They Left Me. Building Alone in the Mountains. (Italian Stone House Renovation)

They Left Me. Building Alone in the Mountains. (Italian Stone House Renovation)

So last week you would have seen us knocking down the old sistern here and digging around the mountain getting ready to build a new room this week not only do we have to finish that digging process and see what the mountain holds for us in terms of our foundation but I

Also have a very large list of items to do as we have a crew coming in just 5 days time to help build that room open up doors and windows and other items as well so in order to prepare for them I have to finish hand hewing all of the

Logs that we’re Gathering From up in the mountain in order to use those as the window lentils and door openings we of course need to finish digging open up a hole between the two rooms to pass pipes and electricity as well as a massive amount of other items to prepare for

Them to arrive and unfortunately this week I am working alone as Heather and the kids have left the USA for a couple of weeks and I’ll explain why a little bit later on but for now I need to get to work For Well today we’re back at it digging out this area for the new room we’re so close we should be finishing just in the next couple of hours here then we can inspect that Foundation to see what the requirements are going to be so the section that he’s working on

Currently is a bit precarious as it’s all a bit tying into the house and as a reminder these are dry stacked stones and in this area there would have never been any mortar or any rendering over top of them um so we do have to be a bit

Careful as he’s chipping away those areas but we are almost there he’s done an incredible job all of this was buried underground most of it was ranada this uh slate here we just have one final bit to pull away from the house more or less this is giving me giving

You a sense of what this entire digging process would have been if we had chosen to continue forward digging out behind the mountain so you can get a sense that with how long this area here is taking with it being the simplest part of what would have been a massive digging

Process digging behind the house um you can see that this would have taken at least a full month of digging to finish behind the house which is what he had originally Estimated now of course we’re going to be using all of these stones to build the new room build um a bit of a wall against the mountain to hold the mountain back as well as to improve the Aesthetics of the outside area um but once all of that work is done we will

Have an immense task of uh cleaning up this Terrace leveling it back out removing any of the unused stones to other areas for future building projects and then just in general a lot of clean up and Landscaping work isn’t it just so convenient that all of

The stones just naturally break off in a flat kind of format there usually with at least two three four different flat size look at this when it’s almost perfectly Square that’s just naturally how the rocks break off and it makes building a house like this so much

Simpler so you can see all of these Stones came from the mountain surrounding this area and of course there is some work to do to shape them up to make them fully usable but they break off naturally simply 90% there sometimes 100% ready to Simply place

Them into a wall and build a house I myself am super excited to see and learn and to show you guys how local Builders take the these Stones shape them and then build a room out of what we just jackhammered out of the mountain it’s not only going to be a beautiful process

To witness but I’m going to learn a lot in the process this bit is um definitely the most nerve-wracking part because the stone that he’s Jack hammering on right now actually comes in all the way to the house so this this is the stone right here that he’s jackhammering on comes

All the way into the house and this area this wall is starting to crumble a bit you can see as he’s jackhammering the uh the dirt in the mortar is coming loose between the stones making all of this quite loose you can see all of the dirt falling down it’s a lot of

Vibration that’s just slowly slowly it’s my favorite Italian phrase piano piano so I keep having to go back and forth watching outside and then coming and inspecting inside wow you can see the mortar and the dirt crumbling It’s my job to watch and call him off if I think it’s too dangerous um we’re right on the edge Here so I’ve said it before and I’ll say it many more times it is so impressive to watch Andrea work I’m very thankful to have someone like him handle this job for Me he’s doing things with an excavator that I had no idea were even possible he’s basically delivering us a square box to work in down to the millimeter walking around checking his dep with a laser level that I’m quite jealous of and he’s like spot on bang on to the Centimeter So off camera we just had the engineer take a look at the site and we just got finished talking with him um we didn’t get uh bad news at all also it didn’t get great news I would say it’s right in line with expectations which is good

Keeps the budget exactly where it should be he’s not making us do um the crawl space like we had to do in the house a little confused about that but that’s fine I don’t want to do it so we’re moving forward and Andrea is now digging

45 to 50 cm beneath the finished level of the floor so that we have space to run the pipes and the cement and all of that good stuff and then in just one week’s time we will begin mixing up that cement and building the walls all of

These Stones there are a shocking amount of stones piles everywhere we got a pile that he just placed close to the house here and we’re going to pull from that and start building this new room well the excavation is finished and while yes that was a very stressful

Process to go through it’s very encouraging to see the space finished and ready to go Andrea did such an impressive job of essentially carving us a square Cube into a mountain getting ready for this room to be built as nervous as I was to start this process

Once he began I realized I had nothing to worry about considering the person that that I hired for the job so very thankful for his expertise here but at the same time it also showed that we made the right decision to not dig further into the mountain and let me

Show you why so in case you weren’t aware our original plan was to continue digging back into the mountain and the entire length of the house in order to um once and for all stop any water intrusion from coming in on the bottom floor but one concern is how did they

Build the house against the mountain so we can’t inspect that the walls on the inside are relatively straight but on the outside are they straight or are they leaning which doesn’t make any sense when you first think of that but the way they would have dug into the

