Our house has a basement, that we call our
seminterrato, which means "half under earth" or souterrain. Our
seminterrato, however, is very special: On one part it is really underground, carved into the rock, on the other side it has fantastic 180 degree see view 54 meter above sea level! And it has access to a small garden with a lemon tree, a fig tree, a bougainvilleas and some cacti. It did not have a balcony though. But this has changed. Angelo is always good for surprises. Now we have a balcony in our basement. It is a balcony for two people with shoe size 40 or so.... but look the transformation from
before with no balcony and rusty wrought iron balustrade to
after with small balkony and restored balustrade in blue (!) :
BEFORE in August 2006
in between in 2009
(...)
iron rail painted blue
balcony railing moved further out to obtain a small balcony above the new haven
Angelo demonstrating the use of the new balcony
I am saving this post to a new label "guest residence". Our basement is beautiful, it is my favorite part of the house (actually, I cannot decide which floor I like best, they are all amazing). But since the house is too big for us alone it makes sense to rent our part of it. The only part that can perfectly be separated from the rest of the house is the seminterrato. It has its own entrance. It will have two bedrooms, a bathroom with sea view, a pantry kitchen with balcony and a garden. I already envy my guest... ha ha! Of course we also have one guestroom upstairs, but this can only be used for family and friends while the guest apartment can be rented out to vacationer spending some time in Pizzo.
At the moment we are working on the insulation of the floor and walls and will post new pictures soon.
Meanwhile you can find more about the progress of the guest residence or
seminterrato here.