March 18, 2011

Before and After: Basement with Balcony

Our house has a basement, that we call our seminterrato, which means "half under earth" or souterrain. Our seminterrato, however, is very special: On one part it is really underground, carved into the rock, on the other side it has fantastic 180 degree see view 54 meter above sea level! And it has access to a small garden with a lemon tree, a fig tree, a bougainvilleas and some cacti. It did not have a balcony though. But this has changed. Angelo is always good for surprises. Now we have a balcony in our basement. It is a balcony for two people with shoe size 40 or so.... but look the transformation from before with no balcony and rusty wrought iron balustrade to after with small balkony and restored balustrade in blue (!) :

BEFORE in August 2006

in between in 2009
(...) 


iron rail painted blue

balcony railing moved further out to obtain a small balcony above the new haven

Angelo demonstrating the use of the new balcony

I am saving this post to a new label "guest residence". Our basement is beautiful, it is my favorite part of the house (actually, I cannot decide which floor I like best, they are all amazing). But since the house is too big for us alone it makes sense to rent our part of it. The only part that can perfectly be separated from the rest of the house is the seminterrato. It has its own entrance. It will have two bedrooms, a bathroom with sea view, a pantry kitchen with balcony and a garden. I already envy my guest... ha ha! Of course we also have one guestroom upstairs, but this can only be used for family and friends while the guest apartment can be rented out to vacationer spending some time in Pizzo.

At the moment we are working on the insulation of the floor and walls and will post new pictures soon. 
Meanwhile you can find more about the progress of the guest residence or seminterrato here.

2 comments:

  1. Suzie that looks and sounds wonderful! I am curious - how much do you think you will charge?

    Cheryl

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  2. Hi Cheryl, thanks for asking - you are the first!
    I am thinking of that already. Not easy. No straight answer.
    Because the location is not Capri or Amalfi, we cannot ask that much. And although it is better than a hotel suite, we do not offer the service. We think of renting it for a minimum amount of days. But how many days one would like to spend in Pizzo? I will do some market research this summer, compare our residence with B&B's of higher standard and new hotels in the area.

    PS: I first read "change" instead "charge" and send you a wrong reply via mail, sorry! ;-)

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