Author: Karina Hauser

After nearly three month our container finally arrived. It has been two frantic weeks of unpacking and organizing. The Italian movers were AMAZING, they assembled everything even the stuff we unassembled ourselves. Everything survived, even my delicate glasses so I am very happy. I had marked the wall with “small/medium/large” boxes and directed people inside the house while Thomas was in charge of garage/garden stuff. It worked out nicely and they were done unloading/reassembling in 5 hours.

Then the “fun” of unpacking began. Thomas had stressed that nothing jiggles/moves in the boxes so after running out of clothes to put in empty spaces I had filled everything with newspaper in addition to the items that were packed in newspaper. At one point I thought I would drown in all the newspaper. Every empty cardboard box in the house is now filled with newspaper. We will be recycling those for the next few weeks. At one point I threw a ball of newspaper in a box but it hit the wall and made a weird noise, turned out I had forgotten to unpack the airtag.

The furniture fits nicely, so we are very happy that we decided on moving it. Now the living room that I thought was too big looks really great.

Saturday we officially opened our guest quarters, even with no baseboards and only one screw holding the door lock. The renovations are not going as fast as we would like it but that’s just life. My half-sister and her husband from Germany arrived and we put them right to work hanging TVs, moving furniture etc.

It was just work we also spend a day at a beach club at Lago Monate. We rented a paddle board and had lot of fun, some people were more stable than others on it. Unfortunately, I didn’t capture the “graceful” fall off the paddle board on film. I think Snoopy definitely enjoyed the day.

Besides gardening and renovating we are also doing other fun things, like baking homemade bread and rolls, going out to eat and after we got our health certificate we finally started playing some tennis. Yes, you read that right, we needed to go see a doctor to get a health certificate to play tennis. She did an EEG and measured our blood pressure and now we have a piece of paper that says we are healthy enough to play tennis. Just recreational, for tournaments we need another one, it’s crazy.

We have been working to get the guest bedroom finished so that we can move the bedroom furniture and desk downstairs ones our furniture arrives. The container finally has arrived in Genua and is on its way to Milan, where it will be unpacked and loaded onto a truck. We are keeping our fingers crossed that we will have all our stuff next week.

The guest room turned out really nice, even the glue stripes on the ceiling are hardly visible any more. We painted it a cheerful yellow and I exchanged all the outlets. The electrical work has been interesting, I am learning a lot but starting to feel more confident. Now all that is left are baseboards, lamps and shortening the door. But we will get that done this weekend.

We are harvesting cucumbers, zucchinis, more zucchinis, eggplants, lettuce and greens. The tomatoes are close to being ripe and I have one watermelon. We are pretty self sufficient when it comes to vegetables right now. We had some plums from one of the plum trees and the others will be ripe soon. Can’t wait to plant fruit trees and berries in the Fall.

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.