Renewed renovation

When we first thought about moving house, we hadn't bargained on taking on another renovation. We did want to move into the town proper and we wanted somewhere that would serve as both home and office. The one that came to us and continued to attract us despite lots of looking elsewhere turned out to be in need of a huge amount of care and attention. In every other respect, it was perfect: a fascinating old building just outside the medieval town walls and with the very rare advantage of a good-sized garden. In the end, we just couldn't resist it.

Unloved and showing her age

First priority was to get the office area functional, so that disruption to the business, Holt Immo, could be minimalised. As is usual with these ancient town house, the ground floor had never been utilised as accomodation but was just cellar and storage. It was dark, damp, and largely filled by the antiquated oil heating boiler and tank and an obsolete septic tank.

The office to be. You can see the big fireplace on the right, and the dividing wall with the central passage on the very left. The barrel shaped thing in the middle is a concrete fosse septique (septic tank). The weird configuration of pipes feed toilet bathroom and kitchen waste direct to the mains waste disposal bypassing the old fosse septique. The first thing we had to do was knock the dividing wall down and then get rid of the antique fosse septique.

On feeding the new waste pipes we discovered that the old ceramic mains pipe running from back to front of the house was broken in several places. Poor hubby had the task of digging this up and replacing with new pvc pipe.

 
The next problem was the extreme damp in the floor, due to a small watercourse running underneath. Normally, we are firmly opposed to any attempt to damp-proof these old houses, as the result tends to be simply pushing the water somewhere else and normally good ventilation is sufficient to deal with most damp problems. In this case, however, we opted for laying a damp-proof course and a new concrete floor. To keep some ventilation, we edged the floor with the local clay tiles, known as tomettes.

 

The wall behind the waste pipes was totally rotten so had to come out as well. This gave hubby a chance to hide the pipes within a new stud wall, at the same time making space for a toilet under the stairs.

 
After that major reconfiguration, it was largely plain sailing: pointing, replacing the large window at the front, lining and plastering the walls and ceiling and finally the decorative touches like dado and paint. With great satisfaction, we finally put the desks in place and stood back to admire our work.

  Now to attack our living accommodation! ...

So where have I been lately?

Those of you kind enough to follow my ramblings so far will no doubt have noticed my prolonged absence.

Well, it's been an interesting few months. Having very nearly finished creating our beautiful dream house, it began to dawn on us that it really was too big and too difficult to manage. With regret, we decided it was time to move on. We were somewhat caught on the hop when some buyers turned up in early summer and the deal was done.

We therefore had several hectic weeks of trying to find a new house, negotiating furiously once we did, and at the same time struggling with the logistical problem of packing up a vast 300m2 house and squeezing what we could into the very much smaller new house.

An added complication was that the new house wasn't immediately habitable, so we took a rented house for a couple of months. Therefore, the packing up involved deciding whether things should go to the rental, to the new house, or into storage at a barn belonging to some very kind friends who agreed to help us out.

Sorting all this out while still keeping an eye on the normal daily business and household tasks proved quite a challenge, but we got there in the end.

So now we have a whole new wreck to tackle. Details of the first stage will be with you soon. Meantime, nostalgically, here is how the first big project ended up.

Vous Voyez Ce Que Je Veux Dire?

This phrase is a bit of a bête noir for me, know what I mean? A couple of years ago, I had a client who had the irritating verbal tic of repeating his every point at least a half dozen times and then rounding it all off with this phrase. At first, I thought it was because I was foreign and therefore evidently thick as a plank, but after a while I realised he didn't really know he was doing it, so I became more relaxed about it.

My main issue with the phrase, though, is that I have never managed to say it without virtually swallowing my tongue in the process. Properly uttered, it should come out as an elegant whole and sound something like "V' v'yez sk'j'vuddire". I can't seem to manage successfully the transition from "sk" to "je" to "v".

