Construction Update #5

Salmon exterior color 

Good news, the new construction company is on fire (well not literally).  I had a quick visit to the site the first week of August, and it was a busy few days.  Work has progressed substantially even in the short time since the new crew joined the project.  I had a chance to see a nearly completed villa just delivered to the owner using this new company – and it had amazing quality and attention to finish details.

So what have they done?  The radiant heating system is now completed and the sub-floor cured.  Most of the electrical is complete, except for ceiling fixtures.  The exterior has been painted the final color, which you can see for yourself in the pictures.  The lower level is having a stone face applied; the detail is stunning.  This same stonework will be added to all the vertical surfaces of the walkway retaining walls.

We finalized the window and shutter order.  The owner of that supplier took us to see a home nearly finished with his windows.  The product is very high quality, like nothing I have seen in the U.S.  We met the owner of the house under construction; she is the skipper of Andrea Bocelli’s yacht.

I also met with the plumbers, kitchen designer, the carpenter for the bathroom cabinets, and ordered beds for the apartment.

What’s next?  Well, first everyone is on vacation for the two middle weeks of August.  In early September the sequence will be windows next, then finished floors, followed by the kitchen installation, plumbing and electrical.

I still need to choose interior doors and final paint color.

My readers might be interested to know about the structural engineering.  While the town dates back five or six hundred years, building methods are largely the same, but codes have changed.  In particular seismic standards.  While no major quakes have been recorded in Lerici, there is always the possibility.  To meet the new codes, the owners needed to drive 130 vertical pillars into the bed rock 33 feet and tie them into 2 horizontal beams 66 feet into the hillside.  If the area ever seriously shakes, this might be one of the few untouched structures in the town.

Exterior stone is being applied to the first level.