HOW WE RENOVATED AN ABANDONED HOUSE IN POSITANO | EP 201

We are Nikki and Carlo and our family live in Positano, Italy, nearly 500 steps from the road but surrounded by fruit and olive trees and with a fabulous view. Our garden overlooks the sea and we grow our own food. We show you what life is really like on the Amalfi Coast. So please subscribe and welcome to the Positano Diaries. Hello. Hey everywhere. We thought we would do something different today. We thought we would tell you how we came to live in this beautiful property in Positano which is known to be extremely expensive. Did we buy it? Are we extremely rich? Do we rent? Is it his? Is it mine? How did we get to live here? We're going to tell you all about it. So first of all, who does this property belong to? Because he likes to stay in the garden and grow things. You don't see him here anymore because he's too old now and it's been years since he's been here. As soon as I bought the property, I thought about getting a house and I asked him, I asked Dad, do you want to build the house for me? And my dad said, no, no. And then I insisted very hard. Very. Yeah, I'm very insistent. Yes, it's true. And then after a lot of discussion, bit by bit, brick by brick, the house becoming a reality. So how did the house get here? Did you get an architect or were there professional house builders? No, no, just us, our family. So it's basically a homemade house. I know I'm asking all these questions as if I don't know. Obviously, I know all the answers, but I'm doing this for you guys. So you get to, I'm asking the questions for you. I do know all of this. How long did it take? It must have been hard work bringing everything. Everyone's going to ask, how did you get everything down the steps? In majority, my and my brother's shoulders. And then when, I remember very well one time, a lot of cement. And then I asked for a donkey. And this guy said, tomorrow I'm coming, but tomorrow never coming. And then a lot of cement go down by myself and my brother Luca, majority. And yes, all day carrying sacks of cement. And how much is each sack? At that time, 50 kilos. And how many could you carry in one go? In the start, one at a time and then two at a time. Okay. So you suddenly got stronger. Yeah. And then at the finish, my brother Luca, three sack. 150 kilos. Yeah. And me, I try for just one time and then when I arrive here, I'm very destroyed. So the house is very small. It's basically the one big room, which is the kitchen and living area. And then there's one bedroom and there's a bathroom on each side. So why did it become, why was it so small? Why just one bedroom? I don't know, because my dad at that time wanted to lose as little space as possible. Okay. And then it's my dad. Yeah. So his dad was sort of in control. So we only got one bedroom from it, but we sold that later on. And then the house was left abandoned for around about 13, 14 years. When Carlo and I got together, we rented down in the town centre in a condominium. And it was a small apartment, two bedrooms. We had no balcony. We had no outdoor space at all. We didn't really have a very good view either. And it was a long 13 years there. And eventually we did a calculation and realised how much money we had spent on renting and we had nothing to show for it. And we started thinking about moving. And I started thinking about here. And I said, let's go and try and live up at your old house. It's empty. Nobody wants it. We could move in there. And he said, no. Yes, because I thinking it's too hard for Nikki. Doesn't like. But I'm wrong. He thought I wouldn't like the steps. He thought I would be stuck here or not want to go out at all. And it didn't really happen like that. I think when we first came up here to have a look around and see what it would be like, we saw so much potential in this property. And we realised that the thousand euro a month that we were spending on rent, we could use to improve this no end and we could do whatever we wanted with it. January 2013, we started renovating. Now, we weren't doing videos back then, but we did take a lot of photos. First thing we had to do was sort out the central heating because inside the house, it was three degrees Celsius. And once we had that sorted out, we decided we needed another place for people to sleep because one bedroom for the three of us was not going to cut it. We needed another bedroom. So we decided to put in the sleeping platforms. We put one above the living room for Sky. And the funny thing is Sky was only about 10. Sky was 10 years old. So once we put the steel beams in and then we put the flooring down on top of it, we ordered some carpet, but we had to wait a few weeks for the carpet to arrive. So I said in the meantime, Sky could draw on the floor up there. And she designed the whole bedroom. And I have a photo of that. She designed the bed with herself sleeping in it, her head on the pillow. The pillow next to her had a cat on it, a pair of slippers down below. There was even a bedside table with a phone charging. We decided to build another sleeping platform in the main bedroom to get the bed up from the floor and free up floor space. So now we've got like officially two living room areas, which is great if he's watching the Grand Prix very, very loudly. I can go into the other room and I've got a sofa there and I can read or talk to my dad on the phone. And we've got two separate living spaces, which is really handy. And the other thing we had to do was lots and lots of painting. The house was pink, salmon pink. Itself on the outside, everything was salmon pink. And inside everything was very dark brown. No, the walls were white. Well, with scribbles and handprints. Tommaso was quite liberal with his artwork when he was younger. But yeah, everything needed a good paint. It was just looking a little bit. Oh, what was it you said yesterday? Granny fashion. Yeah, it was a little bit old fashioned. I suppose 80s style, but very, very brown. It is very cottage style. Old cottage. Old cottage style. Yeah. But it just needed updating. And I decided to whitewash absolutely everything I could get my hands on. So the kitchen cupboards, the doors, the walls, the ceiling, all the porch area behind us. So everything got whitewashed. He was slightly horrified at the beginning because he just imagined this whole sterile white house that we're going to live in. But once we brought all of our stuff in, cushions and rugs and blankets and books and candles and stuff, it all brightened it up again. That's true. And we also spent some money putting down the wooden flooring, the parquet flooring, which really warmed up because underneath that, there was pink and brown tiles, which were icy, icy cold. In fact, the litter bathroom is the only place left where the original tiles are still there. And the floor is so cold in there. I mean, it's great for the dogs in the summer. They love lying there. But in the winter, you can't put your feet down in there. It's very