I wished badly for it this week though. I returned from an appointment one morning to find hubby waving a bit of paper with a phone number on it and saying could I phone this person back because he hadn't been able to follow what she wanted. The ensuing call with a clearly elderly person proceeded along the lines of:

"Hello, this is Zoe Holt ... you wanted to talk to me"
"Yes. Are you the one with a house for sale?"
"Well yes, Madame; I am an estate agent; I have many houses for sale"
"Can you tell me where it is?"
"I need to know which house you are talking about ... do you have a reference number?"
"It's in La Souterraine"
"Yes, but do you have a reference? Or perhaps a price, to help me know which one it is?"
"I just want to know the address"
"But I don't know which house you mean"
"Oh, well, if you don't want to tell me the address ..."
"It's not that I don't want to, but I cannot tell which house you are referring to unless you can give me some more information"
"It says here it has an entrance hall, living room, kitchen, 3 bedrooms ..."
"Hmmm, but I have many houses like that: I need something to help me identify it"
"It's 176,000 euros"
"I don't think I have anything in La Souterraine for that price right now - is there a reference number?"
"The reference is xxxxx"
" Ah, that number is not one of my references. Have you perhaps got the wrong agent?"
"I just want to know where it is"
"I can't tell you where it is if I don't know what house it is. I think you may have called the wrong agent"
"It says here [repeats entire house description again] and Orpi"
"Right! [with relief] The house is for sale with Orpi agency. You are talking to Holt. The house is not one of mine. I don't know this house."
"I just want to know the address"
"It isn't for sale with me; it's for sale with Orpi. You must ring Orpi"
"Ah well, it's not for me anyway. If you won't tell me the address, I'll have to get him to ring you .... "

A few days later, I answered to phone to a much younger man:
"Hello, I'm enquring about a house you have for sale in La Souterraine"
" Very good, Monsieur ... do you have a reference?"
"I'm not sure what the reference is, but it's 176,000 euros"
"Ah ... did someone else call me about this some days ago?"
"Yes, but I want to know the address"
"I believe you have the wrong agency and this is not one of my houses. I think the house is for sale with Orpi? I am Holt Immo"
"Oh, well, OK, but can you just tell me the address ..."

A Fruitless but Fascinating Afternoon

This week, I had to make a visit to the central tax office in our nearest city, Limoges. Not to do anything mundane like paying or enquiring about taxes, but to search out the answer to a particularly odd property question.

This story started when I had an offer on a house a couple of weeks ago. Good news, except that when I started preparing the sale contract, it emerged that there was an issue with the ownership of the correct plots of land. In France, every bit of land is mapped on a cadastral plan and the entire history of each plot is theoretically available to all at the tax office. For the past few years, all the plans have also been available on-line. For the most part, it's a marvellous system and works very well, but anomalies do arise.

In this case, a very small village house with a little back garden is for some reason divided down the middle into two plots, but only one of these plots has ever been mentioned in the last three sales deeds. It is obvious from reading these old deeds, that everyone concerned in the various sales and purchases thought they were selling/buying the whole house (well, you wouldn't buy half a house, would you?), but in fact they weren't. So, I needed to investigate what was going on with the second plot, and a very interesting process it turned out to be.

The first woman I dealt with, although extremely pleasant, didn't come across as exactly fizzing with intelligence and was pretty quickly at the end of her resources, so passed me over to someone more senior. This woman was a lovely, able and funny person and we spent a pleasurable couple of hours trying to solve the mystery together. In the process, I was admitted through doors marked "NOTAIRES AND GEOMETRES ONLY" (the French love to surround themselves with regulation and then conveniently ignore most of it).

We ended up on our knees in a basement, sifting through sheaves of the original plans, hand-drawn and notated with exqusite precision. When she started talking about referring to the Napoleonic plans, attractive though that prospect was to a history buff like me, I had to admit that I didn't think it would take us any further. I think she was as disappointed as I at calling the adventure to a halt, but we had found as much as we were likely to.

