Our first impression upon seeing the house in person in September 2023 was one of desolation. The house is what it is: cracked walls, shattered windows, stones scattered across the ground… You need a great deal of imagination to picture in this building the project we are supposed to achieve. I’m not even talking about home automation, quality flooring, or heating. All of that feels so distant that it is easy to become depressed and put the project aside for a while until better times come.
However, the negative feeling passes after a couple of hours, once the brain gets used to processing what it sees and starts to look a little beyond the current state. It cannot be denied that the house has a lot of potential and that, with determination, patience, effort and plenty of imagination, this dream can become a reality.
We were in a hurry, with little money and little experience. A very bad combination with which to begin. The urgency was imposed by the condition in which we bought the house and by what two years of ownership had done to it. Entire sections of the roof had collapsed, piling up remains of beams, slate and rubble on part of the structure and seriously threatening to overload the floor joists, which were probably not designed to bear such a load. Every rain, every frost, every hot day was taking its toll on the walls, cracking the whole structure. It was clear that if we did not take action, we would lose the main house — the one we had planned to leave until the end of the project.
But our haste led us to a good roofing specialist who is also branching out into general construction. Some friends from work had hired him and, aside from a few minor issues, they were very happy with him. So we asked him for the most economical quote possible to redo the roof and repair the worst parts of the walls. It was a difficult negotiation — nobody gives anything away for free — but we reached an agreement and signed a contract.
From that point on, we went from worrying about the ruin to worrying about the progress of the renovation. We had bureaucratic problems (building permits), cost overruns, and communication issues, which brings me to the third point… “little experience”, which has probably been the biggest obstacle throughout the entire process. I cannot stop feeling guilty for getting involved in a project of this scale without the necessary knowledge. Words like “footing”, “battens”, “thermochip”, “tongue and groove”… which at first sounded like Chinese, turn out to be decisive when it comes to understanding why some solutions cost more than others and what exactly you need within the budget you have.
There were discrepancies between the beam structure proposed by the architect and the one ultimately implemented by the builder — unnecessary discrepancies that are frustrating because you don’t understand why someone would ignore the instructions of the person who is going to certify the work. A long tug-of-war to bring a stone-and-wood corpse back to life, one that sometimes seems unwilling to be resurrected.
And yet, why do we keep going?
Well. I think the answer is in this photo.
Once we have renovated everything, we intend to keep this window with the same stone frame and the same wall, although with a clean face — replacing the wood and glass with modern materials. And the landscape will remain exactly the same. The same green, the same trees, the same mountains in the background, the same silence… the same peace.
What today is an endless source of headaches may, in a not-too-distant future, become an oasis to escape from the world. A lost corner where time stopped many years ago.