A Roof Over Our Heads

The more observant of you may have noticed something missing in the picture I posted with last week's blog.

Like, a roof.

We had a long conversation with Brian the Builder and his mate John the Plumber about what needed to be done with our French house. In brief, everything. Drains, heating, water, inside lavvy, bath and shower, kitchen, outside lavvy (because it's always good to have a spare, and we were tired of hauling buckets of water out with us). And the ceiling upstairs was showing some interesting water stains.

Not to worry, said Brian, he would take a look and see if he could patch it up enough to last through the winter. Which he did.

Leaving the two of them to it, we went back home to Wales for the winter, in the knowledge that things were moving on. M le Maire was happy that we would be connected to the main drains at long last; he had been writing to us for a while urging us to get it sorted out, to which we had to reply that as we had not been to the house for five years, we had put nothing at all down the drains for some time, but we would sort it out when we could. So, sorted.

Then in January we got an email from our next door neighbour (the English one) with a picture of our house. With no roof.

Brian the Builder had thought that, as the weather had been quite nice for a bit and the forecast was good, he would make a start on it. So he had removed the entire roof down to the trusses.

The weather changed. The roof had luckily had the waterproof lining thing put on it by then (I'm not very technical when it comes to roofing) so at least the rain did not come pouring through. But for a while we were the only house in the village with a bright blue roof.

Other things were being removed as well. All the old heating system, the shower and basin, the water supply itself. We went over at Easter and were happy to find that John the Plumber had at least made a temporary connection for the tap in the kitchen sink, which was now our only source of water. We stood in a plastic bowl and poured water over ourselves. It was like camping in our own house.

And the electrics. John the Plumber had once upon a time done electrics as well, but he had become fed up with the French bureaucracy, which had gone from complete laisser-faire ("You have bare wires sticking out of the wall? That's OK!") to pernickety in the extreme. He would not be able to do our rewiring, the one job that we had put at the top of our list. Remember you mustn't touch that switch! But he knew someone else who did electricity. Unfortunately the someone else could not start on our house until next September.

Still, at least the drains had been done.

This Land is My Land

In my experience French properties come in two basic types: those with no land, and those with too much land.

Ours is the second. We had, on roughly three quarters of an acre:

1. a concrete area just outside the back door, with steps up to an area of overgrown gravel in front of the outside lavvy and shed. Go through the gate at the end and head uphill and you find
2. an area of grass with an outbuilding which housed the previous owner's hens in a wooden bit, and a breeze block and interior brick bit which is a sort of potting shed. Go through the gate, still heading uphill to
3. a large field. Go through the gate and down some steps to 
4. a levelled area with a garage.

  Obviously this creates a problem for people who are only intermittent residents. As I said in a previous blog, one tends to arrive late at night off the ferry to find the path to the lavvy overgrown with ankle-biting brambles and perennial sweet peas (pretty colour, no scent). Any thoughts of planting vegetables or fruit trees were killed when we realised we were very unlikely to be in the country when the harvest was ready.

Our next door neighbour, the French one, did however have a horse, and a goat, so when he asked for permission to pasture the animals on the field, we accepted without hesitation. So the field is generally not too bad, and we get to see peaceful grazing animals from time to time. The neighbour is also unnecessarily grateful, and keeps embarrassing us with his effusions. (We are, after all, British.)

Remains the last bit of ground with garage. We did flirt with keeping the car there. Unorthodox perhaps. But the road is very narrow, and it takes someone with exceptional parking skills to get a car into the garage with less than fifteen minutes' backing and forwarding. You are then left with the walk back to the house. With the shopping. We prefer to park outside the front door.

Then on our recent reappearance in France, we were told by M le Maire that complaints had been made about the overgrown brambly state of the end plot. We must do something about it!

The following day our English neighbour arrived at the door towing a youngish French person. This is Gregory, who lives in the house opposite our garage. He would like to buy your end bit of garden to make a football pitch for his sons to play on, being as his house, though large and comfortable, lacks sufficient garden space.

I accepted with alacrity. My husband was less eager, until he went up the road and actually looked at the state of the land and realized he would be the one who would have to clear it. We agreed to make the sale and exchanged email addresses.