Mountains and build the house often times would have meant that the exterior part of the wall was quite at the angle which means if you excavate the the mountain away from the house the house risk collapsing and you have to slowly reinforce it and that is what we found

After digging out a small area so if you look here the house is straight but then when it meets the mountain it immediately Curves in quite a lot and then actually juts around this Stone here now angles and everything are hard to tell on camera so it’s doesn’t look

As bad on the camera but it is leaning quite a bit this way so if you remove the mountain here you would have had to very slowly reinforce the house and prop it up so that it would not um you know fall down um that’s not really a process

That I would have been too excited to go through so I am glad that we were um more or less forced into the position of deciding not to go that route uh because that would have been opening up a huge can of worms so now that the um space has been

Dug out I need to um finish off this hole that connects the two rooms this is how we’ll pass all pipes and electricity from room to room what we’re building out here is essentially going to be a uh utility room laundry room storage multi-purpose um who knows what else

We’ll um put into it it’d be nice to add like a a mini bathroom or something but we don’t really know at this point we’ll see how much space is left over seem like it’s going to be fairly easy so far to get through this for those asking about Heather and

The the kids why they weren’t um here last week and if they’re doing okay after the car accident yes everyone’s great everyone’s fine um they ended up having to go back to the USA last minute um Heather received um some family health news recently ly with her dad and

Um Wanted to fly back to be with him for that as they go through the diagnosis and the treatment plan and all of that so uh the kids went with her um of course I would have preferred to be able to go back with them um but with the

Amount that is going on here and was scheduled and um could not be stopped um we decided it was best for them to go and I would continue working here um and will be back in one week’s Time well we can check that job off we now have a sizable hole connecting the office to what is currently the outside World it comes the way lean into its power and control what you have sa Here Comes the Flood rushing clean Cuz there’s a presence in the grave Beyond reaching out and reaching on Here Comes the Flood rushing free Here comes the Fire Burning Heart and white with desire here comes the flame feeling rain there’s a hunger in the face of down reaching on and reaching out here comes the flame burning free To M so when Heather and I were first whitewashing the uh the floorboards for the uh the first half of the house I think we are overthinking things quite a bit kind of really focusing on the ratios of water to paint making sure that every board was uniform from from

Board to board and uh really taking our time with it but then as we got further along I realized that it’s actually the inconsistencies and sloppiness if you will that makes the whitewashing technique work I don’t know much about the originations of whitewashing I’m sure somebody can fill me in in the

Comments below but it certainly was not meant to be uniform from board to board it’s the variety and the difference from board to board when you put them all together and some boards you see the grain texture a little bit more some boards are um less transparent but then

When you put them all together it just really works and for me what that means is I can just continue to be a little bit sloppy about it which means today I should be able to have the rest of the floorboards for the house completely painted and maybe even Sealed All right there are no more beams to work on everything is finished and hued and stained I guess I do have to polyurethane them so a little bit of a premature celebration but that stain needs to dry for about 24 hours before I can coat it in poly but the boards that

Are painted are ready to go so it’s time to polyurethane the Floorboards Well I put the camera down uh for the last day because I’m under a severe time crunch I have to get this floor finished we have a construction crew arriving in just a couple of days and I figure it’s not very nice to make them walk across

The beams as I have been but let me catch you up to speed once this stained dried for 24 hours I seal coated it I finished up painting all of the boards there’s two layers of boards there some more here an entire room full of boards over there those have all been painted

And seal coated ready to go I’ve actually started on the flooring just back here just a little bit took a long time to get things laser aligned and proper but then I kind of realized that there’s nothing aligned in this house so I don’t need to worry about it that much

Usually a a brand new house built from end to end might be off by let’s say a quarter of an inch well how far off this house is in terms of its squareness is not measured in inches it’s measured in feet that’s not an exaggeration so there’s nothing Square about it and I’m

Just going to embrace it and it’s it’s looking quite nice from underneath which I will show you soon So the last time I laid these floorboards um in the bedroom kitchen area over here there’s a lot of confusion of what in the world I was doing um and rightfully so because I was using the wrong terminology I keep calling these floorboards but in reality it’s laying the ceiling for the bottom

Floor and then essentially a subfloor for the top floor uh which is why I don’t mind cutting them up so small I tried and tried and tried to in this room behind the camera put the boards together properly in the 4 meter length that they come and it just was not

Possible because they’ve been warped and twisted so much I was spending hours on just a handful of boards and when I chop them up small they go in Easy the reason that’s fine is because they are supported on either end and the middle by a beam and in the end it’s just a

Subfloor that will hold the concrete that we have to pour um on the entire second store we have to pour a couple inches of concrete for structural purposes um so yeah the seams will never be seen and it is structurally sound enough to hold concrete [Applause] Well my to-do list is not finished yet but they are arriving with uh Building Supplies bringing up a load of sand as we’ll be pouring the cement Foundation Tomorrow [Applause] I want to W out of the valley where the river takes far away from home time upon in the fields around me well there’s nothing but the breeze Greater

With just 1 week to go before we kick off the process of building the extension onto our stone house in the foothills of the Italian alps, we have a huge list of these to accomplish, and I have to do it all alone, as Heather and the kids have left.

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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.