Well, here we are, a whole year after renovation work began on our house in France. When I start to feel like it’s never going to be done, I look back on the pictures we took a year ago, and I’m reminded how far it’s come. Before, it was a beautiful old house hidden under years of paint and plaster and wallpaper and false walls. Slowly, it’s been uncovered and relieved of its weight. I think today it looks happier, and we are excited that it is almost ready to begin a new life. We feel honored to be the ones who get to live in this glorious house in a charming village in the Loire Valley.

This is what we saw the first day we looked at the house.

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The COVID-19 virus put a halt to the construction temporarily, but the guys are now back at work and making good progress. I’ve been spending the last few weeks in our self-isolation searching for shower fixtures, wallpaper, paint colors, curtain fabric, old furniture, and anything else available online. Pinterest and I have a close bond.

I asked the painter to make large boards with the colors we are considering, so they could be moved around the house to see how they look in the different light. We want to have one color for the interior of the house – not different rooms in different colors.

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More windows.

The menuisier came in this week to measure for the last batch of windows to be ordered. There are a couple of windows that will be in challenging spaces, so he was paying particular attention to those spots.

This window in the kitchen is at the bottom of a 4-foot deep window well outside. It will bring some much-needed light into the kitchen.

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This is how that kitchen window well looks from the outside.

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Next is the large window that will be in the small bathroom off the living room. Formerly, there was an exterior doorway into that area on the back of the house. That large space has been turned into a pantry, laundry, and bathroom.

Before, the opening looked like this, it was a two-story storage area we called the cave. Two doors lower, and one upper. Because moisture was getting inside from the lower door space, some of that area has been backfilled with dirt and a waterproof membrane. The remaining space will be a window. The old upper door will remain, even though if you opened it, you would see a concrete block wall. As much as possible, we want to leave the character of the old house intact.

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Measuring again. The window is at ground level, pretty much on the road, so it will have frosted glass.

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This is how that space looked on the inside before any work started. The new window will be in the bathroom at the far end, in the upper part of that door.

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The attic is coming along too.

Recent work has been focused on the attic space, with the floors being leveled and the old tomettes re-laid. Next was the construction of the guest bath space. The walls have been built and the frame for the toilet installed. There was much discussion about how to fit a shower, toilet, and sink in this oddly-shaped space, but we made it work. The shower will be installed this week.

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Remember the story of the bed in the attic?

If you’re new here, briefly told, we had to put our large US-sized bed into the attic bedroom space by a crane while the roof was off after we realized it wouldn’t fit up the small stairs.

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After it was in place, the roof was completely rebuilt with beautiful oak beams and new clay tiles. Last week, we were in the bedroom and decided to measure the distance between the angled roof, which is the wall space of that bedroom. Well, much to our dismay, we realized that the headboard posts are too wide to fit in the room. It wasn’t something we could have measured before, as the roof was reconfigured after the bed was in place.

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So, a mild panic set in. Should we try and cut the legs down to lower the headboard (the foot posts are much lower)? What other options do we have? Finally, we decided to see if it could be moved down just one floor to the other bedroom. I sent an apologetic message to our builder, and asked, pretty please, if they could try and move it. Several days later I received a photo of the bed in the smaller bedroom on the 1st floor. They had to remove a part of the stairwell to get the bed down the stairs.

Here’s the bed in the smaller bedroom, with the headboard on its side. It will just barely fit when turned upright, but it’s going to look great against the rock wall. Whew.

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The house is not the only thing that’s changed in a year.

We’ve been living here a year now, struggling daily with the language challenge (but loving it), adjusting to new foods, new customs, new people, basically new everything. Along the way, something we hadn’t anticipated has happened. We’ve slowed down, we eat less, walk more, we’re more active socially, and we’ve learned to embrace a simpler way of life. Do I miss having a giant kitchen, a housekeeper, and a gardener? Of course. But we’re richer here: instead of shopping at Costco, I’ve learned to cook with seasonally available fruits and vegetables from the local markets. And instead of watching our gardener work in our yard, I’m itching to plant roses and peonies and grow our own vegetables. This new chapter of our lives is rewarding and fulfilling and we’re so happy that we took the leap.

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