Back at home, I searched through the documents I had filed away all those years previously. I found, miraculously, the statement of local taxes for the property. I found the purchase contract for the house and land, but no deeds. I wrote to the notaire who had dealt with the sale. No reply, even with the prospect of charging us for drawing up documents. We cancelled our trip back for consultation with Gregory's notaire. (In France it is legal, and cheaper, for both parties to use the same notaire, as he is held to be impartial in the affair.) I read through the documents again, and on page seven I eventually spotted a paragraph which, translated, amounted to "We haven't got any deeds. If you want deeds, you will have to have them drawn up yourself," said no doubt with a Gallic shrug.

So we gave a Gallic shrug ourselves, arranged to meet with the notaire, and set the sale in motion.

Not having deeds didn't seem to make a lot of difference. We proved we were who we said we were. Several times over. Hands were shaken all around. The brambles are now somebody else's problem, which is a bit of a bargain, even though I suspect we let the land go at a knockdown price. The neighbours are happy. The husband is happy. Next door is happy because we haven't sold the field. I dare say the horse and goat are happy too.

Drains on the Brain

So there we were, back in France after five years' absence, with a bit of money saved up.

Less than twenty four hours after our arrival there came a knock at our door. It was M le Maire, and his wife who spoke some English. In fact I speak French, having studied it to degree level, but the English by and large are not known for their linguistic prowess, and he had made provision.

Good morning, welcome to our lovely commune. You must connect up your house to our new main drainage system, and there have been complaints about the brambles in the end portion of your land, so could you please arrange for them to be cleared.

He was quite pleasant about it, and offered to let us have information on people who could carry out the work, and take a look at their quotations to make sure they weren't overcharging us. Please come to see him at the mairie as soon as we had more information.

Now when we had purchased the house it was alleged by the estate agent to be tout a l'egout or mains drainage. Our English neighbours however were of the opinion that there was a septic tank out in the garden which had to be emptied out periodically.

In fact both were true. What we worked out was this: at some time in the past the Council had come around and installed storm drains which emptied into the river downhill from us. Local residents took advantage of this occasion by slipping the workmen a few hundred francs to join their houses up to the storm drain. Our house itself was thus joined to the drains. However the little sentry box in the garden was still served by a septic tank. As it turned out though the septic tank leaked, so the contents were recycled into the garden. The lilac jungle (it's too big to be called a bush) enjoyed that greatly, and there was no requirement for emptying.

But now the Council had a sparkling new system, whereby all the household water was taken by the main drain, pumped uphill and passed through a reed bed which purified it to drinking water standard (our daughter and son-in-law have a reed bed system, and this is no exaggeration). Perhaps the commune gets some sort of reward or kudos for having all their houses on this system; in any case, the mayor was very keen on having the last hang-outs brought into line.

We consulted our English neighbours. Yes, they had been connected. If we liked they could get in touch with their friend who had done their installation and get him to come out and talk to us. We liked.

Yes, their friend said, he could do our work, no problem. He also did general building and decorating. Did he do plumbing and electrical work? No, but he knew a man who did. How about the roof? Yes, he could take a look.

The roof had a couple of minor leaks - we could see from the ceiling where it was stained. He looked at it, and said that he could do a bit of emergency work to make it weatherproof for the winter, but it needed reroofing. Did we want slates to match the front of the roof or tiles to match the back of the house? Slates are nice, but tiles are cheaper.

So we took his quote up to M le maire, who approved it. Slates or tiles? Well, they preferred slate, but would not object if we had tile.

Let the work commence.

Don't Touch That Switch!

Fast forward fifteen years.
Life happens. Births, deaths, marriages. Job changes. Retirement.

We bought a house in Wales, and that needed renovation. The house in France got left out all this time. Plans to retire over there changed. Grandchildren arrived, we were needed.

Finally we had a bit of money saved up and could do something about the house.

We hadn't been to the house for quite a while, but it was all right, I'd checked on Google Earth and it was still standing.

Actually when we got there finally, it wasn't too bad. It had in the French fashion shutters on the doors and windows, and we'd left them closed up. There was a bit of dust, and some of the packets of food in the cupboard were a bit the worse for wear - we had expected to be coming back in a month or two's time. Our cans of baked beans exploded when we opened them, but other than that we were fine.

