Well, I’m finally getting on the ball and get the house tour posted. The sad thing is, you’ll notice the pictures were taken when we still had our Christmas decorations up, and I’m just now getting to writing the blog. We’ve been in our house now for about 3 and a half months and we love our little Italian abode. Only, it’s not little. It’s huge. And wonderful. So without further adieu allow me to present Casa Bigbie Italia.
We live on a quiet street in a town called Roveredo in Piano. Our neighbors are mostly older Italian couples, and they have been super nice to us since we moved in. While I was in the States in November, one neighbor came and raked our yard and pruned all of our trees and bushes for us.
Say, “Hi!” to Randy. He’s hoping I’m about to take him on a walk.
Here you can see how we drive down into our basement garage. It’s really nice having a useful garage here. The driveway gate is motorized which is a rarity in rental houses.
We have a really nice living room with beautiful windows and French doors. You can see the neighbor’s house across the street through the window. Randy gave up on the walk and settled for a nap on the couch. Our heat in the house is all radiator. See it under the window? We were a little scared by this at first, but it’s not too bad.
We LOVE our wood burning fireplace. We use it nightly,and it makes the room so cozy! Notice our floors. We have 3 different types of marble on the main floor. We have a light brown in the living room, a medium brown in the main hall, and grey in the kitchen. Oh, and that porch? Marble floors. Crazy
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Our kitchen is very big and modern, especially by Italian standards. We looked at a lot of houses where the kitchens were so small, the refrigerator had to go in another room. Here, ours is built into the cabinets. You can see the handles in the bottom right corner of the picture. We also love that we have enough room for a breakfast table. As soon as we moved in, we knew our old table was going to be way too big for the space, so we picked this guy up from Ikea. It has hidden leaves so we can expand it when we have guests.
Main Hall. One thing you’ve probably started to notice is the white walls. Yep, this baby’s all white. Except the bathroom.
Yes, here we’ve got floor to ceiling blue and white pirate ships with pink fixtures. It’s pretty amazing. If you follow John on facebook, you’ve probably already seen the video tour gave of this bathroom, complete with a bidet demonstration. Honestly, as bizarre as the pirate ships are, we love how unique this bathroom is!
Our bedroom is on the front of the house which is a little weird, but it’s a nice big bedroom. All the bedrooms on this floor have wood floors.
The 2nd and 3rd bedrooms are used as an office/storage room and closet respectfully. We hope to eventually have a new bed made for our room, and move our bed into here and turn it into a 2nd guest room (the other is in the basement which you’ll see in a minute). The 3rd “bedroom” we turned into our closet. The base provided us with 4 wardrobes, because Italian houses do not have built-in closets. This room is TINY. A twin size bed would be tight in here, so it was a no brainer to turn it into our closet.
Now we head down to basement where all the floors are brown tile. No marble down here! The grey door leads to the garage. The door to the left is our guest room, and the door to the right goes to the living area, laundry, and full bath. I told you this house was big!
We put our guest room in the basement because there is another full bath down here. We figured our guests (and we hope we have many!) would appreciate having their own space and not having to share with us.
This is the basement family room. We haven’t done much with this room because, well, we ran out of furniture. Everything in here our landlord built. He built the bar, the wine rack, the chairs, and the wine barrel table. They lived in this house for 30 years and raised their family here, before moving to Milan a few years ago. We love the charm in this room and can’t wait to make it more functional. I mean, did you see that fireplace?? This room is also another reason for putting the guest room down in the basement. At my grandparent’s house all the grandkids used to stay in the basement bedrooms. We had our own den to play in down there and “escape” from the adults. We figured guests might enjoy having a place to "escape” to if they needed a break. Through the closed door is the bathroom and laundry area.
The basement bath is pretty large and is also where we do laundry in our miniature washer and dryer.
And finally we have our garage. It’s just a one car garage, but we love it. Notice even the garage floor is tiled! One of the great things about our garage (which you can barely see in the photo) is the built-in work table and cabinets. LOVE having extra storage! Also, our breaker box is in here by the garage door. We usually have to flip it a few times a week (sometimes a few times a day). These houses can only support a small electrical load before it trips the breaker. For example you can not run the washer and the dryer at the same time. Or the oven and the microwave. Or the dishwasher and the dryer. It’s a pain, but it’s all part of the Italian life!
And finally, I leave you with a couple photos from our first (and so far only) snow day on December 8. So when are you coming to visit????
