The Builders are Back!

They arrived yesterday morning.  France takes the view that Christmas is a one day affair and then everything gets back to normal, but even so, to have them back on site first thing on a Monday morning is amazing.

Mind you, progress yesterday was one step forward, two back.

We decided that we wanted to have the lounge colombage repaired with stone work below the wooden beams, as in the dining room.  The stones in the dining room are large square blocks, so I was a bit surprised to see that the builder was putting in quite small stones.  I was even more surprised when I walked Vita last night and realised in the torch light that the small stones had been taken out of the wall that holds back the flower bed in front of the terrace!

Anyway, complete misunderstanding.  Monsieur G arrived with large stones this morning for his workmen and the small ones are being removed.  Hopefully they'll be put back where they came from!

Floor Plans

Lynne, who dips into this blog from time to time, asked if I could do a simple floor plan.

Certainly the house layout is confusing and even living here it took us time to work out how all the rooms fitted together.

This is what the house looks like at present, put together over years from an old farmhouse and outside barns.

People who know us park in front of the garage, walk past the bedroom, come along the terrace and into the kitchen.

First time callers tend to wander in the direction of the "gîte"  and get very confused.

We think the gîte was created by previous owners two or three back.  It's a big space but there is no access to it from the rest of the house (see the solid red line) except by going outside and coming in through the french windows.  Friends have stayed in it a couple of times but otherwise we've only used it as storage space and it has got very neglected.

We'd been struggling with not having a proper front entrance and now that we have the cottage where friends can stay we no longer need a guest space attached to the house.  So the gîte will become our entrance hall.  From there, two new doorways will be knocked through into the rest of the house: one will go straight into the lounge.  The other will be through what's now a large bathroom (there will still be space for a good sized shower room) into the corridor beyond and through to the kitchen. 

At the same time we're tidying up the kitchen area, putting a new water heater alongside the washing machine, knocking down a wall to give more space and putting in a new window.

The other major changes are to the bedroom next to the garage which is having a new ensuite wet room and dressing room  / wardrobe plus a new roof (over the garage as well) and proper insulation.

These are our new plans, in outline.

A third stage will entail creating an attractive corridor with windows out of the space behind the lounge and leading that into a gallery across the back wall of garage - but that's for the longer term.

This is the back wall of the lounge where the colombage has been exposed and there is already an opening (at present with shelves across) where eventually the door will go into the gîte / new entrance hall.

We've Ordered the Kitchen

Nothing's been happening in the house for about a month now.  Though Monsieur B reassures us that activity will start again early in the New Year.

Thank goodness we are in the cottage and not renting a gite somewhere, otherwise we would be beginning to worry.

The electrician decided he would rather wait until the plasterer is on site, which should happen in the middle of January.  And the roof over the bedroom and garage will be replaced (weather permitting) at the beginning of the month.

In the meatime, we have chosen and ordered the kitchen.  We've been more adventurous than we were in the cottage and have gone for a high gloss grey (or do I mean taupe?) for the units.  We debated whether Vita's claws on the gloss might be a problem, but since these days she can easily put both paws straight on the worktop and that is harder wearing we hope all will be well.  She only reaches up to the worktop when we are out of the room and if we catch her in the act she arches her back, stretches and looks over her shoulder at us so much as to say: "I'm just doing my aerobics".

We have samples of the colours so that we can choose tiles.  Bearing in mind my doubts about the tiles in the cottage, I'm not looking forward to this bit, especially as the colours of the units and the worktop change so much depending on how they are lit.

We have a provisional  installation date - some time in April I think, but this will no doubt have to change.  The owner of the kitchen shop cheerfully told us that one of their customers ordered a kitchen two years ago and is still waiting for the builders to finish so it can be installed.  Gulp!

We did gently suggest to Monsieur B that we were hoping to have friends stay with us from Easter 2010 and that more progress would be appreciated.

A Water Leak (or Two)

We're having all of the pipe work in the house replaced and when they dug down to lay the new pipes, the channels filled up with water, even though it was supposedly turned off at the main. Somewhere we had a leak under ground - probably had one for ages, which may explain the damp walls in my study.  It may also explain the size of our water bills.

So a new stopcock has been installed in the manhole at the back of the house where the meter sits and we've new pipe (protected in its red sheath) laid from there into the house. This was not part of the original estimate, but we're resigned to the fact that each stage of the build will throw up something unexpected.

There's still water in the manhole and the trench outside though.  Hopefully this is just from all the rain we've had in the last few days and not another leak.

Water in the channel cut  for the water pipe

 
The new pipe into the manhole

Slow Progress

Progress on the house is very leisurely.  Nothing like the rush and bustle of the Poles when they were doing the cottage.

The French builders are all working on other projects, so they squeeze us in from time to time.  Sometimes it's a bit like having elves on the project.  We don't see anyone. There is no van parked in front of the house, and yet there is some small change.  So when do they come and work?

They may not be working much on our house, but they have been helpful.  Monsieur G. lent us his large truck with a crane on the side and a driver so Tod could collect the attachments for the tractor.  We now have a rusty plough, harrow and another thingy with lots of arms sitting on the drive.

In the meantime we're snug in the cottage.

Foundations of the New En-suite

The second bedroom is about as far away as possible from our one bathroom. Anyone taken short in the night has to find their way in the dark across the lounge, through the dining room, across the kitchen, past the utility room and along a corridor.

