Houses #6 and #7

The plot thickens! We saw 2 more houses this morning...

House #6

This is from the master balcony looking out...the field across there is a sort of park and the gate (that's open) is big enough I could pull the van in. There is a garage, but our van won't fit, so it becomes storage...which is great!

This the front room...the part on the right you can't see is the front door. It'd have to be a combo living/dining room, but it's small enough that the living part would be really small. On this floor there's also a kitchen that looks fairly nice, a laundry room that will hold just the washer and maybe some pantry items, and a bathroom. 

Kitchen has a reasonably-sized refrigerator and a dishwasher?!

This is pretty much what all 3 of the bedrooms look like. Fairly standard, but there are 3 wardrobes, which is a nice bonus since there aren't closets and there are 2 bathrooms. I like the balcony off of the "master" bedroom. You saw the first view from it. The second is below...

Not very scenic...which kind of describes the difficulty with this one. The convenience of things is really nice, but it sure doesn't look pretty. I'm not sure whether I'd be comfortable just letting the boys run and play in the field across from the house or not...there's the syringe to consider, after all. The Net found one in the front yard. Eek...and the neighborhood doesn't look terrific.

View off of the attic...little balcony thing that overlooks the hardware store and the road. I think there's something similar off of the kitchen.

The rest of the attic...it's a huge open room with 2 skylights and another bathroom. We'd probably use this for a large bedroom...Rosa, Deep Thinker and The Net and then have the older girls take the 2 other bedrooms on the next floor down. It would be really easy to set up cots for the girls here when we have company.

This is just 1 corner of an extra room in the basement that the previous family used for their dryer. Italians don't vent their dryers, so the Americans have to be creative. It's large enough it could hold a dryer and a twin-sized bed if The Net really doesn't want to share.

There's also a nice big living space down here which would probably be our main living room. I don't think the room upstairs will hold much after we put a dining table in there. In addition, there's another space about half as large that could be used for a bedroom or toy room or storage or some combination of the three?

A view of the little backyard...more space than house #2, but still pretty small.

Overall, I'd say we left this house feeling kind of deflated and trying to convince ourselves that the mansion house is too expensive and too big. This one has great space, but the neighborhood isn't my favorite...even though the fact that it's close to things is a major advantage, as well. This one is under our price range and already has AC and things like light fixtures and a kitchen (Italians take these things out and move them, so they all have to be negotiated if they aren't there). As a result, we can negotiate to have them pay for our water and our garbage tax as part of the rent.


Then we pulled up to House #7...

From the house looking down the driveway

From the driveway looking up at the house.

My heart is starting to pound as we look at the outside.

Standing at the front door. There's quite a large entryway. The doorway you can see leads into a little hallway that goes into the dining/living space on the right or the kitchen on the left.

Standing in the living room, looking toward the dining area or what we'd use for dining and school. Love the windows and the French doors...(do you suppose they're still called French doors on an Italian house?) It has a very cottagey feeling. I can totally see our dining table (that we don't have yet) back here, our bookcases on the walls...all of the light flooding the room.

Looking back the other way. You can see the front door/entrway on the right. Cool fireplace that is functional. You can't tell how pretty the curtains are, but all the windows have white antiquey-looking curtains that provide privacy, but don't block the light. It made it seem very quaint.

Laundry "hall" and problem #1 with this property. It goes straight back and then turns to the left. There might be room for an American washer, but once you got the washer in, there's certainly be no room for a dryer. Italians rarely use them, so it's not a big deal for them, they just hang the laundry out...which is great in the spring, summer and fall, but in the winter... They were appalled at the idea that a U.S. homeowners association would limit the use of clothes lines for aesthetic reasons, when so much electricity could be saved by line drying!

The kitchen is lovely...marbly-looking countertops, a dishwasher and a lot of space for storage for an Italian kitchen. Below is the other side of the kitchen with doors leading outside. We're thinking a dryer could maybe go in that corner? It's not convenient, but certainly no worse than carrying wet laundry down the stairs to dry it like in house #6.

Our bedroom...2 windows and the cool floors that I still can't remember the name of. They're some kind of baked tile.

There are 2 other large bedrooms and the owners are willing to divide either/both of them with a sheetrock wall to create more. This introduces problem #2 with this house. There are only 3 bedrooms. We can easily fit the kids into 2 bedrooms...put Pianogurl and Songbird in one and The Net and Deep Thinker in the other...but what do you do when people come to visit? There is one other storage space that would be just big enough for a twin-sized bed, but then I lose all the indoor storage...and no one but Rosa wants that space for her room! Although the boys might...

Potential issue #3 is lack of bathrooms. There are 2. One upstairs and one downstairs. They're both very large, though, and this one has the best bathtub I've seen in Italy...bathtubs are important to me! And fewer bathrooms means less cleaning, right?

The bathroom from the other direction...you can just see the edge of the shower.

Total bonus is the cool building, pictured below. It's full of old stuff and we can use it as we'd like. this is an original brick oven, still fully functional! And it has a BBQ to the left that you can't see. There's even a cool pizza spatula (the giant flat thing they remove pizzas with in the movies!)

The taller part is the owner's and houses a tractor! We'd also have to care for the grounds...she does have a riding lawnmower...flashbacks to last summer! The yard is huge.

The well is fully functional...very cool...and covered. The trees include various fruit and olive trees. There's even a willow for Songbird and an herb garden for me that's already full of herbs! The front has little flower boxes like most of the apartments in the city!

The boys were so thrilled with the yard that they never even went into the house and don't care who they have to share with in order to live here. All the fields behind the house belong to the owner and the kids are welcome to wander at will.

 So we love this house...except for the 3 issues...bathrooms, not enough bedrooms and the potential laundry issue. Those seem like kind of big issues...there's also a gentlemen's "club" 1/2 a mile or so down the road. And the landlady mentioned the alarm system twice...that's the first mention of alarm systems we've heard in Italy. Does it NEED an alarm system?