charge the car we finally arrived

I immediately started unpacking and cleaning some drawers for our kitchen stuff and we had our first meal in our “new” 70th orange kitchen.

A walkthrough discovered a few interesting things, like old shovels and that we have no more lamps. We forgot that it is common in Europe to take the lamps when you move so today we need to make a trip to the hardware store.

We had a few pleasant surprises in the garden. We already have raspberries and some fruit trees: 1 cherry, 2 plums, 1 apple, 1 fig, 1 orange and 1 lemon. And the neighbor has a big walnut tree with limbs in our garden. Everything is green and covered in new growth. Looking forward to my trip to the garden center today while Thomas awaits the arrival of our mattress.

Thomas already had setup mobile internet last Friday but it was too slow, so he went and got Starlink until we get fiber. Wifi works fine in the part of the house that is close to the Starling router, but not at the other end. Having solid brick walls has its pros and cons. Thomas will setup a Wifi mesh tomorrow. After everything was unpacked and organized we celebrated with a bottle of prosecco and went to “bed” early.

I’m working on setting things up, so everything is ready for the handover of the house on Friday and the move in on Tuesday. Karina is still in Germany getting the cats ready and helping my parents. One big open item is home insurance.

I picked up a coffee maker plus chargers built for Italian sockets, so everything plugs in on day one.

The big lift was banking which is necessary of utilities. Setting up a Revolut account for Italy took more effort than expected: without the standard documents a resident would have on hand, I had to work around the usual onboarding path. The systems here assume you’re already settled, and we’re not quite there yet.

I got an Italian cell number but my tests at the house showed that all providers have a very weak signal at the house.

It’s official, Sheila and Toffee are now EU citizens. The vet was amazed by the amount of paperwork I had for them but after an hour of sifting through it she gave me their passports. Now they can freely roam anywhere in Europe.

Made bavarian potato salad with fish filets; feeding a whole family is a lot of work. I know why I normally don’t cook.

While Thomas is in Italy the cats and I stayed behind in Germany with my in-laws. I enjoy walking to the bakery every morning and getting fresh rolls and some sweets for our afternoon “Kaffee and Kuchen”. It’s an additional small snack that Germans have in the afternoon, similar to the British tea time, just with coffee and cake.
I also took over the cooking duties and so far everybody survived. My salad dressings are getting tastier but are still not as good as Thomas’s.

Besides that, I am trying to make myself useful in the garden. Gerd and I already organized the garden shed, the patio and half of the garage. We went shopping for plants today, so tomorrow I can get my hands dirty and plant tomatoes and zucchini. Can’t wait to do the same in my garden in Italy, I hope the garden centers are as well stocked as they are here.