Day One

We received the permission to restore and slightly enlarge our old wine cellar.  Unfortunately no permission yet for the room above.  We have had to cancel the reservations we have for the room, and will start with that construction after the last guests have left.

This has been very difficult for us to accept.  But we cannot control the approval process, and the Commune here in Acqui is very backed up.  We have a good relationship with the guys there, and I know it is not personal. They are dealing with massive cutbacks which occured at the end of last year and things were complicated by our first architect having made mistakes in the paperwork five years ago which have come back to haunt us.  They have been nice about it at the Commune, and with the help of our current architect, we got all the huge fines waived which they could have easily hit us with. 

But it is still very upsetting, and has caused me way too many sleepless nights. However, we have to move on.

So today, we were able to start demolishing part of the wine cellar which is no longer structurally sound.  Here is Micha at 7 this morning, surveying the cellar one last time.  You can see we had a couple of small moisture issues.  HA.

Max is making sure everything goes to plan.

As they first started knocking down a tufo wall, a little dormouse who was hibernating fell down.  She is fine.  I picked her up on this shovel and she continued to sleep, stretch and yawn.  I dug her a hole in some tufo, packed it with some leaves and place her in there to finish up her winter sleep.

... and you can see, it was time to go to town.  Demo is always fun and scary at the same time.  You can see that they put up those iron support polls to make sure the entire structure does not come crashing down.  We are opening up this wall, which is where the old unrenovated structure meets the renovated part from last year.

It feels good to have day one under our belts.  Moving forward here, one day at a time....