Today has been a beautiful day, weather-wise. Yesterday, we had brilliant blue skies and sunshine all day, but man, was it cold! And, last night, when we returned home from a local restaurant, the inky-black sky was littered with sparkling stars, like we haven’t seen since the heady days of summer. Because we aren’t overlooked […]
It’s the weekend, but that doesn’t stop our builders. Give them their due, there’s some work ethic being displayed here! We *think* that the major drilling work might be over for this phase of the house renovation, so whilst Misko & Edin got on with the cabling and first plastering of the ceiling, we were […]
It’s been a while since I’ve recorded anything about the kitchen renovation, simply because nothing massive – or Instagram worthy 😉 – seems to have happened recently. But actually, a lot has happened and we are hopeful that the dirty, grimy work is now almost over. Or, at least until Silvano returns to dismantle the […]
Istria is known as Terra Magica. And it certainly is a land of magic, and traditions. As people whose lives are very much reliant on modern technology and the internet, it’s fascinating for us to see at such close quarters, old ways of life, still very much in evidence. Where we live, we are surrounded […]
When we bought the house, we asked the people we were buying from, what Istrian winters are like. “A bit like English summers” they told us – meaning damp and overcast. They hadn’t known snow for ten years – although to be fair, they weren’t here that often and we have had our fair share […]
The signs are all here this morning. The temperature has plummeted – it feels quite icy cold outside. The skies are leaden and heavy. The clouds are moving very, very quickly and the trees are beginning to bend and sway in the wind, which is becoming increasingly stronger. It can all only mean one thing […]
It’s going to be quite a few more weeks, we think, until we have anything that resembles a kitchen, never mind something as luscious as this above. In the meantime, we’re just going to have to continue muddling through the dust and the dirt and the grime – which we do try to keep on […]
Who’d have thought stairs could be so problematic? To be honest, I’ve never really given stairs a lot of thought, because they’re just…there. But our stairs need a lot of thinking about, because they’re pretty unusual. We have one set going upstairs from the living room, and another going down into what will become The […]
One of my favourite weekends, back in West Didsbury, was the one when we ventured out into the garden, for the first time in the year, to start that post-winter/pre-spring clean up. When the weather felt deceptively spring-like and the air felt a little bit different. And that weekend was usually in March or April, […]
I’ve never really been green-fingered. I’m very impatient when growing anything from seed, as I want results right NOW. When I want a riot of colour in my garden, I want it immediately, but I know it takes longer for seeds to germinate and bulbs to push themselves up through the spring soil. Although I […]
If you’re remotely interested in the tales of our house renovation, or maybe fancy a bit of a break out in Istria, we’d love you to give us a follow over on Twitter. If you’re not that interested in the story of the house etc, but like to travel – and stay – in nice […]
Although our house is quite old – we think parts of it are over 200 years old – and is quite traditional in structural style to many of the stone houses in Istria, we are determined to stamp a contemporary feel on it. Apart from The Well Room where the floor is stone flags (therefore […]