Our House Renovations – Sitting and Dining Rooms

 

I have new readers since I last wrote about Our House renovations so I have briefly mentioned the earlier posts with links for those of you that may want a peep!

This is the fourth in a series of planned posts on our house renovations, the first one was  Our House Renovations – Kitchen  which I posted back in July last year. The second post about the renovations was  Our House Renovations - Guest Suite  in October last year.

The third post was to show our transformation of two adjoining rooms from a room that was used as a bedroom, although you had to walk through it to get to the next room, which was used as an upstairs sitting room. It is this pair of rooms that we have converted into a Master Bedroom Suite and that post appeared on the blog in November 2010,  Our House Renovations - Master Bedroom Suite

We completed on the purchase of this property back in February 2009 but as those of you who have been reading my Newsletters and Blog that long will know we have had a lot of work to do. You can read all about it in Archive Blogs of News From Italy but as I wrote then, when we first moved we had no internal staircase, no kitchen, ancient flooring, bathrooms to move, electric wiring and plumbing to be replaced. With a few limitations a blank canvas to work with once all the necessary permissions were in place and this controlled the pace that we were able to work at. The geometra that we worked with was an excellent guide where all the protocol was concerned but it was considered somewhat unusual that my husband and a friend were tackling this renovation themselves.

This fourth post is about converting the space that had not previously been used for living accommodation with no internal access to upstairs or to other parts of the property, there was plenty of major and dusty work to carry out.

The first photo is of the room that was to become our sitting room, a ground floor room that had no access to the rest of the house and had been used as a summer kitchen.

Work commences on knocking through the walls to make doorways.

The next task was to build the staircase as until that was completed we had to go outside to get upstairs!

 

Break through completed!

Beams going in to support the ceiling and to give more character.

Laying the new concrete floor.

Followed by tiling.

Cladding the staircase with stone, not just for looks but extra strength for earthquakes.

Final touches were made to the room when we installed a stufa at the beginning of December last year.

 

The final few photographs are of the finished project.

 

I have only included a selection of the renovation photos from this part of the project in the post, the full album entitled Renovation of Sitting and Dining Room  can be viewed at My Flickr Account if you are interested in seeing more photographs of the transformation.