Days 25 & 26 - We are Lumberjacks and we're OK

We are spending the next couple of weeks at a workaway in a little Italian village called Crasciana. 

Tucked away high in the hills between Lucca and Florence, we are living with a family of 5 (although only 3, Janine, and two of the kids Sam and Holly are here right now) helping them to turn a restaurant / discotheque that was built in the 60s but has been abandoned for the last 20 years into a family home.

After a tour of the house and garden, we got to work on our first job. Apparently it gets pretty cold here in the winter, and the only way to keep warm is by burning logs. For a building this size, that means a lot of logs.

Some of the previous workawayers had chopped down some branches and trees and stacked them in piles outside, but with rain forecast for the next they need to be moved inside and upstairs, ready to chainsaw them up into nice stove sized pieces later in the week. 

 

Obviously the "wood" inuendos came fast and furious (no pun intended). Anyway here stands the fruits of our labour.

The family also have two dogs, Buckles and Archie. Archie in particular has lots of funny quirks, one of which is if you shine a light on the floor and make a shiloutte with your finger she will attack it!

This obviously amuses us for hours on end, and apparently she loves it too. We just recorded this video, and now she is sitting expectantly next to us waiting to start playing the light game again.

The next day we set about making a set of shelves for the study. There were some big planks that once sanded down would do for the actual shelf, and someone (that may have been me) had the bright idea that we could slice up one of the beams that had been removed from the old roof to give the shelves a rustic look.

I say bright idea, because the beams are too big to use any of the powertools to cut through so that means sawing each bracket out of a beam about as wide as my chest by hand! 

We started off both doing the sawing but after a while Becki moved on to sanding duties. At the end of our 5 hours, all the shelf pieces were ready and the first 3 brackets done (only 9 more to go!).