THE EXPANSION BEGINS! Italian Stone House Renovation.

THE EXPANSION BEGINS! Italian Stone House Renovation.

Over a year ago we purchased this Old Stone House in the foothills of the Alps and we have been working together as a family to restore it that’s a big one nice portions of this house are believed to be nearly 700 years old but there was

An old sistern that was added in the 1950s that was built in cement and didn’t really match the aesthetic of the original structure we decided to tear the sistern out dig out around the surrounding mountain and use the stones that we excavated to build a new room today the expansion officially begins as

We pour the Foundation so today I have the massive privilege of working with alesio and Carlos I say it’s a huge privilege because alesio has 20 years of experience and Carlos has 30 years of experience so to me working alongside two people like that with such a deep level of experience specifically with

How they build stone houses in this area um with that level of expertise passed down from generation to generation that to me is priceless that’s probably a reoccurring thing that you’ll hear me say over and over through the following weeks and months as we’re hopefully working together because that level of

Education that they can pass to me as we’re working just makes me giddy to be honest but also just to see the pace at which we are working to see the the room coming together or the foundation currently coming together so fast and and I cannot wait to move on to shaping

Those stones and building the stone walls You well good morning today is a very exciting day because we are finally building up this room we’re done with all of the tearing down and we are moving on to the building phase technically last night was our very first day but I didn’t really film that

Much because it was my first time working with this team ALU and his crew arrived yesterday afternoon and went straight to work with building the rebar cages and all of the foundational rebar and then today we’re going to continue on with this process but we managed to

Make a shocking amount of progress we only have a little bit more rebar to lay this morning and then we’ll be moving on to actually Mixing Concrete these cages went up shockingly fast if you remember how we uh made our stirrups by hand a long time ago with hether bending all of the the stirups and the kids as well helping uh that went painfully slow but they showed up with uh proper factorymade stirrups

Which caused the work to go absurdly fast I think last night we accomplished in a mere four or five hours what would have taken us four or five days to do uh By Hand by ourselves [Applause] MTO so this might be confusing because the majority of the house we’re doing a

Thepo or a crawl space where we have a large area underneath the floor that we can work witho but um in this area for this room we’re doing a slab on great so it’s just solid thick um almost 45 cm of concrete through this entire thing which means we

Have to run all of our plumbing and our tubes that we can pass electrical through before we do the concrete we changed plans from doing a crawl space to a slab on grade just two days ago so it threw a lot of things into motion that we weren’t quite prepared for

Including um the placement of all of these pipes um but they are being very accommodating and we’re kind of quickly changing Clans and wrapping things up and setting in those pipes I woke up at 4 in the morning this morning realizing that I forgotten we needed a pipe for

The laundry room so we’re right now installing that and making sure that we don’t forget anything before we start pouring concrete So I am beyond a static because not only not only is the work happening faster than I can keep up with but I am getting what I would call the most priceless education right now because I’m working with experts who have been doing this

For 20 30 years I just have a couple of years experience so to be able to learn from their experience is um to me Priceless Ready Go so to give you a little bit more context as to what we’re doing we’re of course pouring the floor in the foundation currently but then we’re going to be building out three walls to enclose a room and then thus a Terrace on top of that room we only need three walls

Because we’re going to use the existing wall of the existing building of course as the fourth wall two of these walls are going to be built out of stone using the old technique and then one will be built out of cement simply for the additional strength and because you’re

Able to make the wall thinner so the back wall that sits up against the mountain will be made out of cement and then the two walls that are going to be exposed on the corner of the house will be made out of stones in the similar

Fashion that the rest of the house was made out Of A big thank you to Ora for sponsoring today’s video Ora is the new all-in-one app for mental wellness and sleep that provides the world’s largest mental Wellness Content Library and Community you guys know that for a variety of reasons this past year has been um very hectic chaotic and stressful it’s very

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The subscription so go ahead click on the link check it out and thank you to Aura for sponsoring today’s video building the walls out of stone is what I’m most excited about that’s going to happen very very soon we of course have to finish pouring all of this