I didn't really resolve my problem, though I now have a lot more information and a theory as to what has happened, but the experience was well worth a lost afternoon.

Lingua Franca

We all know Brits are rubbish at languages; it's a national characteristic. People blame antiquated foreign-language teaching methods, laziness, lack of will, lack of necessity when all the world understands English, Empire, island isolationism, and probably a hundred other factors. You know what? I think it comes down to sheer embarrassment.

Fairly obviously, one of the major features of living in a foreign land is the need to get by in a foreign language. I long ago resigned myself to the fact that I came at it too late in life and will never become utterly fluent and relaxed in French. Still, by dint of hard work and necessity, I have become pretty competent. By far the biggest hurdle to overcome was my wish to avoid errors at any cost. This can easily lead to saying nothing rather than exposing one's ignorance.

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Luck of the Bodkins 

I have a very dear friend who is Dutch. The Dutch, as we all know, speak every European language "effortlessly". When I first met this friend, we holidayed a lot together and I had plenty of opportunity to marvel at her facility in English (near perfect), German and French. She will happily engage strangers in long, complicated discussions on almost any subject. As my French has improved over the years, I have come to realise that hers is in fact not brilliant; nowadays she often relies upon me to do the understanding bits. Inspite of this, she is still the more chatty, partly because that is her nature, but mainly because she has no qualms about mistakes but ploughs on regardless.

Which brings me to my point: if someone says to me "Do you speak French?", I'll reply along the lines of "After a fashion" or "I get by", or "Not really, but I try". Whereas, the large numbers of French people who know about a dozen words of English seem utterly convinced that they do, indeed, speak English, and are all too ready to demonstrate this fact. This leads to many tortuous conversations where the other party insists upon struggling manfully to communicate with their dozen words, when it is patently clear that sticking to French would be far more productive.

Doctors seem particularly afflicted by this syndrome. When my son was very young, he had various minor complaints which led to numerous referrals to paediatricians and the like. So many times, I have sat across the desk from some medical specialist who, the second he hears my accent, lapses into a strangled pidgin English which makes little, if any, sense. I usually respond to this by merely continuing to speak French, in the hope they will get the hint, when really all I want to do is scream at them "For Goodness' sake, speak properly, man!"

Of course, it is lovely of them to make the effort, and I appreciate it, really I do, but ...

Extended absence

Good grief; the whole month of February seems to have passed me by!

It's truly a wonder how time slips away in this life I lead - there are always so many different things needing my attention and the days pass in a flash.

This time around, the weather is much to blame for my lengthy absence from the outside world. There we were in early February, congratulating ourselves on nearing the end of what had been an exceptionally mild winter, when BAM! in came the snow and the ice and the lowest temperatures since the Ice Age. It was quite a shock, I can tell you. The snow was only average, to be fair, but the extreme temperatures plus a daily bit of afternoon sun meant that it melted and re-froze  for days into a very dangerous road surface.

Once we had got past the let's-build-a-snowman stage, it all became a bit tedious. Many of my clients whose houses are empty were naturally concerned about possible plumbing problems, and were ringing to ask my help. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to do much: the roads were too dicey to get to many of these houses, and in any case there is not much one can do while the freeze is still on, since leaks won't normally become evident until the thaw.

This all lasted for only a couple of weeks, which as winters go is pretty reasonable really, but still it was quite hard going. A poor friend of mine, who is living in a caravan while he carries out renovations, recorded a temperature of -23°c one night. Chilly!!! Thankfully, though, it passed over soon enough and one day we awoke to a proper Spring morning, with sun and birdsong to cheer us all. A couple of days later, we had 18°c on our patio in the afternoon, and it has been pretty balmy ever since, with some really warm days and Spring galloping on apace.

