Find Us in France

We’ve been busy! This life in France is way more hectic than we’d anticipated. We had envisioned a slower pace, lots of time to relax, read books, and enjoy the process of getting to know our new country. But we hit the ground running, and it hasn’t slowed much since we arrived.

Work continues on the house, with the construction of the annex moving along at a good pace. They will be pouring the cement foundation this week.

The picture above shows the cement block walls going up for our bedroom. On the left is the hallway coming from the house. The dirt in the foreground will become a patio, shaded by a pergola (and hopefully some wisteria growing over that). The doorway and two windows from the bedroom are starting to emerge as the blocks go up.

So here’s some big news. We have been struggling to figure out how to fit the living room and kitchen into the spaces we had decided they would go. Allowing for the various doors and windows and fireplaces in each space, the rooms were just not coming together….and suddenly, it hit me. Why not switch the rooms? Bingo. Once we looked at it with that in mind, it all started to work. So now, the smaller room, instead of being a small living room, will be the kitchen (and, surprisingly, it will be a larger kitchen than it would have been in the other space), and the larger room will become the living room. The dining area will remain where it was, and will now share the space with the living room instead of the kitchen. These rooms are just across the small entryway from each other.

We are very happy with this new arrangement. Fortunately, our decision did not cause any problems for the workers – we made the change just before it would have caused some things to be redone.

Upstairs update.

The guest room on the 1st floor (still having a hard time with that, it’s the 2nd floor to Americans), has an interesting fireplace. I mentioned this in an earlier post, but here it is fully exposed. See those large stones on the left, under the blackened wall stones? It seems the fireplace was much larger in the past, and for some reason, it was made smaller. The stones were blackened by soot.

And in that bedroom, an old doorway was restored. We will use this doorway, after the header is raised (it’s so low now that even I have to duck), to access the bathroom.

The walls in that room were old “wattle and daub” construction, in which a woven lattice of wooden strips called wattle is daubed with a sticky material made of a combination of wet soil, clay, sand, animal dung, and straw. It’s the only wall in the house like this. We plan to plaster between the vertical boards, so they remain visible, and cover up the ancient animal dung part. You’re welcome, future guests in that room.

An old house viewed with new technology.

A friend who is into CAD work has made us a fantastic rendering of our house and annex. When we open the file on our computers or iPads, we can go into each room and see how things fit together. We are so grateful to have such a nice new friend who has been generous with his time to create this for us.

Flooring decisions.

This is what we have chosen for the ground floor. It’s gorgeous limestone from Burgundy.

For a while, we considered having a patterned tile in the entry. But the limestone is so pretty, we decided to keep it throughout. We may use a patterned tile in the bathrooms. Stay tuned.

And in the “why didn’t I buy this?” department:

We have been making the rounds of the flea markets, called brocantes here, that pop up in every village near and far. Some are just a block, others fill the town square, and some take up several streets of the village. The offerings range from shoes, baby clothes, and toys to antique furniture, homemade jam, tools, car parts, and unusual bric-a-brac. I love going and our calendar is full of them every weekend. There’s even a website that keeps a record of when and where they are happening. Bob is a good sport and goes along, but not quite as enthusiastically as me.

I’ve started a few collections – it’s more fun to have something particular to search for, something that is not so ordinary that you’ll have no trouble finding it. I’ve decided to collect small copper vessels, particularly ones with feet or stands. Not your usual copper cooking pots.

Most brocantes offer a fixed-price lunch, usually a sausage in a baguette and fries. But one we attended recently offered a lunch of moules frites, mussels and fries. For 14 euros, it was a fantastic meal, and the experience of sitting there, eating a pile of mussels under a big tent with a hundred French people happily chatting and enjoying themselves, was one of those pinch-me moments.

After lunch, we continued browsing the stalls. This brocante in La Celle Guenand was huge and went on forever. It was a super hot day so we finally left without seeing it all.

And today’s surprise:

After a few months of destruction, finally, we are seeing some actual construction happening. Now that the area next to the house has been cleared of bushes and chicken coops, it was prepped for building the addition that will be our bedroom and bath.

The bedroom will be separated from the house by a 10 ft hallway connecting it to the corner of the living room, and in front of the bedroom, facing the courtyard, will be a large covered patio.

We had to get permission from the Maire (Mayor) to close our street while the cement truck delivered its goods.

The footings were poured, and the rock wall in the back was removed, which exposed a wall of dirt precariously standing without support. The first order of business was to build a cement block wall there while installing a waterproof barrier and drainage system behind it.

