While we're just about to start our own Abruzzo villa rental building project, our friends Becky and Andrew from Cornwall in south-west England are well on their way to renovating part of what was once a church in Manoppello, a village on the northern fringe of the Maiella National Park in Abruzzo's Pescara province. Like so many rural buildings in Abruzzo, the basic structure is very old, with sections added-on - or taken-off - over time.

A tantalising glimpse of the property's origins as a church can be seen in the very early Christian symbols engraved into parts of the building's original stonework. 

Becky and Andrew are doing the lion's share of the restoration themselves. It's not work for the fragile or the faint-hearted. This is what will be the sitting room. The debris of ages had to be dug out of the floor and a thick layer of gravel laid by hand. This'll then be compacted to provide a solid  base for  the future floor covering.

Damp had eaten its way a metre or so up the walls, so the old plaster had to be taken off back to the stonework. A sad casualty of this was the room's hand-stencilled wall covering: a not especially old, but very pretty design applied directly onto the plaster. In this particular room, the walls are stone. Elsewhere, Becky and Andrew's restoration has revealed what have been identified as Roman bricks.

The sitting room has a traditional vaulted ceiling, a common Abruzzo feature, and that's repeated across the small entrance lobby in the kitchen. Originally, these vaulted ceilings will have been bare brick, perhaps whitewashed, but over the years, they've been patched and repaired and subsequently given a cosmetic plaster covering. The temptation is to strip off this plaster back to the old brick - but beware, because this can reveal a costly and complicated restoration task.

More straightforward is the work Becky and Andrew have done to bring back the kitchen's old brick floor to its former glories. Again, this is a traditional Abruzzo feature and it looks terrific, as do the external chestnut wood shutters, handmade by a local craftsman in Pescara province, leaning on the wall by the kitchen window.

Work's in progress on the upstairs bedroom and bathroom - but the new ceiling's finished. The beams and timber-tiled infill arrangement is faithful to what would have been the original.

The chestnut wood that's been used for the external shutters has also been used on the new timber window frames. They blend in perfectly with the old stone - and the old lintel !

And tucked away in a corner of the garden underneath the olive trees, a sure sign of a responsible and cost-conscious renovation - a huge stack of tiles awaiting re-use. Alongside them, similar piles of old stone and brick. Even when smashed and broken, these seemingly worthless fragments will be recycled as the hard-core bases needed for paths and patios.

Becky and Andrew have several more months of hard, physical work before their renovation project in Manoppello is finished. As I said earlier, renovations on this scale aren't for the fragile or the faint-hearted - especially in winter, with the wind whipping down from the Maeilla National Park -  but knowing it's been your efforts that have brought a property back to life make the rewards all the more special and satisfying.

And there's much more to the project than can be covered in this blog. In common with our own Abruzzo villa rental project, Becky and Andrew are committed to keeping their renovation as green and eco-friendly as possible. You can chart their progress here - and also check out the stunning original bead jewellery made by Becky when she's not up to her knees in mud and rubble; and Andrew's highly-evocative woodcuts of Cornish wildlife - with just a hint of a Abruzzo in the shape of a hoopoe bird in an olive tree !

(Click on pictures in text for larger images) 

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Property, About Abruzzo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.