Then I was struck low with an odd form of laryngitis which seemed resistant to all treatment; I kept thinking it was gone but then finding it back again with a vengeance. During this, I was barely functioning at the most essential level, let alone having the energy for blogging.

So, all in all, I have been very lax, for which I apologise. But I am back now and ensuring things are brought up to date.

What Colour Are Yours?

One aspect of French life which I really have embraced with full enthusiasm is the window shutter. What on Earth are we Brits doing, persisting with our impractical, outward-opening windows and leaving them all naked like we do? Having seen the light, I can only marvel at our national ignorance on this issue. Shutters are not merely pretty and a chance to play around with different paint colours; they offer a gamut of benefits which I have now come to appreciate in full.

The shutter is a marvellous asset for many reasons. Firstly and primarily, they offer protection from the intense heat of the summer sun. When it is really hot here, the trick is to leave all windows and shutters firmly closed when the sun is on them and then open everything up once the sun disappears for the day. In this way, the stone houses can be kept bearably cool. Equally, closed shutters are good protection from the worst of the winter weather, as they create a sort of primitive double glazing effect. Another benefit is that you can have windows open and shutters closed as a way of letting in air yet keeping out rain or light. They protect not only the inhabitants but also the windows themselves from the harshness of both summer and winter weather: I see all the time ancient houses with the original oak windows still in place and still sound and solid.

Then, there is the security benefit. I can't say this has ever bothered me personally, as I live in a very low-crime area, but the French have a peculiar obsession with burglary and most insurance policies require shutters to at least all ground floor windows and doors. For a holiday home which will be left empty for long periods, it's comforting to be able to close the place up completely. Indeed, when French people view a house, they are always most put out if there are no shutters.

Where there are shutters, there have to be inward-opening windows, which makes much more sense, as they can all be easily accessed for cleaning. This arrangement also allows them to be hung on lift-off hinges, so if they need painting or if you ever have to replace a pane, you simply take the whole thing off and carry it out to the garage (or off to the glass-cutter) for the necessary work.

There is one final advantage which is particularly useful in my line of work. Around here, most of the little villages have no need of anything so fancy as street names. Postal workers use owners' names as reference. Houses may or may not be numbered, but even if they are, the sequence of the numbers is usually totally random and many owners struggle to remember their number, as it has no practical use. This means that finding a particular house in a village can be tricky: I am aften to be found driving at snail's pace around a hamlet, waiting for my new vendor to leap out and identify himself. The one question one always asks when taking down directions is "And what colour are your shutters?" 

The House: The Principal Players

We finally had the house in our possession, but in could in no wise be considered habitable. By this stage, I was so heartily sick of the gloomy place where we had been living, that I laid down a deadline of three weeks before I would be in residence. Enter our motley but trusty crew who saw us through this initial "it has to get worse before it can get better" stage: our two leading men, ably and not so ably supported by a random selection of gophers, labourers, passing vagrants, visiting friends and family.

First and most definitely foremost comes Alain, our heating engineeer/plumber extraordinaire and general Mr Fixit. Alain had already saved our bacon in our previous house, by rectifying some hopeless work done by a rank cowboy (whom we sued). He was a compact, wiry and ruggedly handsome chap, with a sweep of white hair and a very French, bushy black moustache. He would cheerfully turn his hand to any job needing doing, could think of ways around problems and understood the need to economise where possible, all qualities of extreme rarity and value.

Alain was always accompanied on site by Mrs Alain and three or four of the junior Alains, who all looked identical and thus put us in mind of a set of Russian dolls. Although we came to know the family quite well  over the years, we never could work out exactly how many juniors there were. Mrs Alain had a penchant for extremely short skirts and high heels (not too practical as work-wear) and not a tooth in her head.

Alain (left) lends a hand with the endless rubble

Although slightly given to histrionics and a little too fond of pastis, Alain was our rock and our saviour on many occasion, and his magnificent heating system serves us faithfully to this day.

