Friday, February 03, 2017

The Other Place 04 - Kitchen and Bathrooms

Cisternino, Puglia, Italy. Friday 03-February-2017.

This trip was all about the kitchen and bathrooms - well shower rooms actually. We arrived to discover the scaffolding up and the work progressing at a cracking rate.

Corso Umberto I

Via la Fiera

For the kitchen we had options from the designer Scavolini kitchen from Euromobili, via a custom built version from a local carpenter to the cheap-and-cheerful option from Conforama (more like a B&Q kitchen). In the end we went for the latter.

The "design committee" 

A couple of days later we went back to discover that the builder's brother had preemptively started building stone walls where the units were to go. We'd been thinking of wooden carcass not stone so he had to demolish his little walls.

The new staircase and shower-room walls are replastered and the concrete steps stone-clad.

Stairs to terrace and door to shower room

Stairs to the terrace

The roof had been curved because of the two barrel vaults below. Now it is levelled with lightweight, expanded clay granules and a floor laid over that. I had been concerned about extra weight but the granules are not too heavy and provide some useful thermal insulation.

The roof terrance

Inside the two ceilings in the public rooms (living room and kitchen/diner) are now sand-blasted, re-pointed and looking lovely.

Living room ceiling

Dining room

What was the family bathroom is now the utility room. The old bath has gone and will be replaced by a laundry sink and a washing machine.

Utility room

The small bedroom was way too small so we demolished the internal non-structural walls and reinstated them further over giving us a decent sized bedroom, a shower room and reduced the wasted corridor space to a minimum. It also enabled us to repair the arches which had been mangled by the previous walls.

Small bedroom

The terrace is a bit of a building site for equipment storage but they have carved out a niche to house the new boiler. The Italians very sensibly like to install boilers on the outside - greatly reduced risk of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Terrace with new niche for boiler

After a major planning session we repaired to our local cafe for coffee.


As well as all that we also decided on all the shower room fittings - two of everything please. After that we headed off to Bologna for a well earned city break.

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