The thing was that even before we'd left the place, it had been a bit basic. We'd never managed to get the central heating going. In fact the boiler was so old the instructions were in Egyptian heiroglyphics. The little gas water heater gave out after the first couple of years, so we had to boild kettlefuls of water, pour them into a bowl and use a jug to pour warm water over ourselves in the shower. But the final straw was the outside toilet, or karsi in familiar parlance.

The karsi was actually a normal-looking affair at first glance: however instead of a water tank, it had some strange sort of cylinder affair, which seemed to work on the mains water pressure. The water in that part of Normandy is actually fairly soft, but over the years a certain amount of limescale does build up, and it did so in the pipe taking water out to the karsi. The pressure dropped, and the flush stopped working. We were reduced to carrying buckets of water out with us. We built up muscles.


Of course, after a long time of no visits, the first problem when arriving was not actually carrying out the buckets of water, it was getting through the jungle of brambles and perennial sweet peas to the sentry box in the first place. We habitually arrive late in the evening, in the dark. On the first recent return we had difficulty even getting the back door open for the ivy that had grown over it; then we had to get through the gauntlet of vegetation. It grabs you round the ankles, trips you up, but after a drive down from the ferry you have no choice. Anyway, you get used to the middle-of-the-night stagger out through the undergrowth, in the rain, half asleep. You don't actually like it, but you do get used to it.

Then the shower started to leak from under the porcelain shower tray.

And the light switch for the shower room? Well, my husband used to keep a rubber glove nearby for when he needed to switch the light on. Apparently there used to be a factory just up the road. When it was demolished there was a certain amount of recycling of odds and ends. At one time nearly every house in the village had one of those switches fitted somewhere in it. And every one was live.

The Eccentric House

As you might expect with a house that has been in existence for some time, the place has been altered somewhat over the years.

It was a little odd to start with, I have to say. The inhabitants of that corner of the Hexagon have the habit of building right up to their property line. Along that road, for some reason, all the property lines are at an angle to the main road. This results in eccentrically-shaped houses. One just up the road from us is distinctly triangular.

Ours I think initially was a square house of two  rooms, one above the other. You can see from other ones nearby that they all used to have an iron staircase going up the wall of the house, and if you look closely at the stonework at the back of ours, there are marks where this staircase used to go; the upstairs window was once a door which has been partially bricked up. Onto this at a later date were added two little outbuildings, one at each side; the stonework isn't keyed into the stonework of the main house, so was almost certainly not original. Perhaps they were sheds for animals or agricultural implements. And the outside staircase was removed and a twisty little one put in the corner of the kitchen. There was a door leading into the loft over the single-storey addition from the upstairs room. This door is still there, but is now stranded in mid-air over the staircase.

But then times changed and more room was needed. A door was knocked through from the kitchen to the single-storey addition. This room looks fairly square, but when you actually try putting furniture in, you find that the corners are far from being ninety degrees. I know no building is exactly square, but this one is seriously out.

On the other side, because of the angle of the property line, the outbuildings were built up to the property line, which made them triangular in shape, with the narrow end at the front or street side. So we have two triangular rooms. Upstairs is a little bedroom; you can just about get two single beds in, as long as you don't want anything else in there. Downstairs the room has been split in two; the wider end was a shower room, and the narrow end, windowless and with unfinished walls and floor, was a sort of glory hole with a tangled mass of pipework and a header tank for the central heating system.

And this is the way it stayed until recently.

The Big Empty Space

So, there we were in the summer of 1999 with the keys to an empty house.

Well, naturally we'd brought a car full of stuff with us: a couple of Z-Beds (remember those), a camping stove, some pots and pans and crockery. The basics. I ate my first meal there sitting on the stairs.

We had thought to get really into the French country life there. What we found was that our next-door neighbours on one side were English. There were several more English families either living there permanently or with holiday homes around the small village. In fact it seemed at times as if every resident of Hampshire and his dog had bought a nice little house in France. Lovely, sociable people all. We played "Spot the English Car" in the supermarket car park.

After just a couple of days we went back home. Our task was done.

