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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And in the grocery department..

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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:

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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?

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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.

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

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

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