cold. So eventually, he shortened the greenhouse so that we could see out of the windows and we could have the sea view. There was still this big plastic greenhouse slap bang in the middle of the front garden. And after another year or so, we convinced him to completely take it down and move it up behind the house. So now that's why we have the big greenhouse at the back of the house in the back garden. Yeah, we can grow much more tomatoes now. And then the other thing was, I'll never forget this. I asked him, there was one year where he didn't plant anything just here behind us. So I went up to him and I said, well, seeing as you didn't plant anything, can I have that bit? And he said, well, what do you want to do with it? And I said, I'm going to plant some grass and some flower beds, some roses, some flowers. And he looked at me and he went, you can't eat grass. And that actually is a really good definition of how people look at land in this part of Italy is that land is a really useful thing to grow produce on so that you always have something to eat. And what's the point in having a piece of land with flowers and grass? Because if times get hard, you can't eat those flowers and grass. So he was a little bit horrified with me. But grudgingly, grudgingly gave me a little bit of garden. And for years and years, we tried to plant grass there and it never grew. We never managed to get any grass there. And eventually we decided, well, if you've been watching for a couple of years, you would have seen that at the very beginning of lockdown in March, 2020, we put the crazy paving down and put the decondra seeds down and created that little area there. And the swimming pool. Yeah. No, I don't think we would have done that if he was still here. Yeah, we actually had to dig up the potatoes to put the pool in, which was... Yeah, yeah, yeah. We still plant potatoes, but we didn't have any that year. So, slowly, slowly, over the last nine years, we have added more to the garden. We've bought plants from various markets and garden centres and plant shops. And we've brought them down here and just very, very slowly, we've made it into what you see today. It did not happen overnight. There's a lot of mistakes we've made, like trying to plant the grass, which never grew, and then trying to do something else, which never happened, or putting plants in the wrong area and then not growing. Like, for instance, lavender does not work here. We've tried it so many times and the plants grow, but we get no lavender flowers, which is a real shame. Without building something really invasive, like concrete or something else, you can do it with wood. For example, this pergolata at the entrance, when we came, it was half-destroyed because the wood was old. We've redone it, totally ecological and totally feasible without any kind of permits, and it has completely changed the look. There are so many little things you can do, like buying really nice vases, putting them in a place where, even if there's soil, it makes the area even more beautiful because you've put a nice vase. Yeah, some of our blue vases are just spray-painted with blue paint. It's just a cheap way of doing it. Yes, okay, we can say something like this, for example. This was a gift. Yeah. It's beautiful. You can put a light in here, turn it on in the evening, and it'll be fantastic. Yeah, but even just leaving a basket full of whatever we've gathered from the garden, leaving it on the table or somewhere, it always looks pretty. And yeah, I mean, we haven't spent huge, huge amounts of money on the garden. I suppose if you added it up over the whole nine years that we've been here, yes, it's quite a bit, but it's not that much. And we just sort of buy a few plants in the spring. Like, for instance, last year we bought one papyrus plant, and then this winter we cut it into four because it got so big. And now we've got four papyrus plants and we could easily divide them again. We could have a whole papyrus plantation here if we wanted. Anyway, back to the house. So we have been living here. Hello, beautiful. So affectionate. We have been living here now for nine years and we got Holly about two weeks before we moved in. Holly just appeared and became part of our family as well. So she's been here for nine years as well. And we are very, we feel very lucky. Some people in town think we're absolutely mad and won't even think to come and visit us because they're not going to do all the steps. But we think that we are really lucky that we have this property because for Positano to have a property with so much land and so much space is really special because a lot of people think of the pyramid, the classic pyramid of Positano. There's not much outdoor space for the houses there. They're all piled on top of each other. And personally, that's sort of the area that we lived in before and it was very claustrophobic for me. So this is like, ah, I can breathe here. I love it. So I'm really happy here. Yeah, houses in Positano are very expensive. The whole area is a very expensive area. To put it into perspe... To put it into... Last try. To put it into perspective, when we were moving back up here and we left the rented apartment, our landlady offered us a special price on this two bedroom apartment down in the town centre. No parking, no balcony, no view. Everything needed to be redone. The electrics needed to be redone and the plumbing needed to be redone and the whole thing needed to be redone. 800,000 euro. This is nine years ago. So prices have gone up since then. So I dread to think how much that's worth now. But that just gives you a very, very general idea of how much small properties are worth in this area. So there's no way we can afford to buy here. We're very, very lucky that Carlo's father lets us live here because nobody else wants to. I'm very lucky people. Yes, okay. My wife. Okay, so that's the story of how we got to live in this beautiful house. Will we live here forever? I don't think so. It's difficult from 20 years or just from 10 years. I don't know. Yeah, we're always on the hunt. Well, we're not on the hunt, but we're always thinking about moving somewhere else where there's much less steps and the possibility of parking outside the front door. Yeah, I want that. Yeah, but I don't think I could give up the point of having a house with a garden around it and being quite private. I don't think I could live in a town again. France? France. Another language. Yeah, yeah, just because it's another language. Yeah, yeah. So we're always on the lookout for other ideas and stuff. I know house hunting is fun. Everybody loves house hunting. So yeah, we're always thinking about it, but we're not doing anything concrete. We're here for now and that's what's important. So I hope you've enjoyed this little video with this little story about how we came to live here. All the photos we've shown you of what it used to be like and what it looks like now. So thank you very much for watching. Ciao. Bye.