On our next visit we found out about the depots vente, places people take their unwanted goods for sale on consignment. They are wonderful places to rummage around, and we do love to rummage. In a short time we had a whole bedroom suite in the old French style, carved wooden doors and headboards and all, and a buffet or two-storey sideboard. And a fridge. We think that they must have been the property of an old French family, inherited with a house and not wanted by the younger generation. We wanted them though, they were perfect for our old cottage.

 The only problem was getting the stuff home. The fridge and some smaller stuff came from nearby and went in the back of the car, but the sideboard and bedroom furniture were from further away. Not to worry, though; the depot vente will lend you a van if you leave your car with them as security.

It was a rather old Renault Master. It didn't have power steering. But me, I'll drive anything. So we loaded up and I drove this very heavy left-hand drive van with a steering wheel the size of the London Eye back to our house. At one junction I actually had to have two goes at getting round the corner. Luckily the roads in France are less busy than those in England, and I got back without enraging any French drivers.

Which is where we ran into problem no 2. The buffet was so heavy - solid wood - that I couldn't even get my end of the smaller top half off the ground, never mind up the four steps to the front door of the house. Our next-door neighbour came along at that moment, the French side not the English side. Did we need help? We certainly did. They carried the purchases in for us. What lovely people.

Problem no 3. The divan base of the bed is too big to get around the spiral staircase to the rooms upstairs. Solution: simple. We use the small room downstairs as a bedroom. No more problem.

A nearby furniture shop had some second hand things, a bed settee, table and six chairs. Gradually the house filled up. Cheap electrical appliances and a few more things from home, and we were living the good life over there.

The Little House in the Valley

We looked at a few houses throughout Normandy in the spring of 1999, and each one was - how shall I say it - different, but that's what happens when you haven't got a lot to spend.

There was one which, officially speaking, had no toilet at all. When we got there we found  of course that there was a little hut perched over a drainage ditch, about which nobody was very specific. Also the house  consisted of two buildings which touched at a corner but were otherwise unconnected, so that to go from living rooms to sleeping room you had to go outdoors. The current owner was obviously very proud of her little house, though: she had newspaper down on the floor of the living room so we wouldn't sully it. We didn't go very far in, as the room was stuffed as full as it would hold with china ornaments and knick-knacks and we were afraid of breaking something.

Then there was the one which was built in cob, or mud and straw to you and me, where you could see daylight through parts of the walls. What was worse to my sensibilites though was the way they had covered over a beamed ceiling with lambris, a sort of pine board cladding. Following exactly the contours of the beams underneath.

Then there was the one with the shower in the middle of the kitchen. I mean, in the middle, where normally you'd put a table, there was a shower cubicle.

And the one where all the furniture was piled up on tables and cupboards. "Don't worry," the agent said, "it's only flooded twice in the past twenty years."

Finally we got to our last town. As on most stops before, we found that the house we had been interested in had been sold months before, but they had some others we might be interested in. Apparently this was not an unusual ploy over there, where they would get you in the door with a picture of a neat little cottage which matched exactly what you might want in a holiday home, and then showed you the properties that were actually for sale, which looked nothing like your dream.

"We've just had this one come on the market," the agent said, showing us a picture of what looked like a dark little stone cottage. It was a sad story. The old couple had had a large family, and the last child, a son, was a little slow. All the other children had moved out, but he stayed on with his parents, and worked odd jobs hedging and ditching for the local council. Finally one day the council offered him a permanent job. Excitedly he cycled home to tell his parents, and was hit at a local pinch point by a car driven by a seventy year old man, and died. The parents couldn't face driving past the scene of their son's death every time they went to the small town nearby to do their shopping, and wanted to move away.

I have to say it wasn't a prepossessing house from the front, but when we went inside it had nearly everything we were looking for. It had a shower room of sorts, a couple of bedrooms, a reasonable kitchen/diner, in the French manner. Admittedly the toilet was outside in the garden, but not too far from the back door, and there were a few outbuildings that came with it, and about three quarters of an acre of land. It was the best of those we'd seen on that trip, it ticked the boxes, and it was immediately habitable if you weren't too fussy. It grew on me. The back view was better than the front view.

We bought it.