Fillide's activity

This place is a big factory/shop, they have the sort of chairs you want on offer at E20 apiece. The website is very slow - but some nice images! http://www.sediestella.it/  

Here is a link to a product which claims to get paint, or anything else, off brick floors. http://www.geal-chim.it/prodotto.php?id=97  Scroll down to the ''scheda tecnica'' link for a detailed description. It is called Service Solvent, by Geal. If you struggle through some of the Italian just about every word you might need should be in there somewhere. You probably won't be able to pick it up off the shelf, but if you track down a local stockist (which you can probably do through the site) they should be able to get a bottle in for you fairly quickly to experiment with.

I'd always go for a tile adhesive (though I have seen one super-expert pavimentista with his own dedicated crew use sand and cement, blindingly fast, so if your tiler wants to use it, let him). You should ask the tile manufacturer whether they recommend a particular tile adhesive, and especially with a thinner clay tile (as with anything stone) it is essential to have an absolutely solid bed of adhesive (colla) below the tiles or a patchy effect can occur, even after some years.  Mapei make a wide range of tile adhesives, here is the page for Keraflex which I have often used, though it is probably unnecessarily expensive, and a more basic compound is probably just as good for internal use. http://www.mapei.com/IT-IT/product-detail.asp?IDMacroLinea=0&IDProdotto=106&IDTipo=1&IDLinea=1 Have a play around with their site, but take the advice of the tile manufacturers and your tiler above all. For the protection tests, water is generally okay on cotto with just a polish surface, even wine tea coffee won't get through polish and Woplus. It's a good idea to test Base and Barrier (I've never used Barrier - Protect seems to do the same thing) against any other stains. Hand cream is something to test against, and of course olive oil and any other greases, together with animal urine (if you have any to hand!) Acids (within reason) don't seem to be a problem with cotto, but they are a nightmare on polished stone - the liquid from mozzarella packaging is one of the nastiest common acids around if you want to test for acid.

I too have tried various Australian plants - but for areas subject to cold (most of inland Italy if it's bit high) they do tend to peg out. But tradescantia - wow - that is truly wonderful for me outside - the variegated ones often appear to die in a cold winter, but the roots are fine and it comes back up. Some of them like a bit (or even total) shade, most obliging plants. Tradescantia x andersoniana is quite stunning and will do in full sun - a pot survived a lot of ice on it this winter with no complaints. One thing you just can't buy here are the sort of plants other gardeners 'wish' on you in the UK. Like vincas, snow-in-summer, unflashy sedums - weedproof low ground cover to chuck out when better plants have established themselves. They wouldn't command a high price though. I'm not convinced growing and selling plants is much of a money spinner here in Italy: okay, there are high priced desirables on sale at plant shows and the posher nurseries, but there are also plenty of single polytunnel sell off the side of the road merchants which are clearly run by well equipped nurserymen, and though they make their bread and butter by raising pelargoniums and tomato plants increasingly there is someone in the family who branches out a bit. I bought a few ornamental asparagus for a euro apiece for a dark corner which are doing fabulously, and some boxes which would have cost 20 euro which they were flogging for 4: they had F1 bedding plants of great beauty and unusual colours/forms - but at 2 euro each. As a development of a hobby, and to know that you've introduced someone to a new plant it will be a worthwhile venture, but you may struggle to cover your costs, but best of luck anyway, and keep us posted!

Since you aren't too sure whether it is paint, I think perhaps you have a lot of rather nasty red coloured stuff covering your brick floors - which for some reason people thought was a modernising beautification some years ago! It is probably paint, almost certainly an oil based paint, although it could be a heavily pigmented wax based compound. Paint stripper won't do any harm to the brick - though it will need thorough rinsing, and then let the floor dry, before thinking about any new finish. I'd suggest you experiment: maybe aquaragia (turps) or a diluente sintetico (paint thinner) from the ferramenta will work, perhaps even try cellulose thinners (well ventilated and no smoking!) I'd not recommend doing this when the temperature is high - the solvent will evaporate before it has had a chance to soften the 'paint'. If none of these products make any impression, you could try a product designed to strip old wax (though that's often just an expensive way of buying turps!) If you do choose to use something sold as a paint stripper you can cover (obviously, small areas at a time) the treated floor with clingfilm to give the stuff more time to eat the paint. If absolutely none of the above make any impression, maybe it's a rubber based 'paint'? An alternative, probably much less messy and unpleasant solution, assuming your floors are solidly supported and in pretty good nick, and reasonably flat, would be to seek out some local company with a floor sanding machine. Again, you could experiment a bit yourself, even with something like a Black and Decker mouse, to get an idea whether sanding would be a good idea. Good luck - do let us know what worked for you! (I don't know what you mean by cementone).

