Welcome to the fifth episode in the series of Villa Aroldi - An Italian House Restoration.
In this episode we took a break from house restoration and moving apartments in the heat and instead headed for the mountains to answer some of the questions we have received.
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00:28Hi and welcome back to a short Q&A with just me, Anna, behind the camera today asking the
00:41questions. Okay so question number one. A lot of you have asked how much we paid for the house.
00:48Okay so we bought the house in 2020 during the pandemic and we got a super deal for it
00:57due to the fact that people weren't able to come visit the house to come view the house and the
01:05overall market wasn't really functioning so we paid a hundred thousand euros for it including
01:12the lawyer fees and brokerage fees but it was valued at a hundred and seventy five thousand
01:21euros in its current condition. Question number two. So people have been asking if you're an
01:31architect. No I'm not an architect. I'm... what am I? I've studied economics before then worked briefly in a
01:43bank and then I've been working for myself for the past 13-14 years in finance and so I control
01:55my own time and do whatever I want in brackets. So no I'm not an architect. And they've been asking where we live?
02:07Yeah so we live in Milan, Milano. Or we used to. We actually are in the process of moving right now even though we are at the mountains.
02:22We took a short break from the 47 degree heat to recuperate a bit. That was in the car though. It was 14 Milan but that's still very hot. Yeah exactly.
02:33So and what's the reason that you came to Milan? Yeah so I moved here for her. I moved... Anna has lived in Italy for 18 years. We met and I moved.
02:46Yes. So you came to Italy because of me. Very nice. I can do my work from here anyway in any case. So yeah. Why not live in Italy? Of course. Best food, nice weather. Yeah yeah yeah yeah.
03:00Different kind of landscapes as well. From the mountains, seaside and the countryside. Exactly.
03:07Okay so question... Next question.
03:12Okay so how long do you think that this project will take? Yeah. How long is the string?
03:19I mean it really depends. Hopefully the house will be slightly livable in six months. I mean we'll see. If it takes one year, two years. I don't know. We'll take it slowly. Just as long as we get to where we want to be with the house. So we're not in a super rush. We want to do it properly.
03:47Yeah. From the beginning we were in a rush because actually you can have some kind of help from the Italian government when you restore. Especially old houses. But Tony is just here by the camera.
03:59That's one dog.
04:03Yeah to get this eco bonus. Let's see if Tony is here again. He's here. Yeah the eco bonus.
04:13Go on the go easy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah so I'll take over. Yeah so the eco bonus system that the Italian government has. For us it might not be possible because it's been taking a bit too long to get the permits etc. So we'll see what happens with that. In any case we're going to restore the house anyway.
04:37So yeah that's it. Okay next question. How big is the house? Okay so the house itself is about 430 square meters which is about 4400 square feet.
04:55I think. The property itself is about 3200 square meters. The garden etc.
05:03Yeah. And do you have any skills from building houses or restoring houses from before?
05:13If I have any skills. A few. Yeah. So what have I done before in the building. I mean coming from finance. Yes I have. I've renovated a few apartments myself. I have owned property with rental apartments where I have refurbed them myself.
05:35So I quite enjoy getting hands on in projects even though I'm not educated in it. My father had a kind of a construction business growing up. So I've been I've been in this environment quite a lot. Yeah.
05:57So we're going to see these skills now. Yeah. During the renovation. And what about the dogs? We have many questions about two dogs.
06:07Yeah. So our dogs Jimmy and Tony. Jimmy is the chubby beagle dog. And that if you turn the camera this way a little bit. Yeah. Okay he's gone.
06:19He's gone. Anyway. The smaller beige dog is Tony. He's from Naples. The bigger dog is Jimmy from Sicily. They are both rescue dogs. Anna is very into rescuing dogs. She's helped many many many many many dogs from Italy to go to mostly Sweden, Italy. Yeah. All around.
06:44All our friends. All our friends. Yes. All our friends had a rescue dog almost. Yeah. And can you tell me about before Christmas? How many dogs did we have in our Milan apartment? Yeah. That was great. We had six dogs in the apartment for a short while. So yeah. That was chaos.
