Author: Karina Hauser

I learned a new Italian word “rampicante” which means climbing. When we bought the plants I bought 4 zucchini plants and didn’t read the label any further, I understood zucchini and that was good enough for me and I ignored the “Trombetta d’Albenga” part of the description. After they started growing they looked more like pumpkins than zucchini and then I looked it up and it is a climbing variety and that you can eat them fresh but if you leave them on to dry its like a butternut squash, pretty cool. Overall the garden is growing like crazy, I sowed radishes that are now ready to harvest, after barely 4 weeks. Some of the lettuce is ready, so is the Swiss chard and I am starting to get a few tomatoes. It is so different from Colorado and I am LOVING it. Gardening is sooo easy here, now that I installed the drip irrigation all I do is cut back some unwanted growth and pull out some weeds. I have big plans for next year. I am planning a small garden shed right in the middle of the vegetable garden, with a trellis for grapes and kiwis. I also need some arbors and sturdy support for those climbing zucchinis and other climbers, it’s going to be so much fun.

Right now I am dealing with a leaky pool, a Japanese beetle infestation and getting shocked by my stainless steel countertop. Thomas is in Munich to pick up our new car and help out his parents.

The leaky pool is annoying but we already emailed the pool company and they told us to wait until the water level stops dropping and then they come and investigate. They think its the seams and they just need to be recaulked, no big deal except that I now can’t really swim any more just sit in the shallow end. I really need one of those little floats for drinks and snacks.

For the Japanese beetles I bought a pheromone trap and when I put it up it was like a scene out of Hitchcocks “The Birds” except mine was called “The Beetles”. There were hundred flying in from all angles and the humming was deafening. I hung the trap and ran back in the house. Within 30 min the bag was full and I needed to replace it. The second one took 2 hours to fill and now my garden has a nice layer of dead beetles. They are supposed to be good compost.

The electric shocks from the countertop required some detective work. I had gotten shocked when I cleaned the counter and Thomas when he emptied the dishwasher but most of the time we didn’t get shocked so initially we didn’t pay too much attention to it. After nearly dropping a bottle of olive oil I got the voltage tester and heaven forbid, there are ~100 volt between the oven wall (stainless steel) and the stainless steel countertop and the same between the metal part of the dishwasher and the countertop. I am no electrician but I am fairly sure that is not how it’s supposed to be.

Luckily, I have a friend with a masters degree in electrical engineering and we worked through different scenarios. His suspicion was that it was one of the appliances he had me turn off the electricity and then pull the plugs for the microwave and dishwasher which were partially covered by the cabinet. So I took out a saw and very carefully cut off part of the back board around the outlets. I am so glad we have all our power tools with us, not sure what we would do without them. When I unplugged the appliances the power on the countertop was gone, so that was good but not really a solution and the chances that both appliances are causing problems seemed odd. I send a message to an electrician but he said he can’t come until next week. I left the fuse off and went to bed. I was exhausted vom going up and down the stairs (17 steps each way) to turn the fuse on and off, and on and off, and on and off… and also sanding the ceiling in the guest bedroom.

This morning my friend had me do some tests on the outlet and it behaved different from the other outlets so I took it apart. It was a mess of different colored wires. Light blue, dark blue, black, gray, brown, and yellow/green. My friend words were “OMG that does not look right”, which was not very encouraging.

Luckily we had bought an outlet for the basement so I decided to install that, I am nothing if not adventurous and I had faith in my friend to explain the process to me. I really should have paid more attention in school when we discussed electricity. To make a long story short, it turned out the only the black wire has power, the dark blue is the neutral and one of the green/yellow wires is the ground. The other wires are for other outlets and just needed to be screwed into the back of the new outlet which was no easy task because the wires were pretty thick and the holes pretty small after a few tries I managed. I turned the fuse back on and then came the moment of truth, and hallelujah, no more power between the oven wall and the countertop. I was very proud of myself until I tested the dishwasher to countertop connection and 🤬 there is still electricity flowing. So I will just be careful when I load and empty the dishwasher and not touch the countertop and if I forget I get a “shocking” reminder. It was a long and painful process but I feel confident now that I can replace at least some of the other outlets myself without the need of an electrician. We have all kinds of outlets in the house, some with 2 holes, some with 3, some with 5 and there is a myriad of plugs in the home improvement store to convert one in the other, so it seems to be a common problem in Italian houses.

