Capitolo Sette: Our Secluded Garden Retreat…At Last
Welcome to Chapter 7 of my posts on our DIY renovation of our tiny Italian villa! If you didn’t already catch them, click the links to read my previous posts in this series: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5 and Chapter 6. In this post, I’ll share the progress made to our villa’s outdoor areas.
We had and continue to have a lot to tackle outside the villa. We were working with a widely overgrown walled-garden which looked like the site of a horror movie when we first moved in, not to mention a front porch and patio with a crumbling brick and tile BBQ and overgrown trees. Yikes!
Our priority when moving in was to complete the indoor renos and make the space comfortable. We focused our time on the interior (see Chapters 1 through 6) before having the time and energy to implement our plans for the outdoor space. As a consequence, there is still a LOT to do outside.
First up on our list was adding waterproofing to our roof. Roof structure in Salento is typically flat as any rain fall quickly dries up in the hot, hot sun, so no need for the pointed roofs we have in North American which allow for easier water run-off. Even though we started the roof work in October, the days were still blazing hot, over 25C in direct sunlight. One job I never expected to be so fun and so filthy is pressure washing a rooftop with 20+ years of dirt caked on its surface. After several rounds of messy water pressure washing, we swept up the dry debris and painted two coats of a special paint designed for water protection. Fun!
Simultaneously, we removed SO MUCH debris from the back garden, trimmed the out-of-control tree where we found our kitten, rebuilt many areas where the stone was crumbling to fill in holes in the walls and create proper surfaces, plus cleaned out the pizza oven and added a new metal oven door. Then, we built a wooden roof (and made it waterproof) to cover the open shed. There is a strange pride that comes with building something from wood that didn’t exist previously.
Now that the garden was cleaned out and the villa’s roof protected from water, we were finally able to work on some aesthetics we had been planning for months and months. We white-washed the garden walls to lighten them up, spruced up an old bike we found in the shed and attached it to a wall, strung LED lights throughout the garden, painted the rusted doors and tiled our newly fortified surfaces. In our last weeks, we learned how to pour a cement slab, hired some friends to help us assemble a masonry BBQ, painted the BBQ and moved firewood from the front to back of the house. We assembled a pergola and hung string lights and vines to create a more tranquil space for dining. Our walled garden is now equipped with a BBQ grill, pizza oven and pergola-covered dining area.
Out front, we added metal stucco to refill gaps in the old gate. We repainted the gate and fence and water well, plus added bistro seating and planters to tidy up the space. Finally, though we are far from gardeners, we leveraged some help to cut back an out of control palm tree, replant trees in long planters and along the front patio. I can’t tell you how many dead plants, unruly tree branches, random broken planters and dirt we cleared from the back, front and side of the villa, but thankfully, it’s now a much tidier, serene space. Our last effort was to paint the house, resealing it with white paint to prevent future damage and brighten up the exterior (for this, we leveraged a professional given our painting woes in the past).
In the future, we want to take advantage of the small olive grove and make our own olive oil (read: have someone who knows what they are doing make olive oil from our harvested olives). We also want to fully insulate and render the villa helping with energy conversation and effectively “winterizing” the villa. Even though Italian winters are nowhere close to Canadian winters temperature-wise, the Puglian stone walls sans insulation require a lot of extra heating, both through our fireplaces and electric air conditioners. We’d also love to redo the front patio with new stones and fencing to create another tranquil space overlooking the olive trees. Finally, much less exciting, but we need to close off our back septic tank and install a newer model out front. It’s a huge project and, as downtown city dwellers, we never thought we’d own (or need to replace) a septic tank, but alas, it’s on our list.
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More to come on Under the Puglian Sun: Adventures in Renovating Our Italian Villa.
Stay tuned for Chapter 8: Lessons Learned and a Retrospective on Buying Property in Italy
View our villa on Airbnb at https://airbnb.ca/h/villettacanadese