Psst... wanna buy a house?

Now we know where we were going wrong in our property search - we should have just bought one from a man in the pub in the first place.

Well, it isn’t quite like that – almost, but not quite – though it is amazing how things happen serendipitously. Seemingly, Samuel had been talking to Mario, local farmer and man about town with his flashing white teeth, in the MacIntosh Pub, who said he had a house to sell. Samuel told Stephen yesterday but said we would have to move fast as the estate agents were due to arrive this afternoon to size up the property for placing on the market.

As Stephen and I were discussing it last night over a postprandial coffee and limoncello, who should turn up at the pub again, but Mario. Yes, he said, he did have a house to sell, and yes, we could look at it in the morning, and yes, it would be fine to call by about 9.

So at 8.50 we set off from the factory on foot to Mario’s house a few minutes away and from there to see the house. OK, let’s get this clear from the start: when we were discussing what sort of property to buy, we said we didn’t want the clichéd farmhouse of people’s idea of an Italian retreat; we didn’t want to be surrounded by fields and we didn’t want to have something that wasn’t ready to move into, even if in a pretty basic way. Which is why it took us so long this morning to actually say that this was the house we wanted, even though I think we both knew from the moment we saw it that we were going to buy it, because it was everything we said we were not looking for.

We had a good look round with Mario, trying to figure in our heads how we would use the space. Downstairs there is a largish open area with a shower room off it, which has been used as a factory until recently, a garage running the length of the house, another room opening up to the front and a similar one at the back which had been used as a very basic kitchen (and I mean very, containing only an old cooker and a broken table). There are stairs on the outside that go up to a terrace running on two sides of the building. On this level you enter the front door into an area with a boiler, a fire and connections for utilities. To the right are two fair sized rooms then on the left is a recess with two more rooms going off from it and another shower room. There is also an attic room, but access to this is something of a challenge as the door is at the top of the gable wall and the outside stairs have been removed. How’s that for storage space…

You can see, then, that this is by no means ready to move into, as we had wanted, but with some discussion we could see how it can work for us and fulfil Stephen’s vision of winter and summer living. Nor does it need a complete restoration, just tweaking inside to rearrange the layout slightly.

Anyway, as I said, we were very taken by the house but being us we couldn’t just say yes so we had to go and get a second opinion. We walked back to the factory (not something you really want to be doing in 30° heat, especially as the road out is bit like the north face of the Eiger), told Elsa she had to come and headed back, this time in her car. She, like us, thought it enchanting at first sight and after some more dithering, with Stephen asking Mario questions as he good humouredly hung around waiting for these two Englishmen to sort themselves out, we made an offer. Mario said he would have to talk to his brother but would get back to us by 12 o’clock.

Following his phone call later that morning, Stephen and I headed down the hill for the third time, in the hire car on this occasion, and parked up at Mario’s, who came out with his brother, who just so happens to be called Luigi. Yes, only we could go to Italy and meet two brothers called Mario and Luigi but no, they do not have moustaches, nor are they plumbers and neither one has a go-kart (and if that is all nonsense to you, just ask any one from the Wii generation). Terms were agreed and hands were shaken under a lemon tree while Mario’s very cute spaniel chewed at half a football. The result: we are almost the proud owners of a house.

If that were not enough excitement for one day, in the evening we took Harry and Bella to register with a vet and for Harry to have his annual injections. It was all very jolly, partly due to Maddalena coming with us, as her sister is the veterinary nurse.

There was, though, a moment of jeopardy when Elsa rang as we were waiting at the vets. Mario had phoned her to say that there was a problem and could we meet him in the pub at 9.30. Of course, by the time we got there we had convinced ourselves that the sale had fallen through, a belief not helped by Elsa’s dramatic delivery of the message. We sat down gloomily to hear the worst, which was that Mario would have to change the usage of the downstairs from industrial to domestic. And that was the great problem. Mind you, if it does cause a difficulty, we could always leave it as industrial premises and go into chutney production on a grand scale – though I am not convinced it would be a great seller in this culinary neck of the woods.