Most of Europe is under a heat dome and our area is no exception. It’s in the mid/high 90s during the day and low 70s at night so activities are limited to early morning, which is about 25 degrees higher than normal. The birds start chirping at 5:30 anyways so we work 6-9 and then take turns in front of the portable air conditioner we bought. After taking off the acustic/styrofoam ceiling I attacked the wallpaper and that is all gone now but we are left with a mess of glue on the ceiling and a bunch of holes everywhere. It will be at least another week of scrubbing/patching before I can start painting. The goal is to have the room ready when the furniture arrives so that we don’t have to move it twice.

Today we applied for our residency permit. Thomas had done a great job of prepping all the forms and copying documents so we didn’t encounter any problems. Now we are waiting for the police to come by to verify that we really live here and then we will get our residency card. We got a form to fill out for our garbage but the person who can enter it in the computer is on vacation today so we will give it another try tomorrow. In the meanwhile we are filling the garage with cardboard since the garage door is not opening and we park outside. Another project for the future.

We hired a pool company which is coming today to empty and clean the pool and tomorrow it will be refilled. I never wanted a pool but now I am looking forward to it. In the meanwhile we are swimming in the lake which is very refreshing. We have to get different swimwear to blend in with the locals and get used to European modesty (or not modesty) standards again. Our thirty years in the US certainly definitely has left a mark.

The garden is coming along nicely. We harvested a few zucchini from the plant we discovered during weeding. I probably will regret planting 4 more zucchinis but hindsight is 20/20. I spend a day researching and ordering drip irrigation. “The supplier has limited the sale of this item to 1” is something I did not experience in the US, especially not for items that cost 3 Euro. I think I have everything now so tomorrow morning project will be to install at least some of it. All the vegetable gardens around here are covered, so at first I thought it was for shade but our realtor said it’s for hail. So I spend another day researching and then ordered hail netting and poles but that won’t arrive until July so I am hoping for the best.

Since it’s too hot to work outside after 9am and I have no more vegetables to plant I started the renovation of the main guest room downstairs. Its a nice big room and will be split into a bedroom and a living room at the end. It will also serve as our temporary bedroom ones we start the renovations upstairs.

Unfortunately, it has an acoustic ceiling that needs to come down, wallpaper on the walls and really ugly tiles. I started with the ceiling and was prepared for a weeklong project but the styrofoam removal “only” took 2 days. The glue removal, filling the holes and smoothing out the whole area might be another story. I can’t lift my arms any more so today it’s only cleanup and baseboard removal.

Last evening we had a nice walk along the lake to our local bar/cafe. I had listened to a podcast about how an Italian aperitif always includes some nibbles so I was eager to try that. And it didn’t disappoint as you can see from the pictures. The 30min walk home was a lot harder than the way there, can’t wait to get our bikes so that we can do this regularly.

I had spent most of the day trying to pay our property tax. We decided to pay it instead of waiting to become resident at which point we don’t have to pay property tax at all (at least that’s what I think). It’s only 228 dollars and without it we can’t get trash services. They have a special system to pay local taxes and it didn’t work for me at all. Thomas’ worked after several tries (at least we think it did) but he can only pay half and I have to pay the other half. Tech support was very helpful, it just took a while to try different things, reinstalling the app multiple times ….. This morning it finally worked and now we can tackle the trash services. Trash has to be sorted into plastic, paper, glass/cans, green waste and regular waste each with having their own container or bag and the bags have a barcode on it so I can’t just set out a regular trash bag. We still have a few bags for regular waste from the previous owner but nothing for our plastic waste, so we are eager to get the waste management establish but it might take a few more weeks. Thomas has been working diligently on the paperwork to establish residency so we will try that next Friday since he is leaving for Germany tomorrow to pickup our German drivers licenses and ID cards.

I am currently conducting taste tests for dry food with the cats, which is very interesting. The cats are very happy now that they can go outside, they are now hunting little lizards instead of mice/bunnies which are a lot easier to clean up.

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.

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.

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.