Friday, October 23, 2009

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).

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

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...