Well - in my opinion cotto is most frequently 15x30, so suggesting that he can up a price book charge for the format is absurd. (I bet if you gave him 30x30 he'd up the price because the cutting is more difficult!) I'd expect the E25/m² to cover laying and grouting but that is all. In other words it wouldn't include anything but the roughest cleaning, and certainly not finishing or polishing. I have no idea why he would want to use acid before laying, and I've no idea why anybody would want to impregnate the clay before grouting. Has he ever laid a floor before? (IMO using any sort of impregnation before grouting would make it most probable that the grout would fail very quickly because it would not adhere adequately to the sides of the floor bricks.) Using a grout gun on a cotto floor is gilding the lily IMO. What you do, in my experience, is you lay the floor bricks (which you have avoided getting saturated by any rain, but you do wet them superficially before laying). You then grout them - either with a pre-mixed mortar such as a rinzaffo storico (for joints above 5mm), a bagged large grain tile grout (Keracolor or similar) for joints between 3 and 4mm, or a fine grained tile grout for 2mm joints. The grout is very wet, and forced into the joints with a sponge grouter (for the wider joints), sometimes for very narrow joints a metal tool is necessary. You can use any colour you want, but it costs least for dark grey, and I like dark grey for 2mm joints - anything light looks a bit contrived to me. For wider joints the rinzaffo just looks like lime mortar, but it is too coarse for narrow joints. It then looks a mess, so at this point you apply acid to get all the excess cementitious film off the clay - it should only be a 'film' if the grouting has been done properly. That's as far as the builder will go, and he might even have the cheek to ask to be paid for the acid wash. Wash with water a few times and then get on with the finishing and polishing. I'm sure I (and someone else on this forum) have sung the praises of Geal products (they have a website). You can get protective finishing and polishing done by professionals, but they do charge rather a lot in my opinion. You can buy perfectly adequate domestic polishing machines for about E100, and the materials will cost less than E8/m².

I've never managed veggies, even in good soil in the UK. It seems to me that veggies are much more demanding than shrubs, trees, or even flowers because they want water (or whatever else) today. Not the day after tomorrow, or next week - NOW. Quite a famous gardening writer (possible Christopher Lloyd, though I'm not certain) recommended that you did things (pruning, spraying, transplanting - anything) to your ornamentals when you noticed it needed doing. None of this rubbish about do it in March with a full moon - that might be the ideal, but doing it in August won't do a lot of harm. Now you can't get away with that with veggies. Of course, you need to plant the right ornamentals - droughtproof sun lovers, or find some shade (plant a tree to put your geraniums under). Fruit and nut trees are good, and hot fruit off the tree is wonderful. Treat them almost as biennials if you have trouble with diseases which need spraying against - just plant a few each year, they are so cheap, and chuck out anything looking sick after three years! Olives are pretty well bombproof - but planting 200 is going to make you a lot of work in the future - 10 or so would be more sensible. I've only grown table grapes on pergolas, but that was very easy, so a small vineyard might be fun. Good luck of any of you who are early enough risers (5.30am seems good) to cope with veggies. I admire you.

It's absolutely fine to type in English on this site. Probably it would be clearer. Maybe (I'm sure it is possible, but I cannot give you instructions) you could open a Group entitled Horses - or horseriding, or dressage, or any other English word associated with leisure use of horses. Probably it would be of interest, and appreciated. Pity it is so difficult to open anything useful with this bizarre site design, but maybe you could persevere!

First off, do research Sprostoni's suggestion of getby (which I think is a microwave solution). These are very good (I have no experience of getby, but of three other operators in this sector I only get good reports )- will probably cost you in the region of €20 per month for a flat reasonably fast (typically 3MB real, not promised) ADSL. The only snag is you must have line of sight to one of their masts. Check out a rivenditore of getby and ask a techy to call at your house. For a cellular based solution, if you have got a good signal from any of the operators (searching on a UK Simmed smartfone is a good idea for assessing which operator might suit) then you have many payment options - pay as you go, contract, whatever. The major difference between the packages is how much data you can download (upload) in a given temporal period. Some offer 4GB per month, others 500MB per day, some contracts offer unlimited. (If you want to stream video on a regular basis you need unlimited.) A landline (to my mind) has now become the least attractive choice on cost considerations, (booting out of the window some of these mega expensive satellite based deals) and if you are located some distance from your nearest centralina (or if your nearest centralina is ancient) then it's probably also the slowest option.

After a little googling I did discover this thing is specific to my browser (by all accounts by way of an extension), but I couldn't track it down on my machine. Anyway, I seem to have frightened it off by simply looking for it, since it has disappeared! Odd that this is the only site where it showed up for me, because the references make it clear it isn't site specific.