Cement but to be able to learn from the experts here how to shape the stone how to stack it that’s a skill that I’ve been wanting to properly learn for a very long time I’ve of course built a few things around the property out of stone but I’ve never had someone to

Teach me in person and that I’m really looking forward to threee Go things are moving fast as we’re mixing and pouring the cement Foundation we’re also discussing the placement of all of the large pipes any drainage pipes that come from a shower or toilet or anything like that that’s going to um the sewer line all of those need to be installed

Soon um underneath the crawl space uh before we pour any concrete over top of it and then over top of those tubes we going be building with I think bricks I’m not entirely sure um that will hold up the cement floor that we’ll pour inside of the house and those bricks

Actually create some kind of maze that allows the um crawl space to air out a bit of a maze for the air to go through to make sure that all corners and points of the crawl space dry out but I’ll give you more information about that in a future video as we’re building That [Applause] E It’s quite a bit noisier on the job site today because we have to run a generator which is the first time we’ve had to do that so far we’ve done all of the building including all of the mixing of the concrete for the internal Foundation using solar energy and our batteries

Here but today at the pace we’re working the sun just can’t keep up so they brought their generator which is a little loud and annoying but it’s all right Problem so earlier I mentioned that I was caught a little bit off guard uh in the fact that we’re pouring a slab on Gray Foundation rather than doing the crawl space which is what we had to do for the rest of the house house the reason being

Is that this room is not officially part of the living space of the house so you don’t have to have that crawl space according to the law we’re simply using this for a laundry room for all of the electric to run into this area to to

House the um thinking of all of the Italian words um the furnace that’s the English word my brain is getting all confused here um the hot water heater all of our um utilities and everything will be housed into here which is obviously a very large room for that but

Then um as I mentioned we’re going to have the laundry room and a lot of storage as well so as a result of this not being a bedroom or a living room we really don’t need any extra space like that we just needed a place to put all

The utilities they don’t require that um the spile that the cross space underneath the uh floor so the slab onr is just an easier way of doing things we did have to hustle to get all that piping in thankfully we did [Applause] I’m not aware of anything more physically exhausting in construction than hand mixing cement uh the three of us together are mixing and pouring a just shy of 10 cubic M which um to put it lightly is um a lot so there’s not a lot of uh talking

Or anything other than just mixing and plowing through we’re down to the last three mixes which I’m very pleased with not just pleased to be done with the exhausting work but thrilled that we have gotten so far so fast it’s fascinating to me before we were mixing

Cement with myself and one other person and adding a third person the uh the speed and efficiency of that um you would think would be 50% more cuz there’s 50% more people but no it’s easily double or more than double almost there oh sh up for

Well that’s it it is finished we have mixed and poured nearly 10 cubic M of cement so not only am I super excited to have the work done and looking so good but I’m also just a little proud like we’ve done done a really good job I

Think it’s a a good thing to celebrate getting to this point because as I mentioned before mixing by hand this much concrete I cannot think of a more back Breaking part of construction than that and to get this far so quickly I’m very very pleased you can see we have

Rebar sticking up which will be supporting the walls that we’ll build and we managed to get all of our pipes in last minute this one right here actually these two right here I nearly forgot these two until the very last second and thankfully they were accommodating to me as they were mixing

Cement I was wrestling those in really quick last minute but we managed to get all all of the pipes and these are all of our electrical runs that is for a drain pipe over there for the furnace this is for the laundry room and we’ve got a a tube running up for our

Condenser unit outside for the furnace and right here well that’s a secret I’m not even sure Heather knows about that one yet well that’s going to do it for this video I’m just so thrilled with the progress we’re making and cannot wait to show you the transformation over the coming weeks and

Months as we transform this building but thank you so much for watching give us a like if you wouldn’t mind leave us a comment we’ love hearing from you and we will see you next week

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The expansion finally begins! We are adding an extra room to our Italian stone cabin in the foothills of the Italian alps. We have excavated around the site and are now using the stones that were excavated to build out a stone room that matches the existing stone cabin.

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We are Heather, Bradey, Alexa and Chloe. We purchased an abandoned stone barn in the foothills of the Italian Alps and we are working together as a family to renovate and restore this old stone barn into our dream home.