Once the wall is done, work will continue on the rest of the outer walls and the door opening from the side of the house.

And inside…

Things are moving along, slowly. Early on, it was discovered there had been a slow leak in the bathroom just above the entry. Once the rotted beams in the entry ceiling were exposed, it was clear they had to be replaced. Now we have a big hole where the bathroom was.

Sometimes I feel like this house is a giant Jenga game, the one where there is a big stack of sticks, and people take turns removing them until the one stick that was holding it all together is removed and the whole thing falls down. Our guys keep taking stone walls and beams away — what if they reach the one that holds the whole house up?

Meanwhile, a drainage trench has appeared in the living room and kitchen.

These clay floor tiles, tomettes, were removed from the bedroom on the 1st floor. We hope to reuse them in one of the outbuildings.

And sunflowers!

Around this part of France this time of year, fields of sunflowers have been blooming. It’s a spectacular sight, and so tempting to stop and take photos of them often. But as they grow to maturity, they turn to face the sun (this is called heliotropism), so if you are on the wrong side of them it can be a challenge to find a spot where they are looking at you for their photo op.

Yet another French holiday is approaching (and it’s a long one) so our guys are pushing to get some things finished before they leave for two weeks. I guess we’re getting off easy, as it seems that much of France goes on vacation for the entire month of August (“Août”). Entire offices can shut down for a month. Many restaurants close and leave a little sign on their door saying they will return in September. Everybody takes to the roadways to travel elsewhere, creating such horrible traffic that the “Bison Futé,” the French government’s traffic info service, publishes a chart showing the best days, even down to the hours, to avoid being on the roads.

A big job was to create a doorway from the kitchen to the cave on the back of the house. There is already an entrance from the living room, but we want to use part of the cave as a pantry.

It was quite a task to cut through the wall to make that doorway – the stone wall was 3 feet (1 meter) thick. It will be so handy to have access to the cave from both the kitchen and the living room.

The next doorway has been started. This one will go from the living room through the exterior wall of the house into a small corridor leading to the annex, which will be the master bedroom and bath.

And outside, things are now starting to happen. All the bushes have been removed, except the big “tilleul” tree (they are also called linden or lime trees, although they aren’t the fruit-bearing kind of limes) in the courtyard. The old heating oil tank has been drained and removed, and the large “fosse septique” (septic pit) has been exposed and filled in.

Meanwhile, back at the rental house…

A big gust of wind caused the umbrella to smash the glass table in our entry courtyard. What a mess. It’s nearly impossible to remove broken glass from gravel (fortunately it was tempered glass so not sharp shards). We had to remove and replace some of the gravel. Then the search began for a new table. After visiting seven stores in the surrounding area, we finally found a near-exact replacement. And it was on sale. Hurray.

And in the grocery department..

Work continues at a good pace on the house. Now that the walls and beams have been sandblasted and exposed, the focus has turned to the floors. As none of the floor tiles were worth saving, they were removed, plus about 10″ more to prepare for new floors. The orange marks on the back wall is where the kitchen entrance to the cave will be made.

In the cave (pronounced “kahve” in France), the floor level was three big steps up from the level of the living room. In order to get through the bedrock in the cave, they brought in a digger, which barely fit through the door.

The digger magically squeezes through narrow spaces, so the guys went to work inside the cave and, amazingly, managed to get the floor level down by more than 3 feet. I would have been happy to have the cave one step up from the kitchen and living room, but they were able to get the level all the way down to the match the adjoining rooms. This does two good things: it gives us more headroom in the lower level of the cave, and it allows us to lower the floor level on the upper space in the cave, which was needed as the roof there is slanted.

The photo above shows how much the floor level has been lowered in the cave. You can also see the arched doorway on the upper floor. When we put back the flooring on that level, we will then have a step down into the upper cave. That room will be used as a storage closet.

Just when we thought we were done with surprises being uncovered in the house, we got a message from our builder saying we should come by to see what they found. We went over immediately, of course. What could it be? A buried treasure?

They were digging in our living room area and found what appeared to be remnants of some old steps, so they kept at it and found an ancient cave, measuring about 9 ft wide and 6 ft high. It was definitely man made, with marks on the ceiling from being formed. It was in a precarious spot, going under an exterior wall of the house, and also an interior wall of the living room and the back room.

There were a couple hours of excitement about the discovery, but there was nothing we could do with it but fill it in. By the next day, it looked like this:

I’m having “pinch me” moments just about every day. It is thrilling to watch this house being transformed.

