...I have been taking a break from, well, me for a while.  We are right in the midst of the high, HOT season around here and I can't seem to get up enough strength to do anything when I get home from work! I was, however, inspired to snap a few photos of my city the last few days. So take a look here for the latest addition to the"Bella Firenze"  album.  I will try to update again soon, lets hope, I can keep that promise! 

I think these are my two favorite shots.

Although I am thinking about heading back over and shooting this one again when the sun is a bit lower. It will get rid of the flare and give the lion a better glow I think.

Thanks Alycia!!

Ok, so maybe it was a bit optimistic for me to think that we would actually be living here by this weekend, but we are getting close!!!! We have a toilet, yay!  We actually ended up buying it elsewhere because domani (tomorrow) never seemed to arrive.  

We also got the floors laid in the living room/office space but we still need to finish the baseboards. (they were all out at Ikea today)  We started to place some of the furniture, but still have a ways to go and will be waiting for our new couch for about a month.  The room, if you can really call it that, is incredibly narrow so we will have to be super creative in figuring out how to best utilize the space. But I guess that’s city living for you! 

Today we picked up our kitchen and began assembling it.  This is what it looks like so far.  The legs still need to be added, as well as the counter tops, doors and appliances!  The wall behind the kitchen will have a white tile backsplash with black grout and the counter tops will be done in black with black handles on the cabinets. I also found some really great fabric to reupholster the kitchen chairs with. So this is where we are at the moment.  We are both exhausted and sooooooooo ready for this to be finished!  We will move in knowing that there will be many little details to finish up and hopefully we can keep ourselves motivated to get it all done.  

 I will be back in the next day or so, hopefully with a near complete home to show you! For now hope everyone has a good week! Ciao ciao!

Hello again!  Ok so I know its been forever, over a month since I’ve updated the progress on Project Renovation, and there are no excuses, other than, my poor little PowerBookG4 seems to on her last legs these days! Poor thing is getting old and tired! But somehow she keeps on trucking……..but just the basics.  I’m having trouble uploading photos and watching videos of any kind is out of the question. So this is my excuse for not keeping you all up to date!  (BTW if there are any Mac gurus out there reading this, any suggestions would be helpful. I know, I need a new computer, but it seems that the MacBook fairy is busy right now!) So at the moment I am borrowing Luigi's computer when I am able to pry it out of his lap!

Ok so here are the new photos!  This is what the kitchen currently looks like…..

Yes there is still a little of the blue tile left, I'm hoping I can paint over it to avoid having to rip it out, or maybe another creative way to cover it up.....

We still have some work to do on the doors and we will be cleaning and sealing the floors as well.

And these are a couple of inspiration kitchens that I am looking at!

And the bathroom has undergone quite a transformation, even though its not completely finished, its still pretty dramatic!  We are still waiting for our new toilet bowl……..

It was supposed to be here last Thursday but still hasn’t arrived. Somehow I’m not surprised….Then they told us it would be there today after 4……..We’re still waiting.  Oh the joys of living in Italy!

Today I put the first coat of paint on the walls in the bathroom and ended up needing more paint, so I will be finishing that tomorrow.  It’s a nice dark plum with white tiles and white fixtures, I hope it will look fantastic! 

The tile has since been grouted and looks even better now, I'll show some more photos as soon as I get the painting done.

And here is my inspiration bathroom!

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Except our walls are even darker!!

I hope it won't be as long until the next update!  Hopefully we will be moving in this coming weekend, assuming we have a toilet bowl of course! 

Thanks for having a look!  If you know of any great sites for interior design or inspiration, I would love to hear from you.

For now Ciao Ciao and Happy Monday! 

As things are starting to pick up with work for both of us, our time to work on the new place is getting more and more limited!!!  Ahhhh! But we're getting there.  Here's where we are so far.......

When we started scraping what we thought were loose, dry layer of paint off the wall we realized that it was much more than we expected.....basically the entire thing, so I just kept scraping to get as much off as possible and this is the result! 

This photos shows the, not decades, but I would venture to say the centuries of paint on the walls.  I'm thinking there are between 6 and 8 layers here! All really dry and crumbly.

So after scraping and scraping for days, we finally added fresh plaster to the walls.

And now we have nice, new, clean walls that are ready for paint. But we are going to wait to paint the kitchen until the bathroom is done since it is right off the kitchen and there will be a whole lot more dust and dirt around.

So after we prepared the kitchen we began (well really Luigi began) tearing up the bathroom.  Check this out! We've a lot of work to do here!

The shower door came out and some of the old broken tiles as well.  I know it seems pretty hard to imagine that this will ever be livable, but we have Mastro Lui on our side!

We'll be replacing all of the fixtures and I can't wait to get rid of this awful, horrible, terrible, peachy, salmon, or whatever color this is, paint on the walls.  We're going to add more white tile to the walls and then paint the rest a nice deep plum or eggplant color with all white fixtures for a simple clean style. 

but for now we are off to ever faithful Ikea to look at Kitchens and bathrooms! Wish us luck on a Saturday morning!

A presto!