Fred works on one of the new doorways

Our second leading man was Fred, a rather mystical chap who appeared one day in response to our search for a stonemason. Fred drove and lived in an ancient ex-gendarme Renault van, was very proud of his distant Irish ancestry, played the fiddle like a demon, and made a bit of extra money teaching the handling of working horses at the local agricultural college. He was generally accompanied on site by his slightly unbalanced but very gentle Welsh Collie, often by his two absolutley delightful young daughters and occasionally by his elderly mother who, as far as I am aware, never spoke to anyone.

Fred's dog keeps watch on the pressure-washer

Since the purchase had been so badly delayed, we had had plenty of time to sort out all the necessary planning permissions, so as soon as the papers were signed, the gang went at it: ripping out floors, digging up the garden for the septic tank, bashing new doors and windows in the half-metre thick walls. By the time I moved in with eight-month-old babe (hubby had artfully arranged to be away in the UK at the time), we had one freshly painted and reasonably orderly room (later to become my son's bedroom) in which we put our beds, settee, fridge, microwave, etc, and an adjacent half-built bathroom with a loo and washbasin with cold water only.





 I would work mornings and then pick up my son from the childminder and arrive home at lunchtime, dive through the front door and dash upstairs to our room before any of them could collar me to regale me with the latest disaster - I worked out early that they always mananged to sort it out if left to their own devices.

By the end of the Summer, it was beginning to look a bit like a house.

Kitchen????

 

 

 

 

Kitchen!

La Creuse: Heart of Oak and Stone

Recently, a field close to my home was re-fenced; nothing very startling about that. Except that it is a pretty big field - at a guess approx 1km around its perimeter - and the entire job was completed without any sort of machinery by a couple who look to be well into their eighties. I have to drive past this field every day and for weeks I saw them laying out the posts, banging them in to the rocky ground, stretching the four rows of wire straight and finally trimming the top of each post at an angle to delay rot. This sort of sight is not unusual here: people continue to do manual labour to a very advanced age and even those who have sadly had to move to a retirement home still pop out for a brisk march up the nearest steep hill every day.

This land has bred a hardy and insular people. The Creusois are tough, self-sufficient and long-lived. They consider themselves Creusois first and French second. Indeed, there are still certain aged folk in the deep countryside who do not even speak French, but only the ancient "langue d'oc", which was spoken here before modern France was formed.

Creuse has never been awash with natural resources, but it does have extensive supplies of granite. The traditional trade of the men here was stonemasonry and associated building skills. Having learned their trade on the unforgiving local granite, the Creusois masons could handle other stone with ease. From the 17th Century onwards, reaching a peak during Napoleon's ambitious rebuilding of France, almost the entire male population of Creuse would leave in Spring to trek the 400 or so kilometres to Paris and other cities. They would spend the Summer working on those great building projects and then return to their families in the Autumn, when the shorter days and freezing weather closed down the building sites. It is often said that Paris was built by the Creusois.

Creusois workers set off on their Spring migration

They travelled on foot, and had to watch out not only for gangs of thieves on the roads but also for the gendarmes, who could arrest any man who could not produce the correct papers. Only the most basic, if any, accommodation and food were available, and they arrived to arduous working conditions, even poorer accommodation and the scorn of the city-dwellers, to whom they were ignorant paysans. The Creusois mason was famed for being able to work longer, harder and on less food than any other and for this and his skill was much sought after. In this way, the men earned just enough to see their families through the winter without starving.

This annual migration was, of course, also hard on the families left behind; the women, children and seniors left to manage the family smallholdings. With that sort of history to live up to, no surprise my elderly couple is out there bashing in fence-posts!

The House: Part I

As part of this blog, I'll be creating a serialised history of our love/hate affair with our home. We bought our current house 8 years ago, at which time it consisted of walls, roof, a baffling labyrinth of rooms and external doors but no internal connections, and a field of chest-high grass. Two of the rooms had been occupied as living space up until approximately 50 years previously, the remainder were rammed from (mostly rotten) floor to ceiling with obsolete furniture, machinery and assorted junk.