Meanwhile, after waiting more than three months past the day when our new car was supposed to be ready for us, we finally received it. We bought a Peugeot, of course. What else but a French car?

And on the weather front, we’ve been experiencing a “canicule,” which is the French word for HOT AS HELL. The last two weeks have been nearly unbearable. OK, so I’m a California girl, what can I say. I’m used to warm weather, even hot weather, but I’m also used to air conditioning. Of course, there is no AC in the rental house, or most any house here. We now have fans strategically placed all over the house. We also have adopted the French way of using the metal shutters to keep the cool overnight air inside as much as possible. At night, we open the windows and the shutters, but close the curtains, in a feeble attempt to keep the bugs out. It works pretty well. Or maybe that’s because we have a commercial-grade fan blowing over us all night. No fly or mosquito would survive that gale-force wind. During the day, windows and shutters are closed, and we stay inside as much as possible.

We found a wonderful fruit and vegetable store in nearby Descartes. Yay!

I don’t know why I am still fascinated by the flavors of chips available here, but here you go. Burger flavor?

After being here for almost three months, we decided it was time to take a road trip. I start feeling a little claustrophobic if I can’t breathe some sea air every once in a while, so we headed to the French coast. It’s an easy 3 hour drive from our village to La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay. We’ve learned that you can get almost anywhere in rural France without going on the toll roads, so we’ve had our car GPS set on “avoid tolls and highways” since we arrived. Most of the places we go wouldn’t involve a toll road anyway, but even if it were an option, it’s way more fun to take the smaller roads.

We strolled through the picturesque Vieux Port (old harbor) of La Rochelle and meandered the narrow streets of the old town. We found some fun shops and had several great seafood meals. One day we drove out to Île de Ré, an island just off the coast. At first, we were unimpressed with the landscape, but we’d heard the place was so great that we just kept driving, and ended up in the town of Saint-Martin-de-Ré. This was more like it, full of cute little shops selling things like straw bags and hats and expensive clothes. Definitely touristy, but it was fun to explore. We look forward to going back.

House update – Day 36.

Yesterday I met at our house with the électricien (electrician) and the menuisier (door/window/flooring guy). All in French, of course. Our builder and his wife, who are Brits, have been so helpful as translators with the various craftsmen. We’ve been doing this for 3 months already and it’s starting to feel almost normal that we can’t have the simplest conversation with anyone. So today, I stood in the rubble of our house, looking at samples of window frames (which are SO different than what we had in the US), and wood flooring options. Some of the decisions (anything outside or visible from the outside) can’t be made until we get the approval and guidelines from the Bâtiments de France, the agency that governs any changes on exteriors of structures near historic buildings. Since we are so close to the château, we have to do what they say. So, we may not even have a choice on what color our doors, windows, and shutters are painted. It’s frustrating, but in some ways, it may be easier since we won’t have to choose.

Meanwhile, demolition continues. Preparation for the installation of the underfloor heating has begun. We’ll have underfloor heating only on the ground floor, and will use electric radiators on the upper floors.

Upstairs, the sandblasting is done for now, and the beautiful rock walls and beams are fully exposed. Soon we will have to decide which walls will be covered up again (this time in the proper way to prevent moisture damage) and which walls will be “rendered.” There are two options for the rendering, “pierre apparante” and “pierre vue,” which leave stones visible. One reveals more stone than the other, so more decisions ahead.

This wall in the guestroom is the only one in the house with this method of construction, which consists of vertical boards and straw and mud between. We will plaster between the boards, leaving them exposed.

And a pheasant, for good measure.

I wish we could camp out at the house so we don’t miss anything, but we do stop by every day. Today was an exciting one, as they started sandblasting. Everything, really, but mostly walls and beams.

In the picture above, another hidden cupboard was revealed when the plaster was removed. This one is in a perfect spot as it’s right where we were planning to put a TV. This is the same room with the arched doorway.

Upstairs (on what we are trying to remember is considered the 1st floor in Europe, not the 2nd floor – this makes for confusing conversations), in the room that had previously been separated into two spaces, the drywall was removed and a bookcase/cupboard was uncovered. Then the bookcase was removed, and a beautiful arched doorway was revealed. Since this is on the 2nd (oops, 1st) floor, the guys put bars across the opening so the curious Americans don’t fall through the opening to the floor below.

The space beyond the doorway is the upper level of the two-story “cave” that runs along the back of the house. On the ground floor, we will finish off the cave, which currently is quite rustic with dirt floors and cobwebby stone walls. It will become a multi-function space, with a dividing wall separating a small bathroom and laundry room on one end, and a pantry on the other end.

