Restoring old buildings in a country like Italy is a challenge that requires calling on all of your fighting abilities.  You have to fight to get the design you want, fight the bureaucracy to be allowed to get the design you want, convince your muratore that you are not crazy, just foreign, and that yes, he should build the things you are paying him to build, and then pray the whole thing works out like you are hoping so you don’t have to flee the country after selling your place for a song.  I would like to be able to tell you it’s not that dramatic, but I’d be lying.  It can be all that and more.

Here, for example, is our barn.  The original structure was built in the late 1800′s. It was anchored in the back by a hill, and juts out towards the southwest.  The barn was used as a stall for animals, had a dirt floor and was loaded with a century’s worth of things that no one wanted.   We worked for over a year to empty it and use it as a staging spot for the construction going on on the main house.

In 2005, we decided to use it as my temporary pottery studio.  I say temporary because we were still not at all sure what kind of form the barn would eventually take.  We paid a thief’s sum to get high tension kiln electricity into the main stall.  We had new windows put in, the ceiling sandblasted and we splashed some paint on two of the walls and the floors.  We put in an old pot belly wood stove for heat in the winter  It made a great, rustic studio for awhile.

At the end of 2006, we came up with some tentative plans for the barn as a whole.  It should eventually become our residence, with the main farm house being 100% B&B.  (To this point, we were living in the main farmhouse on the ground floor with the top floor given over to two en-suite B&B rooms).  The first phase would be to install a gourmet kitchen/dining/living and pottery studio on the ground floor.  We started the planning permission process which took the better part of a year – and that was just for the first phase.

This was to be a small, contained, almost entirely interior restoration project.  Since we were doing the restoration between B&B seasons, we had a ten week construction schedule that was to start right after the Christmas holidays in January of 2008, weather permitting.

Oh, the best laid plans.

In order to get planning permission, we had to dig the entire barn out of the back hill and secure it from moisture.  When we dug the back of the building out, we found out that there was no foundation to the back of the building at all.  The excavation work immediately threatened the entire structure and we had a partial roof collapse.   The builders, who had ignored the architects warnings and proceeded too quickly, then needed to shore up the main structure to keep on working. Max’s expression says it all.

Eventually the structure was secured and the design/build work continued. These were scary times.  We were only about 6 weeks before season opening in the photo below.  You can see my beautiful (expensive) kiln sitting in no man’s land waiting for a new home.  Seeing this every morning almost made me lose my breakfast.

Miraculously we finished and were ready one whole day before the first guests drove up the road.  How does a person face a booked B&B season one day after coming off a project like this?  You put it on automatic and know there will be a huge price to pay later.   But in the mean time, you try to enjoy the monstrous feat you just pulled off.

My pottery studio was moved to the back of the barn (the part that collapsed).  While it’s not as romantic as the first makeshift studio was, it’s a great workspace flooded with light.

So that’s the nuts and bolts of number 4 of the six renovation projects that we’ve taken on so far.  I wish I could say it was the most challenging, but this was only a small test of our resilience.  We are still living in our small apartment in the main farmhouse.  It might take a long time before we actually finish the barn.  That’s fine.   For a long time I saw it as my nemesis – a huge, terribly frightening structure that threatened to suck up all of my energy, all of our money and leave us shattered from the experience.

But I see it differently now.

I see it as my personal test in resilience.  It’s just a building, a beautiful old building, that we are helping along for the next generation of care takers.  We’ve given it a sturdy foundation. It can stand for another century or more with no problems. We’ve  started to unwrap its secrets.  Gorgeous brick patterned ceilings.  Arches.  Perfectly proportioned spaces. A wonderful social setting.

The barn has peeled back all of my vulnerabilities and exposed them.

Fear of making mistakes.  Fear of things going terribly  wrong without having been able to stop them. Fear of going broke.  Fear of having made the blunder of a lifetime by risking everything for a pile of rocks that could cave in at a moment’s notice.  It’s been quite a journey so far.

Resilience is so tied into perspective.

When I see my barn from the distance, I feel for it, I want it to stand for a long time after I am gone.  Those kind of thoughts give me the strength to continue.  I love what we’ve done so far. Not that it’s perfect.  I love it because it’s been an organic project absolutely entrenched in imperfection. I embrace that now.

This is a picture of my fantasy wall – it was in my original studio (now the kitchen).  It was made up of clippings of all of my ideas for food/kitchen/pottery/b&b dreams that I had collected in the years before coming to Italy.  It, at time, was all I had to keep me going in my exhaustion.  I have saved a piece of it for myself to have for the rest of my days.