A New Chapter Begins

Settling In
With Michelle's good decorating eye, we arranged furniture this week, purchased many of the accessories for the villa this week, and reorganized cupboards and closets for more convenience. We are far from done but feel like a lot has been accomplished:

Towel racks for all the bathrooms
Dishes and racks for the kitchen
Several light fixtures for the bare bulbs
TV stand
Coat rack
Computer printer
File cabinet for office
Clothes hampers, ironing board
Bathrugs

Johnnie has shoveled more snow off every day and cleared a double wide parking spot, and now the access to the side gate and driveway as well. It is slowly melting and we have had very little new snow.

De-bugging
We are still having intermittent electrical problems where the lights all dim when the heaters kick on, and then on occasion, the main breaker trips and turns off everything in the house. This happened on Wed. night when the breaker kept tripping and we finally just went to bed because the electricity wouldn't stay on. Our DSP had the expert electricians out the next day to try and figure out what is going on, but they were unsuccessful. They say the 25 AMP switch is adequate, and when they turned on all the appliances, heaters and lights, the breaker was fine. It is a mystery and we are under instruction to phone day or night when it happens again and to note what is plugged into what outlets at the time it occurs.

The plumbers were out twice again this week trying to fix the hot water in the shower. It is sometimes hot, sometimes lukewarm, and sometimes is cold. Supposedly the hot water system is separate from the water radiators so should not be affected by the time of day we shower. To date I have not had one hot shower in 2 weeks (been finally finding a use for those bidets!), however I have had two lukewarm showers and one lukewarm bath. They worked on the system all day yesterday, ripped out the shower wall and replaced the mixer behind the tile so hopefully that fixes it.

There are still other things that remain to be installed or fixed but at this point, we are putting things into priority and tackling them one at a time!

US Electrical appliances
An important learning if you move to a place with different electrical current: don't bother to bring your small appliances from home. It is not worth the time or trouble. We have some things like table lights, iron, clock radios, room fresher, etc. that we brought from home and they will all go back in the box. It is not worth buying the power converters -- even the low watt ones are $20+ each -- to use on each one when you can replace the appliance for close to that amount of money. The only things that are worth bringing and buying the power converters are those things that are big items like my electronic sewing machine (which you can't even buy in Italy) and perhaps some power tools. That would be different for each person what is important to them but for us, there is very little that is not replaceable.

What would I do differently
So we had a lot of advise from different people and a lot of the advise depends on what kind of living space you end up having in Italy. Well, we didn't know where we would live when the movers came so we were guessing on what would be needed. As it turned out, we have a villa larger than our home in Everett and it is very empty right now because we only shipped bare minimum furniture.


We also had advice that said, don't ship a lot of knick knacks and paintings, etc. because you will buy that while you are in Italy. Well, that may be true, but it takes time to acquire those things and in the meantime, your house feels stark and like a hotel. I wish I would have brought more of my own paintings, photos, and decorative pieces so it feels more like home.


Bring more:
Decorative items - our house feels bare and the walls are empty
Linens - bedding, towels (Italian linens are not available in King size and in general, you will pay a lot more for high quality thread count sheets, and high quality soft towels)
All season clothes - who said it doesn't snow in Southern Italy?

Leave behind:
Table lamps
Small appliances (basically, anything that is not 220/240 volt)
Books I am not going to read in the next year