So an en-suite bathroom in the second bedroom is a priority. But the bedroom, with its sloping roof giving it a shape like a triangular slab of cheese, is a challenge. It was probably a cowshed attached to the main house with steps down to it from what's now the lounge. The end nearest the lounge soars up to a colombage wall. Yet this is the end where the en-suite needs to go.



To build a small box for the en-suite in the tallest corner seemed grotesque. This was the skill of our architect - to raise the box of the en-suite so it was on a level with the lounge entrance and put cupboards underneath into the bedroom. To give symmetry, a matching box is to be built the other side of the steps from the lounge for a walk-in wardrobe. The foundations for these two boxes are already down.

The Lounge Back Wall 2

Things have been quiet at the house for a few days. Monsieur M has been steadily making holes for the new wiring but the major construction side has stopped. The new concrete floors are down in the lounge and the bedroom and we guess that they need to dry out.

So we wander round the house and take a closer look at the colombage wall that has been exposed in the lounge. Because it's been covered and protected, in places it's in very good condition. The mud and straw have not dried out and fallen away and still hold the small branches that act as cross members between the vertical beams.




Colombage has been used as a building method for hundreds of years with little change and it can be difficult to put an exact date on a building. Views differ as to the age of our house. Some say two hundred years old, others three. We wonder if the pristine sections of our colombage will allow for more precise dating and I've posted a question to the Total France forum, hoping that an expert will respond.

I find an article on the internet which tells me colombage walls are built above stone to keep the wood from getting wet and rotting. We can see some stone blocks half hidden behind the render and still hanging electrics, but elsewhere it looks as if the posts - now damp and half rotten - do go right into the ground.




Already we are looking at a large task to restore the wall, starting with cutting away the rotting beams and building a new stone base. Fortunately we have large stones left from the cottage rebuild. We then have to decide what to do with the packed mud, straw and wood above.

The Lounge Back Wall 1

Having removed the wooden floor in the lounge, the next task was to dig down and barrow out an appreciable depth of earth, so that pipes could be laid and then the space back-filled with gravel, insulation and a concrete base for the new wooden floor.



The back wall of the lounge was just painted white with some horizontal and vertical struts and before we started we wondered whether there was old colombage behind and if so whether it was worth revealing. The wall made the decision for us.

As the builders began to dig down, the wall began to move and crack. It had been faced with "bricks" (thin, red brick tiles) which had then been plastered and painted over. These just rested on the earth and as it was cleared away they began to slide down. Old egg cartons, wedged behind the facing (a paradise for mice and rats) slid out of the bottom.





Over night the whole of the back wall shifted downwards.



The facing had to come off, revealing the old mud-filled colombage behind and a couple of places that had just been filled with red brick. This was probably the original back wall of the house and there may have been a doorway or window there. This is where we want to put the new doorway through into the gîte (soon to be entrance hall).

The Lounge Floor

The lounge floor is where work on the house has started.



We knew right from the moment we moved in it had to come up. It bounced, sagged, and had rotten boards. We tried prising one or two up but couldn't see much. We thought some of the beams under the floorboards were probably rotten.

We weren't expecting to find the beams were laid straight down onto earth with little or no space beneath the floor boards.



Like other parts of this old house we can see how nothing was wasted and how the building evolved. Some of the beams have mortice holes cut in them so they must have had a previous life as supports elsewhere.



In a few places the beams have completely rotted away - probably wood-boring beetles have caused the damage.



We're glad to find the earth is dry. We feared that there might be damp under the lounge, but no.

To Recap

When we moved into our house here in the Lot & Garonne in summer 2007 we quickly discovered that what had been fine as a holiday home for the previous owners needed a lot of work if it was to be a comfortable house we could live in throughout the year.

We spent much of 2008 drawing up plans and trying to put together a team of French artisans. It was not to be and we turned our attention to restoring the cottage.

In the meantime, we found a maître d'œvre (project manager) Monsieur B. and slowly but surely through 2009 he has brought us a team of builders ready to start work on the house this autumn.

In fact the delay to starting the house has allowed us to build a beautiful cottage which will comfortably shelter us through this winter while the house is being restored. It has also given us time to fine-tune our ideas and has enabled us to learn what to expect and to bring a more realistic view to this restoration.

The financial climate has also changed and with help from Monsieur B. we have looked hard at what we can afford to do now. We also recognise that this is an old house and as we begin to restore it we are likely to find "problems" that have not been built into the budget, so we have allowed a good margin - hopefully enough. That means some of our ideas for the house are on hold for a year or two.

Much of the immediate work will be fundamental: putting in totally new plumbing and wiring, a new sewage system, replacing rotten flooring in the lounge.

Some of the work will be about comfort: smartening up the existing bathroom, building a new en-suite, putting in insulation.

And some will be about changing the way the house "works". At present there is no front door, visitors come along the veranda or wander round the back, getting lost. The "gîte" at the back has never felt part of the house because there is no way into it except by going outside. The gîte (which has some wonderful colombage) will now become our entrance hall and we will have a door from it into the lounge. We will also take out the scruffy kitchen in the gîte and knock a door through into the back of the house.

I thought I wasn't ...

... going to create another blog, but I find that I am - this time about the restoration of our house.

So much has already happened over the last few days that I want to capture and remember in the months ahead. So having (nearly) finished the cottage blog, here we go again...