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THE
MAIN FARMHOUSE - ON SALE -
In
1998, when I saw this place for the first time, I
felt immediately fascinated. It was all heaps of debris
and ruins covered by bushes. You could reach it only
thanks to a path of clay which became impassable in
rainy weather. In front of the house shrubs barred
the doorway and the inner was even more impracticable.
The “copse” before the house has been
removed and I am still warming up my home with that
firewood. We had the path paved with the debris of
a tumble-down shack and several trucks of gravel.
We installed telephone, were provided and connected
with water and natural gas with relatively low costs.
Natural gas is collected in a tank which was delivered
in bailment, (farmers can benefit from special allowances
on LPG). The reason of the double entry is in that,
originally, the main building was made up of two semidetached
houses. Awkward stairs led to the upper floor, where
the rooms were small, dark, arranged in a row one
after the other with no corridors or passages connecting
them. When we joined the two houses it was no joke
knocking down walls 50 cm thick, but in the end we
succeeded in connecting the two floors with a single
staircase and one by one, slowly but definitely, all
the actual rooms came into being. Now every independent
room is provided with a bathroom, in addition to one
more bathroom, a lavatory and the laundry on the ground
floor.
The most prominent feature of the old farmhouse were
its walls of stone on the ground floor and of bricks
upstairs.
I have engaged a real fight with the masons whom
they expected to throw away these wonders in favour
of a ìbeautifulî floor in concret. At
the end the house has been demolished, whereby possible
or replaced the controlled, repaired licences, the
big-bricks puttied by hand. Ground floor has been
created a foundation and here it has been necessary
to replace the floor that it rested on the clay in
order to render the room healthy. The electrostatic
tensions have been in any case eliminated outside
carrying cables of drainage in metal in the four directions
cardinals and the floor has been put down the French
in order to recall that one of the first floor that
is, at the same time, the ceiling of the flat land.
To create the wiring and of heating to the first floor
has been a laborious enterprise, because naturally
the pipages could not slide between a big bricks and
an other, thus is chosen to make to pass them along
the perimeter walls, with the usual great job of chisel
and hammer. For this reason every room has own bathes
that is accessible from the corridor because it would
have been impossible to safeguard the structure inserting
of bathes. It has been created an appropriate column,
of new realization, always in stone and fire-bricks,
that it accommodates part of the service of the two
plans. The heating to radiators in cast iron is to
GPL. Ideally the house can come entire heated to firewood.
At the ground floor there is a big fireplace in fire-bricks
with a beam in wood, from the cast iron heart in order
to guarantee the best irradiation; a wood-burning
stove-kitchen in cast iron guarantees the heating
to firewood in the flatÖ but who prefers the
gas finds, it.
In every room it is possible to install one wood-burning
stove because all the rooms are equipped of chimney.
The ancient flavor has been maintained and brought
back while still alive. The used materials are all
first quality, from the pavements to the floor tiles
of bath in mosaic, from the mirrors embedded to crystals
of box the shower. The doors are made in oak, same
for the windows, thermal to double glass. The shutter
are in steel of emergency painted to furnace, complete
of closing with the emergency key.
The traditional materials (stone, wood and fire-bricks)
and the heating to firewood renders the stay particularly
comfortable. To sleep in a house lacking in electrostatic
tensions, encircled from the callback of or the song
of the crickets in summer, is a wonderful experience
that gives resting sleeps, appreciated above all from
who it comes from houses in reinforced concrete dipped
in the smog and the noise of the traffic.
Often the night the animals of the forest meet themselves:
hare, curls, rates; by day the squirrels run about
on the trees while the hare they are visible in the
forest only when it snows, like the birds, because
they cannot be more camouflaged on the land; they
make company also robin and many other kind of birds
and the friendly hawks over the property.
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