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.