Its really ours!!

We are headed to Italy to close on this lovely house.  We are so excited but have had to tell a bit of white lie to our daughter as she gets extremely upset when she misses school and we have to be in Italy on Friday to sign the papers, etc.  I think she will survive the damage but, if not, we know a few good therapists.

We left on Thursday after school and got into Alba late (again).  We were so exhausted we didn’t even have wine, just collapsed into bed.  Friday morning we were up early, nervous and desperately ready for some good Italian coffee.  You know it’s good when it has converted my husband.  Mr. I-don’t-like-hot-drinks or coffee now requires it in the morning.  But only good strong, Italian café – otherwise known as espresso.  I never thought I would see this happen, its like discovering there are real unicorns or honest politicians (but we’re not going to talk about that on this blog).

We head to the bank first to get the checks for the house, set up bank cards, and make everything official.  After that, we meet Lesley in the piazza near the hotel with the sellers (who are lovely) and head to the notary’s office.  Once we are all there (including the geometra), the contracts are read aloud in Italian.  We initial the documents and sign (our full names in legible, 10-year-old, cursive writing and must do it over if we don’t do it well enough) the pages the note the layout of the house and the composition of land parcels.  The property we purchased was made up of 5+ parcels of land so this makes sure we know what we bought.

After signing, we give them checks for the house.  Yikes!  My heart hurt at that point – we had worked hard for this money for a long time…was this what we wanted?  Did we do the right thing?  Too late now, so we just jumped!

The sellers still had to clear a few things out of the house on Saturday so we spent Friday afternoon getting gelato (of course) and finding the Italian equivalent of Target.  We went shopping!  We figured that we could get some of the things we knew we would need so that when we got back in May, we wouldn’t have to start from scratch.  We did drive out to the house and toast on the deck with a little prosecco. When we arrived there, I had my first panic attack.  The grass was SO overgrown!  How are we ever going to manage this?!?!?!  We have no tractor, we actually don’t have much.  just a house with a lot of land and a lot of stuff growing.  Luckily, Neil talked me off the ledge swearing that we would figure it out and all would be fine.  I chose to trust him and proceeded to drink most of the prosecco.