Where We Are Now

Our target for 2026 was / is to deal with water (hot, cold and sewage). This has been significantly delayed because of our Lugano vacation rental project.

We need to move into the House in September 2027. For us to do so we need to to have a working hot water system and at least one functioning bathroom. It doesn't necessarily need to be pretty but it needs to be usable. This is more than likely going to be what was the rear facing (north corner) bedroom on the first floor.

Alongside this we need to move our electrical installation forward. We have an offer from Elettro Ticino which we can call off on a step by step basis. 

To simplify the electrical installation we have a home automation proof of concept based on Home Assistant. This is already installed in the house and working, albeit in need of proper wiring. This solution is also integrated with the Lugano apartment which allows us to monitor and control both properties remotely.

The diagrams below are a representation of where we want to get to. They are exploratory in nature (asking what is possible) so nothing is  set in stone. They're not to scale and the colours are selected to make detail visible (so are not representative).

We have cold water at the House in the kitchen and the snug on the ground floor and in the two bathrooms on our two mezzanine floors in the west corner of the property. 

We have no hot water to speak of. An old electric boiler in the cellar feeds the shower and sink in the lower bathroom (power switch in the snug). A separate boiler in the shed used to feed hot water to the kitchen but the electricity supply has been disconnected (when the kitchen was removed).

Foul water exits the building from the two mezzanine bathrooms via a cast iron pipe in the west corner of the property. There are separate drains in what were the two kitchens (south corner and north east side). These feed into a septic tank under our neighbours property which we have an easement to use until 2030. It would be prudent to make our own sewage provision. If mains sewage doesn't become available in time we need to consider our own septic tank, possibly under our land across the road from the house.

Our plans are described on a room by room basis below. In addition we may use the current water supply in the snug for a water fountain (sparkling).

We have already installed heating in the building however, we are not wholly satisfied with the outcome. Pellet burners on the ground and second floor provide good localised heating as well as hot air fed to the first floor and the attic. The closed fireplace in the snug is very good for local heating, however, the ducted air fed to the smaller bedrooms on the upper floors is not very good, especially as the fire does not last through the night. We have not installed heating in the two future bathrooms.

The replacement windows have made a significant difference to our ability to heat the property. We tend to use the House for weekends at the moment so we might find that we have sufficient heating when we live there for extended periods (not having to heat the building from cold each visit).

We should, however, consider additional heating, perhaps focussed on maintaining a reasonable ambient temperature in the ground floor rooms and extra heating in the bathrooms (potentially via heated towel rails).

We could also consider further insulation (walls). For budgetary reasons that will need to be a 2027 (or later) topic described on our next steps page.

Luca's Home Assistant solution helped us get over hurdles presented by our heating solution. It worked so well that we decided to evolve this into a fully fledged home automation solution, controlling heating, lighting and smoke detectors and also monitoring the temperature in various locations in the property.

Not only does this provide us with building control and monitoring, it will also reduce the cost of rewiring as much of the wiring will be replaced by (WiFi and ZigBee) radio technology.

This has been so useful we're extending the technology to include the flat in Lugano.

One open question here is how we can integrate the fans from our Lacunza fireplace into our Home Assistant solution. I expect we will need to replace the controller with something more up to date.

We currently have two boilers at the property. 

• The first is in the basement serves the south west side of the property, 
• The second in shed used to serve the main kitchen but no longer has an electricity supply. This needs to be removed.

Our only "functioning" bathroom is on our first floor mezzanine. It is 2m x 1m and contains a toilet, shower and a wash basin (set into an alcove). The wash basin and shower are our only sources of hot water in the property.

We have replaced the door with a shower curtain. The old door opened inwards and rendered the room virtually unusable. 

The doorway exits to two levels which is an accident waiting to happen. We need to move the door to remove this risk. Our current thinking is to move the doorway towards the rear of the property and fit a sliding door.

This room needs to remain available until we have another working bathroom in place.

Eventually we want to:

• Remove the shower and replace it with a new toilet.
• Remove the cast iron soil pipe which runs down the corner of the room.
• Fit a corner sink where the soil pipe currently is.
• Fit a sliding door offset towards the rear of the property.
• We will probably build a cabinet / storage into the alcove.

We have already purchased a corner sink from an architectural reclamation yard in the UK (pictured).

The bathroom on the second mezzanine is no longer in use. It is 2m x 1m and contains a toilet and a bath tub. Both have been disconnected ready for removal. The toilet used to leak and I intend to use the bath tub for preparation of lime putty / mortar.

We want to explore the possibility of replacing the wall with sliding doors so we can use the space for laundry and storage of cleaning products (ironing board, brooms etc).

We have noticed the floor boards in front of the toilet have become soft so it is likely we will have some remedial work to do when we lift the floor covering.

The images below are illustrative, we expect to use solid sliding doors, not see through as the rendering implies.

NB: Since producing the drawings I have found that they are not correct as there is a boxed in area at one end of the bath. We do not know its purpose. There is also cupboard space high above this room, we have no idea of it's intended purpose and have yet to decide what to do with it.

We want to convert the smaller bedrooms on the first and second floors to bathrooms, each with a bath, shower, toilet and wash basin. 

The diagrams below are indicative, the detail will depend on what is practical once the plumbing is taken into consideration.

In 2024 we brought two bathroom sinks back from Aix-in-Provence. Both marble, one Spanish and the other Italian. We envisage making our own wooden sink stands for these.

We also need to consider extra heating for the bathrooms, we are considering "vintage style" solutions like the one shown below.

We do not yet have a plan for window coverings for the bathroom windows (important as they're adjacent to the road (Via Giuseppe Martinoli passes both bathrooms as it climbs behind the house). We have looked at "digital film" but that is far too expensive ... <Offer details here>

The kitchen is too big a job to have any hope of delivery in 2026, however, we should factor water and sewage into the 2026 project steps.

We will install an old style English ceramic Belfast (also known as a Butler) sink in the kitchen. We could easily have spent upwards of CHF 500 (plus shipping) on one of these which felt inordinately expensive. Fortunately we visited a UK Architectural Reclamation Yard where we bought a used one for less than CHF 100 and, as we collected it there were no shipping charges. 

We want to place this in the window looking across the valley. The new window we have had installed takes account of this plan (the bottom section doesn't open). The approximate location of the sink is shown in one of the pictures below.

We have visions of making our own kitchen units (see next steps) but will see how that works out in due course.

We have a vision for our future steps but they're so far in the future that we're not spending a great deal of time thinking about them. Just for fun we've published our thoughts on our next steps for you to read.