Guest Writer

Steve tells all about the wall job...

The Wall



Or, the day of the living muratori



Or, a fortnight of powder



Well, we have finished having our walls done. That sounds like no big deal, but it was for us. We have basically been held hostage for two weeks by that al-queduh based group known affectionately in these parts as Il Muratori.
When we bought our villetta, as anyone who has visited us so far can testify the walls inside needed some work. Okay, needed a lot of work. What passes for plaster here (geso) was coming off in huge flakes and chunks, exposing the concrete walls beneath. The paint job, where it was still visible, was highly drawn upon by the muralists who were being raised as children in this place for ten summers. It looked like no one had cleaned a wall since the first crayon was gifted on the little tykes, and no one wanted to be an art critic.
If someone saw a bug on the wall, va bene, its crushed little body would simply become a part of the next work of art.
And then there was the winter muffa. Let’s just call it muffa, as it is the Italian word for mold, and we were really attacked by muffa last winter. We did not know how much it could grow on virtually everything, including the walls, the backs of the huge dressers, and virtually any and everything else we had. When we finally woke up and smelled the espresso, it was an almost daily task for one or the other of us to get out the bleach spray and spray down the walls or whatever and clean off the muffa. Basta. It had to stop.
Well, our friend Accursio has a brother-in-law who, when he is not teaching viniculture in the north, is a murator. His brother-in-law would do the job for us, and he was bravo. So we agreed to have him do all the walls when school was out. That would be about the middle of June. Va bene.
Meanwhile, at the ranch, our neighbors visited, and said that they were getting a lot of humidity in their house near where one of our drain pipes was in the wall. The brother-in-law, Michele, was home for Easter and he came and took a look. Then he drilled a large hole in our wall, put some silicon on the leaking pipe, and cemented it in, with the idea that he would paint over it when he came back. Va bene.
Then the neighbors came back from Palermo again, and the humidity was worse. They called their muratore, who opened the same hole, and replaced a piece of pipe, and instead of using cement used polystyrene foam. He said that the problem had been caused because the cement was not water permeable (that is a problem?), so all the water was going to our neighbors. This all was being done as Michele and Accursio were starting work. When the two muratori met, they argued about the best way to fix it, and finally settled on some sort of compromise, leaving the polystyrene in place and surrounding it with cement.
Meanwhile, everything in our living room was moved to the center so that Michele could get all the lose plaster off the walls, put on new geso, then spray everything with anti-muffa spray, then sand everything smooth, then spray it again, and finally paint with anti muffa paint. It took the better part of two days, and created enough dust to make a white out if there had been wind. Accursio in the meantime started the same process in our hallway.
Each day, before they left, they cleaned up. That is, they washed their hands in the bathroom sink, leaving it covered in powder. The rooms they were working in had big globs of geso on the floor, and were covered with powder, and when they were painting, little drips of paint. The door frames were covered with gsso dust and paint speckles. For whatever reason, they also found it necessary to walk into the two bedrooms and the bathroom to check things out on a regular basis, tracking in some geso, some paint, and tons of powder.
Fran and I worked each evening to get enough of the stuff off the floor to be able to walk.

MORE ABOUT THE WORK AND BEFORE AND AFTERS TOMORROW!