The next step is excavating the floor of the cave. Our builder hopes to lower the floor level by at least 12″/30cm. As it is now, there are three steps up into the cave from the house. He’s hoping to lower the floor so there are only two steps. This will also make a little more headroom in there, as it’s a pretty low ceiling now.

And some news from the nest, we have a brand new baby bird.

So, on we go. Will be back soon with more from the construction zone.

We stop by the house every day to see what’s new. Or maybe I should say to see what’s old. These are the days when everything is changing fast, and we revel in the daily unveiling. Yesterday we were thrilled to see that the workers had removed the wall that closed in the stairs and the entry hall closet. It was an awkward and narrow space before, making the stairway claustrophobic and the closet long and dark.

Now we have to decide how to deal with the open area. We thought of keeping some sort of closet there, but it doesn’t need to take up all that space. Or we may decide to keep it open and bright. There will still be space under the stairs to tuck things like a vacuum.

Moisture is a big problem when rock walls are covered with plaster, which doesn’t allow air to circulate. Taking the plaster off the rock has allowed the rocks to dry out after decades of suffocation. Of course, prolonged wetness causes any wood to rot. Not surprisingly, the now exposed underside of the stairs shows some damage and will need attention, and the stair railing, which had been one-sided against the wall, will have to be replaced.

The outback.

Our house is on a curve in the road, and the backyard area is gigantic. One of the first things we bought was a battery-operated lawnmower. The locals encouraged Bob to get a riding lawnmower but he would have none of that.

In the picture above, you see the house indicated by the red mark. The yellow line indicates our property boundaries. The side of the house sits on the road, with the front of the house facing the grouping of trees in the yard. Those trees, except for the biggest one on the right, will be removed in order to build the annex that will be our master bedroom and bath, which will be built perpendicular to the house. The little metal structures to the left of the house are old chicken coops and rabbit hutches, which will also be removed.

Tomorrow, Monday, is yet another holiday in France, so no progress on the house. Life definitely moves at a slower place here, and that’s not a terrible thing, except when you are eager to move in to a lovely 300 yr old house.

Yesterday was a big day. After eight weeks in transit, our shipment arrived by truck in Le Grand-Pressigny. As we watched all of our things being unloaded from the container, I realized how big a milestone it was.

In the span of just one year, we visited France a few times, decided to move, bought a house, started wading through the bureaucracy to get French visas, sold our California house and cars and many of our things, and took a one-way flight to France. Once here, we found an architect and builder and began the waiting process for the approval for the renovations on the exterior of our house, which we still have not received. In a way, our possessions being taken out of that shipping container marked the start of our life here. We can now blend our California life with our French life, and the carefully curated inventory of possessions will be adapted for use here. Well, some things weren’t so carefully curated. In our exhaustion, we got to the point in our packing-up process when we said, “let’s just take that thing and see how it goes,” rather than having to deal with getting rid of it. So, our giant Weber barbecue now sits in the yard of our rental house, waiting for us to figure out how to adapt the gas line to work with the French tanks. And our silly fake Christmas tree with remote-controlled lights will be put up to mark our first French Christmas. Tonight, we will happily be sleeping in our own big bed because we found the box containing our sheets. (We like our big California bed so we decided to bring our beds and enough sets of sheets to last us for years.)

It all went very well, with only one little casualty during transit, a small plastic bin of papers was crushed. Of course, almost everything is yet to be unpacked and examined, but none of the boxes showed any damage. The unloading crew was young, friendly and efficient, and we hope to be able to use the same guys in a year to move our things into the house when it’s ready. We also had two French-speaking friends there to help with the translations and that is always a good idea.

And work continues at the house.

Oh boy, it’s all happening now, sledgehammering and chipping and lots of noise and dust and piles of debris. I love every bit of it, as it’s the sound of the bones of this great house being revealed. I can imagine the stone walls taking in a big gulp of fresh air as the decades of plaster and gunk are being chipped away. When you have stone walls that are 19″ thick, there is no place for electrical or plumbing, so back when electrical and plumbing were added to an old house, a thin wall was built in front of the stone that served as a channel for the necessary wiring and such. I was surprised to learn that more recently, thick styrofoam was used as insulation in these walls. All these “false walls” are now being taken out, and some will be replaced. I’m sure there is a technical word for these little walls, but I’m new here in France demo-land.

That’s the update for now. Things keep moving on and it’s fun to pop in every day and see what has changed. I will post more soon.