The First Demolition! Coming Soon!

Coming soon:
I'll be posting the first floor first look as well as the attic first look, then pictures from the first bit of work. There' s lots and lots of demolition! Basically if it's a non-load bearing wall, it's gone. Ceiling clapboard, linoleum and miles and miles of junk from the attic! An old Horsehair mattress and hidden treasure to boot.

For now, a picture from the town:

Meeting the Mayor

In most of France, nothing gets done without a permit. You can't build a fence, put in new windows or re-rout your plumbing without an official seal of approval. If you happen to live in a pretty town, then the powers that be may even want to see detailed plans for your renovation to make sure you don't intend to change your rustic maison into a bombastic bauhaus monstrosity or open a *gasp* MacDonalds.
None of this happens with the approval of Monsieur le Maire. This man (or woman) literally has the power of life or death over your project so it's important to make a good first impression on him. Be sure to show him the respect his office brings him. Call him Monsieur le Maire (or Madame le Maire) until they say otherwise. They may not. Bring a nice gift. We brought a bottle of fine Tennessee sippin' whiskey to meet the Maire. He was much pleased by this. All went well.
I have had the opportunity to have drinks with him twice. He is a genial, efficient, direct man, which is good, because his accent is so thick that what little French I can claim to understand is useless with him. He is very good-natured however, and that's a necessity. For though I only know him as 'Mr. Le Maire', most everybody else in town has known him for many, many years, so most times he's not really the mayor to them as much as he is a brother, friend, boss, etc. So when they hear an etrange like me call him Monsieur le Maire in the bar, they all raise their voices high and with all mock courtesy bow and kowtow in unison proclaiming 'Monsier le Maire!!! Monsieur le Maire!!!' Then everybody falls over in fits of laughter, Mr. Mayor included.

The Second Thing You Need

Once you've committed to buying a place, even if you speak French you could really use help. There are companies whose whole raison d'etre is to help you with everything you need. Even the most self-motivated person would find it damned near impossible to deal with everything they need to do for their project from 3,000 miles away. It's nice to have someone to find plumbers and electricians who won't tack on a 'foreigner tax' on your quotations, but it's really useful for small things. It's the minutae that kills you. There are taxes to be paid, forms to be filled out, power and water to be turned on and off, inpectors and city workers to be let in, meters to be checked, all of which can be a real pain in the ass to make happen from a distance.

This site is useful for many reasons, and it can help you find the right assistance group for your area.

I use a company called CIBA. Spencer and Marie are very friendly, quick to respond and very helpful.

-L'H

Mr. Bricolage

If you want something for your home repair in France, odds are you'll find it at Mr. Bricolage. French for 'Mr. Do-It-Yourself', this gallic Home Depot has more things in one place than just about any other business around. The French have a frustrating history of artisans and fine craftmanship, which is great if you're buying a stained glass window or vanity cheese, frustrating as all hell if you're buying filters, nails, industrial paper towels and plastic buckets. But now, every town of moderate size will have one of these in their 'industrial zone' (usually just outside of town. follow the white signs to 'zone industrielle'):

This is how they all look and they work pretty much like a home depot in that you shop and grab and basically wander aimlessly from lighting to hardware to gardening to plumbing looking at a number of shiny things you have no use for. But if you need a shovel, chaux, masonry, trowels, big garbage bags and power tools, this is your place. But bear in mind this is still France, so this place is closed from 12-2 for 'lunch'. Another way that they differ markedly from American big box hardware shops is in the service: They are very helpful. Take this exchange, where yours truly tries to buy a pair of work gloves:

Me: (In broken French): Hello sir. I would like... no, no... I have need of... things.

Mr. Bricolage: (In French, so I didn't understand but I bet it was this:)Lucky for you then, this place is full of things.

Me: My French is terrible.

Mr. Bricolage: Yes it is.

Me: I need, for my house, things to work with. You put them around your hands.

Mr. Bricolage: Around your hands? Or ON?

Me: On.

Mr. Bricolage: (In English) Then why didn't you just say 'gloves'?

The word for gloves is 'gants', by the way.

-L'H

First Look - 3rd Floor

The third floor is interesting because it doesn't use space very well. This is more or less how it looked upon purchase. It should be noted that the vertical wall and the horizontal wall on the left side are the only two 'load bearing' walls in the whole place. The rest of the load is held up on 4x8 oak beams that run north south. These beams are supported on each floor by one massive 6x12 rough-hewn beam that runs down the middle. On this floor all of those ar obscured not only by the walls, but by probably 3,000 pounds of ceiling plaster. That will come out.