07:00But very nice. Now they have new families and it's just so wonderful that we can help. Okay. So next question.
07:11So many people ask where is the house located? Okay. So the house is located outside of Parma. In between Parma and Cremona.
07:24And how come you chose that area? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's a good question. Why did we choose this area? So the house.
07:35I started looking for houses in early 2020 because we wanted a weekend getaway place. So I started looking maximum two hours from Milano. One and a half hours. So I draw a circle and started looking for houses. And then this horrible ad came up with this house.
08:00I think I saw a picture which was the top left corner of the house. And that was it. And so I saw a bit of an arch. And I was like, that's a nice arch. We should look into this. And so we called the broker and went to have a viewing. And four weeks.
08:17Four weeks. Which was also difficult during that pandemic. Yeah. We needed to have a special permission to leave Milan. We were very lucky because it was in the same region that we lived in. So we could travel even though it was not.
08:32And this is just on the border between Cremona and Parma. So we were lucky it was still in Lombardia. Otherwise we couldn't have left the region at that time.
08:41No, no, no. Yeah. So we just went there, had a look. And I think it took four weeks and we bought the house. So it wasn't really...
08:48I would say that we fell in love with the house immediately. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course.
08:51We just saw this amazing old house that was falling apart and we were like, we're going to save this house. It's still beautiful.
08:57Yeah, yeah. So beautiful. Yes. So it wasn't really planned. I mean, it was kind of an idea to find a weekend place and we just went along and bought it.
09:07And now we were like, we're going to move there. And after a year or so, we were thinking, why shouldn't we just move there?
09:18So now we decided to actually move there permanently. And that wasn't at all the land from the beginning. Yeah, that's it.
09:26Yes. So what about the history of the house? How old is the house?
09:32Yeah. So the house itself is built in 1926. It was designed by a architect and painter called Tommaso Arolli, who built the house for a family called the Gartani family, who still has some relatives left in the region.
09:55Um, and the ceiling of, no, the fresco in the ceiling, for example, is his artwork.
10:02Yes. And what about that fresco? How are we going to restore it?
10:07Yeah. So we have a artist who works with restoring frescoes in old churches and houses in the area.
10:14So she is very, um, well informed or she's very good at this type of, uh, work as she's also local.
10:26So we have an artist who has been to the house, uh, who has some ideas of how to save them.
10:34Save them. She's the best. We're just, we're just going to wait until we started with the roof and then the outside, right?
10:41Yeah. So we're going to secure the house obviously before we're going to start anything in the inside.
10:45We're going to redo the roof, new windows, et cetera, to, to, uh, to make it, uh, to close the house.
10:51Yeah. So most of the parts in the house are original, but people were asking about the bathroom.
11:01It doesn't seem to me from the twenties. So what can you tell us about the bathroom?
11:07Okay. So the pink bathroom is not original. It's most likely from the mid to late fifties.
11:15We've heard, uh, it was, it used to be two rooms. They're two tiny rooms. Uh, so it weren't a bathroom there from the beginning.
11:23And unfortunately we are going to take down the pink tiles. We are going to have to, um, put the, uh,
11:29We can give it away to some viewer if you would like to use it somewhere else in the world.
11:34Yeah, we'll see what we'll do with it. Um, we're going to have to take down the tiles at least.
11:38Uh, we will try to save and salvage them, but we have to take them down due to the fact that we want to
11:44damp proof the wards. And what about bathrooms in the other rooms?
11:50Yes. Uh, we are going to do bathroom in the basement. Uh, we are going to do a bathroom in the pink bathroom.
12:00We are going to do a bathroom on the first floor, primary floor. Uh, and we might do a bathroom in the attic.
12:08We're not sure. It depends on rules and regulations. We'll see.
12:13Okay. Exciting.
12:15Okay. That was it for this time. Uh, we're going to end it there.
12:18We'll do another Q and A at some other point until next time. Ciao.
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