#TeverolaHome – LadyEm ~ Under Mary's Mantle

Dear Readers,

The weather here is cold and rainy. But – I kinda like the fact that I can get caught up on things. I meant to post this a week ago, but here we go.

So when we first moved to Italy we lived within a 5 minute walk to the beach. The views were endlessly beautiful but the house was “poop on a white shoe” poorly maintained. After nearly 3 years of the landlord acting like he was doing us a favor taking our money (and believe me when I tell you we paid 3x more than any Italian family would have for this awful place. So – we moved to a house with a yard. AND basically an apartment for bud since it was his Senior year of school – and we knew he’d be going back to the states. We thought it would be awesome. It was slightly more expensive – but it had a pool, fruit trees, and storage… and Marque decided it was “the one”. However, within a few months we found out it was even in worse shape. Plus the realtor was not an above-board kinda guy… and we just flat out needed to leave. As we were leaving, we knew we had to downsize… and since legitimately most of our storage had black mold. We knew we had made the right choice. So we barely lived there a year and we moved this Fall to a duplex in a different city. It’s not a duplex like in the states. We have a sweet couple that live in the apartment upstairs.

Let me go backwards a bit. Because we are good people – we made every excuse and gave every allowance. Planted things, paid for things, etc. I won’t go back over ever egregious/insulting/unhealthy situation in the first two places… Suffice to say – Italy can be difficult. Things work differently here. And standards/even visuals – are deceiving. LOL I will leave it there.

We now life in a building that used to be a store. The basement has dressing rooms in it and our apartment used to be a shop that apparently sold pizza because there is a pizza oven on our side porch. It’s about 1500 – 1600 square feet (we’re told – it may be smaller). But we do have huge living space outside on porches. One of the things I am most proud of is the kitchen. When we first saw the place, it was all opened up. BUT – we don’t go out to eat all the time, we cook… and I need my kitchen things and Pantry/Fridge/Freezer staples. In my previous post, I explained how I hid my pantry and made my kitchen organized by using my bookshelves, etc. Check out Pantry Challenge – Thawed Out for those pics.

Part of the Lemon Harvest This year. These are so wonderful AND did you know lemon tree leaves smell like lemons? Well they do. LOL

Laundry is different here. The ladies around me do laundry nearly daily. We hang things out to dry and fluff in the dryer. It’s actually nice. This is our side porch area, and the brown door at the end of the fist picture is our outdoor storage. In the winter, this area is not the one I choose, I choose the end of the courtyard where the sun lasts the longest. Also – I have stools everywhere – so I can reach the stuff on top of things (you’re welcome).

FIREPLACE AT THE END OF DINING AND BY FRONT DOOR.

I will blog about our gardening projects soon… and take pics of the outside – including our Blessed Mother Statue we bought our first year here. So far, we love this house. And we are so thankful. Will also show you our basement and things as we improve stuff.

We will chat soon, dear ones, Praying for you all.

Love, Hugs & Blessings,
LadyEm

Happy New Year Y’all.
On New Year’s Day, I posted about the yearly Pantry Challenge. I had meal prepped, and menu prepped…and I was excited to get back to it and use what I have over the next couple months. If you don’t know Jessica of Good Cheap Eats, get to know her – she is amazing. Regular mom logic. AND here is her info about the Pantry Challenge. But as life does on occasion – we came home to a change of plans. Our electricity was off and we lost all our frozen/fridge food.

We cleaned up the mess, cleaned out both fridge/freezers, and then washed our pups (who were with a sitter whilst we were gone, who has other animals and watches lots of dogs) and finally got to bed about 2am. I have not given up though.

January 5th was my hubby’s 63rd birthday, and by this past weekend, we were semi stocked up and ready to participate again. We only replaced parts of what we lost and didn’t buy new pantry items… and though we won’t technically save money, we have pledged to eat at home for the next few weeks, and were creative with our purchases.

Speaking of Creative… I wanted to share with you how I made my kitchen bigger by extending/creating a wall. Here, I extended the living room wall with bookshelves and a hutch (it needs painting and was free):

These pics show the pantry (aka the backside of bookshelves) and the refrigerator behind the red piece. The meal calendar was what I’d done before I left.

Our Second fridge/freezer is on our enclosed porch. I will be contacting our insurance company today about how to recoup anything we can. And later on this evening, I will post pics of our apartment we moved into in September (not duplicating today’s pics). Other than power outages, we are really enjoying it.

Don’t let anything sway you from your plan. Regroup and get back to it.

Love, Hugs & Blessings,
LadyEm