One of the "habitable" rooms

Sweet dreams!!

We fell in love with the location (3 minutes from our office) and the extraordinary views ... there wasn't an awful lot else to fall in love with.

The view that did for us

Well, the first step was to buy the sleeping beauty. Actually, we hadn't really intended to sell our previous house: we had started our business in April that year and I had set up what was in those days a very swish website. The only problem was, we had a sum total of five houses on our books to sell. So, to pad it out a bit, we stuck our own on there as well. Then we made the mistake of letting one of our customers see inside it. In spite of our strenuous efforts to sell him something else, he point blank refused to be deflected from ours and before we knew it, contracts were signed. This was in May. He wanted to be in for summer and I was expecting our baby in September.

Unfortunately, the house we were to buy was part of an estate in liquidation, so the sale needed to be approved by a judge and would take longer than usual. Then events took over and I started having serious complications with the pregnancy. I was hospitalised and the baby delivered by emergency c-section on 6th August. During the month I was in hospital, we became homeless. Babe and I eventually emerged from hospital to a local gite which hubby had managed to rent.

The gite was pretty basic and all our belongings were in storage, but the notaire assured us it should be sorted out within a couple of months, so we felt we could bear it. However, September passed to October, November, and we were still there, with woefully inadequate heating and water pouring under the front door every time it rained.

I have to say, it was far from ideal introduction to motherhood. After a long, miserable winter, we eventually got the purchase completed at the end of March. Then the real fun started!

Our new sitting room

Some Are More Equal Than Others

There was an article in last Sunday's Observer about the difference in attitudes to parenting between the UK and France. To summarise grossly, it concluded that French mothers are much stricter, much less “touchy, feely” and have no problem with offering the odd slap on the bottom for misdemeanours and that this produces far better-mannered children. In fact, I felt the experiences of the writer largely reflected the parenting styles of Parisienne, Bourgoise mamans rather then French mothers in general, but that aside, it did give me some food for thought.

I think perhaps there was a point missed in the writing, about the wider aspect of society's attitudes towards child-rearing and education. In Britain, I would say that those of us striving to be good parents/educators have an overall aim of producing an independent, thoughtful, considerate, creative, thinking, fully-functioning and fulfilled human being. We hope also that our schools have similar aims. The aim of most French child-rearers, on the other hand, is to produce an excellent cog in the great machine that is La France: too much individualism or free thinking will scupper this and so is largely discouraged. The result is a nation whose young people are in the main disciplined, regimented and well-mannered in the public eye but tend towards resentment and excesses behind closed doors, and an adult population apparently terrified of using any initiative or in any way standing out from the crowd.

Which brings me to the title of this post: liberté, égalité, fraternité, that great rallying call of the French Republic. Sounds great, doesn't it? But what if the égalité/equality becomes not a right but an obligation? What if your duty as a Good Citizen is to keep your head down, follow the path of least resistance, carry out your designated role with little concern for self-fulfilment and wherever possible avoid any individual thought/action/responsibility? What if any oddity, quirk or lack of equality is a fault to be rectified? Then, we begin to enter a “Brave New World”-style Utopia, I feel.

My son is eight years old, born and raised in France. He has difficulties of attention deficit, Asperger-ish tendencies and a startling maelstrom of a mind which obsesses over detail, pings in apparently random manner from one topic to another and constantly challenges and questions all he is told. Needless to say, he has not found it easy to squeeze into the rigid behaviour demanded of him by the French schooling system. The fact that he has largely managed it is, to my mind, a testament to his courage and persistence.

Does he behave as impeccably as his French counterparts? No

Is he a fascinating, kind, charming, considerate, funny person to be around? You betcha!

Will he ever allow any body to quell his stubborn self-belief? I pray not.