We have returned to italy after a few months to the most exciting part of the build from our perspective, the building of the trullo cones by Trullidream construzione.
The house is really taking shape away and the “rustic” build will be completed in the coming months. This is the build of the walls and roofs, the framework for the home. The completion part of the build is the next phase when the doors, windows and internals are all completed.
The roof for the main part of the building has been in place for some time and our intention is to put a lot of solar power up there. This will help with the bills, to say the least, since we expect the power consumption of the house to be quite high. In the picture the curved areas of the roof would be nearly all solar panels. This would be hidden from anyone staying at the house. Our plan would also to be to have a reasonably sized generator hidden around the side which would automatically kick in if there was a power issue. The flat parts of the roof could have been a roof terrace but we understand that the health and safety issues would be too great so the roof will be off limits unfortunately. One thing you can see from the view is that the building is about the same height as the olive trees and when up the all you can see is trees for a distance around the house. 
Looking over the trullo area of the build is not quite complete and Massimo at Trullidream Construzione has said that the outside of the cones will be dressed by the end of October. Already you can see what these will look like and they will be an amazing sight. As you can see the structure for all six cones is now in place and the outside will have the same uniform structure. Maria is now at the stage of thinking about the decoration at the top of each of the cones, there are a number of standard shapes traditionally used in the area and Maria is currently considering whether to have a cross on one of the central cones surrounded by the balls on the others. Again this is something that needs to be agreed with the team doing the build and we are keen to keep the traditional feel of the trullo so will take advice. Finally, and considering the recent earthquake in central Italy, the stone structure of the trullos has been reinforced with concrete anti-earthquake pillars. Let’s hope we never need to see how well they work but it is reassuring that the possibility of earthquakes has been factored into the design to make the house safe.
The major progress over the last few months has been around the trullos. 
It wasn’t that long ago that all we could see was steel reinforced concrete pillars and we couldn’t wait to see the stone work going up. Part of this was the concern of whether the space in the trullos would be usable for a master bedroom suite. A lot of trullos are very small but we wanted this to be unique selling point for the house, with the master suite combining five star luxury with a traditional feel. The outside being all stone will look amazing and the plan is to have a small “English” garden outside of the front of the trullo, partly as a nod to our background but also as a tranquil place combining with the Italian architecture. So we are more than happy with how the outside is taking shape but their was still the niggling concern about the size of the rooms and would it work. Pino, our architect, is a very talented man and so we didn’t have anything to worry 
about.
As you come into the trullo, the first cone to the side is a dressing room which is a good size, especially considering that this is being used for holidays rather than a permanent residence which would have a lot more clothes. The picture shows the corridor to the trullo and this is wider than it looks on the picture. The picture does show the flow into the first set of cones, the bedroom cones and finally the bathroom cones. One thing that cones give is height and this increases the feeling of space in the building. To be fair this is true throughout the build with three kinds of traditional ceiling designs on show: stellar, curved and trullo cone. All of these give height to the room.
Returning to the trullo, we couldn’t be happier with how it is going, they are everything that we imagined although building a trullo from scratch is a skilled task, and hence more expensive, we have to say it is worth every penny. As we start to move forward with the internals of the house we will give more details on the bedrooms, kitchen, lounge and games room as well as the basement which should have a gym and storage.
However, that is all for later blogs. The key to a Mediterranean house is of course the outside living space, since this is where you spend most of your time. The pool and sun terrace are very important but there are also covered areas outside which provide comfortable areas. The pool was designed to provide swimming, a play area as well as an area for chilling. It is a standard depth all round which means that we could not have a dive board but does mean that games can be played in the pool without anyone having the disadvantage of the deep end 🙂 we also had the steps extended all the way round so that they became a terrace of sitting which also provides a perfect relaxed area to sit and chat whilst half in the pool. Finally there is a jacuzzi area in the pool. A large area surrounds the pool which provides space for sun worshipping but also has areas of shade, particularly later in the day when shade may be a requirement.