In this picture, which would be the bottom right corner on the map above, you can see not only a crack in the plaster exposing the cross-hatch wood and horsehair mortar insulation (most commonly called Tudor-style here in the US), but also the rough hewn wood planks of the flooring, which is in fairly good condition, at least on this floor. I intend to retain the flooring, which is in thick one-foot planking, and sand and gap it. I will probably use tung oil for staining, if I stain at all. This flooring has worked exceptionally well for 300 years, and it would be retarded to tear it up now.

This room is top right on the map. The wall on the right is NOT load bearing and it will come out. Eventually a bathroom may go here, but for the time being I'm hoping to maximize light in this room. I also need to get all that plaster out. It's useless weight on the house and all it does by essentially lowering the ceiling a foot, is give the feeling of a choked space bending under its own weight, which is what it's actually kind of done over the past 200 years.

The plaster ceiling:

-L'H

My Cantou

A cantou is a very large fireplace, traditional in older homes. It is not meant, contrary to popular belief, to have a fire so big you could spit roast an entire deer in it. No, actually the reason cantous are so big and deep is so the on very cold nights one could get in the cantou with the fire and the stone walls' radiant heat would keep you warm while you knitted or darned or whatever the hell people did back before the industrial age*. This will not stop me from attempting to spit roast a deer in it when it's all said and done.

So this is my cantou. The fireplace area is 7 feet across, 3 feet deep and 5 and a half feet tall. I am in love with this thing. The top is made up of three big, rough masoned plinth stones, like some sort of home dolmen. It's so massive that the first floor wall comes out to support it. For sizing that is a massive grandma iron stove inside the cantou. When I have finished removing that stove (called a poele) and removing the wood walls the previous owner installed inside, I will use chaux (a primitive lime masonry, much more on this later) and restore the inside. I will re-mortar the outside, but I am going to leave the stone exposed.

Then I am going to sleep inside it and dream of meat.

*Answer: Toil endlessly.

First look - 2nd floor

The 2nd floor is the heart of this house. It has the kitchen and the ginormous cantou (fireplace), as well as the balcony. As soon as the hideous walls are gone, it won't be so dark and gloomy either. Some pre-demolition shots:

A view from the second floor balcony. This is looking to the right.

This is the 2nd floor den. to the right of the armoire is a wall that is the wall on the left in the next shot. Notice the fugly ubiquitous wallpaper applied DIRECTLY to the plaster that covers the stone. Those walls are about 3 feet thick. You can see it by how deep the window doors are recessed into the walls.

This is the kitchen. to the right of the picture (but not visible) is the cantou. I may have agreed to buy this place just for that. The wall on the left is the shared wall. It is NOT load bearing.

In the Beginning.

The ironic thing, of course, is that it was her idea and dream. I was not particularly gung ho on buying an old house in France. But we were literally bleeding away all the money we made from restoring and selling a house in DC, and if this locked it up, at least that kept it from going into a new domain couch every year and super expensive toys. But there we were, one day, landing in Bordeaux and driving east. We met several immobiliers along the way, shopping houses in Tarn, Garonne, Aquitaine. None of them really worked for us, but at least the price was encouraging. Houses in parts of France not called Provence or Paris are actually reasonable, if you're willing to put the work in yourself. We originally perused several sites online to find immobiliers, pricing and an general plan of attack. Eventually, in the Aveyron, we struck paydirt.

It should be noted that this house was not listed on any website, and the only reason we found it was because we spent more than a day with our very sweet immobilier (realtor) Nick. He came to understand what we wanted (rustic, something that would reward 'sweat equity' (in other words, not what the average Frenchman wanted in a French home). He took us to see a few that just might do the trick.

Like all houses under 50,000 Euros, it needed work on the inside, and lots of it. But it had charm and as an American, the most solid walls I had ever seen in the home. Being inside the bastide (a city wall made essentially of houses) and supposedly from the late 18th century just made it even more of a steal. But we didn't jump right away, French realty does not work like the American market used to. Houses can and will sit for months, even years. So we felt no pressure to buy without having it thoroughly inspected.

We paid an English engineer 1,800 euro to inspect it, which he did and pronounced it sound (with a few nagging issues to be discussed later). After that, it was pretty simple. I wired the money through Customhouse.com to the immobilier, we paid the yearly taxes (based on the square yardage of the place and very affordable, in our case 190 euros a year) my ex-wife (not ex back then) went to sign the papers and we took possession of two skeleton keys and one old house. Now all we had to do a little light work (demolition of soft partitions, cleaning of attic, new electrics, new plumbing, rebuild the attic, new windows, staircase reconficuration, repointing of brick, replastering and new bathrooms). And from that moment on, my ex started to lose interest in the house at a rate that would terrify bankers. What had started out as her idea, then morphed into our house in France, had finally turned into my 10-year project. Along the way, plans were shed, timetables missed, and eventually a marriage ended (luckily not because of the house). I was going to go it alone. How hard could it be?

-L'homme du maison