This shot is taken late in the day when the sun has gone behind the trullo. The jacuzzi can be seen to the right and the main sunbathing area has already been set up 🙂
First of all, he is a he! You can’t weigh 4.25 tonnes and be built like a brick….. and be a girl! So he is a big boy that looks after us.
chorus of Cliff Richard summer holiday (well we are taking our ‘bus’ to the continent) and we are on our way…..to the first roundabout where we discover that Maria has left her wedding, engagement and eternity rings on the side! About turn, back to Lisa’s, retrieve rings, check that nothing else has been left and we are ready to go again. Another chorus of Summer Holiday (Lisa still didn’t join in), and we are happily motoring down the A130 and A13 on the start of the 1,500 miles. We are making good progress with 20 miles in 20 minutes before we arrive at a bad queue of traffic. We can tell it is bad because people are out of their cars and discussing how long they have been waiting. We had heard about a bad accident on the bridge the night before but surely this couldn’t still be the same problem. We are stuck for two hours in this queue and find it is all because of the problems at the interchange of the A13 and M25 which is cut down to one lane instead of three. The ironic thing is if we had gone from Ipswich we would have avoided the problem so our attempt to save time backfired. Still in a journey that is likely to take 24 hours of driving, what’s a couple of hours of delay!
It is in amongst the mountains so the views are stunning. Again there are two vans in there, it looks like an orchard with lots of small trees, not easy for a large motorhome to negotiate. One of the motorhomes is being stored but the other has a dog outside which isn’t on a lead, that will scupper our plans. Maria’s not having that and marches over but I suspect she was very polite and nice when she got there because the other motorhomers said no problem we will keep the dog in and let your cats have free roaming across the site! Of course they did this in French which Maria doesn’t really speak but the effect was the same. We also discover that isolated doesn’t quite capture the essence of the the hill climb course for the village youngsters as they drive up and down the road at high revs for some time. This is of course a road that Clyde in particular would like to cross to see what is on the other side. Let’s just say that Lisa made it clear to him that he should stay near us! However he now has the devil in him and decides to randomly climb ten foot up each of the trees around the motorhome. A cat that swims and climbs trees, nutter! Bonnie of course is a lady, and everyone knows that ladies would never do such a thing….but it is very tempting and maybe just a stretch up the tree would be OK….that’s probably enough, time for a sleep.
It is our first visit into this mountain range, we understand you can ski there during the winter so that will be on the list at some stage. We are driving up into the mountains and the satnav tells us to take a right up a very steep hill to get to the site. I don’t notice a draining dip at the bottom of the hill and as the rear wheels go into this there is a nasty scrape as the fibreglass shell at the rear makes contact with the road. Now one thing our yachtmaster taught us is that making contact with the ground is not a good thing, at least not in our boat (or motorhome). Maria gets out to investigate. You’d better take a look! Heart in mouth I step down from the cab ( why didn’t I look at the dip, why didn’t I just bail and not go for the hill, how bad is this going to be….). I am relieved to find that the rear bumper is not hanging off and in fact it just looks MH Mariadz is just sitting nonchalantly on her rear corner. However, as I found when I had the lotus, roads do a lot of damage to fibre glass so we need to think about how we get out of this. In the end we deployed our levelling ramps so that we could go backwards onto these lifting the rear and mitigating the dip of the storm drain. We get out of it and Maria reports that it looks like we haven’t had too much damage, we can check that out later. We are all a little shook up but continue because the site looks good and clearly it must be accessible for motorhomes. As we are trying to find our way I take a diversion onto a mountain pass which is very thin with a rock face on one side and a wall protecting you from a severe drop, think end of the Italian job. I so much don’t want to be here but there is no way I can turn around and a lot of traffic going both ways. I am going through tunnels in the mountains and am fortunate that i am meeting other vehicles at the right places or I would be trying to reverse with a queue of traffic down meanering thin roads with motorhome-wrecking objects on both sides. We get to a passing spot and I let five cars go by. We take a look and decide that this is our opportunity to do a three (ish) point turn. Maria and Lisa get out and stop the traffic while I attempt to do the turn without damaging anything under the watchful eye of the mountain goats. Actually the manoeuvre goes without a hitch and we are now returning down the really small roads with cars coming up but hey we’ve done this before. At this stage I discover that I had nothing to worry about previously. Far from it being difficult to bring a motorhome up the road it is actually quite easy to bring a coach up there too. Now we are in trouble. I get around some very thin stuff before the oncoming coach is upon us and I have found a patch of road a little wider. I reverse so as to get as close as I can to the wall but the coach driver is not at all worried, he has been here before and throws it around us with barely a pause and we continue. Back through the thin tunnel with not enough room to pass, nothing coming the other way, phew. That’s it, we are bailing on this stop and need to find somewhere else to go.
But it is completely empty and there is lots of space for the cats. I return to the van and come up with a way to get into the tight entrance. We get down there and it is perfect. The girls are worried that they are going to get killed in their beds but we have an alarm on the van so at least we will wake up for it! Needless to say there are no problems overnight and the cats get some quality time outside. Even better, on inspection the rear quarter is undamaged, we stopped immediately we heard the noise and fortunately before anything disasterous happened – result.
Mariadz 