Monday, March 31, 2008

The rooms, they are a changing...

Took my friend C to see the house this weekend. C teaches history by day, paints by night, and lives with her two girls in a very tiny apartment in the Goutte d'Or. I wasn't sure if her bohemian instincts would be utterly disgusted by the bourgeois excess of our oversized mansion, but she was really lovely about it; she described it afterwards to her partner A, saying, "Elle est grande oui, mais d'un certain cote elle reste modeste. C'est vraiment une belle maison de famille".

There are some decent before and after photo ops now.

This room is R's bedroom. It had this odd asymmetrical thing going on around the fireplace; the door on the far right was just leaning against a hole into the next room. it didn't look terrible, until we scratched beneath the surface and found this:



There didn't seem much to do except try to put it all back together again somehow. And so now it looks like this:



Instead of the fireplace looking like a hat put on at unfortunately jaunty angle, just waiting to fall, it's regained a bit of dignity with a proper chimney breast, and where there was once a broken door there's now a nice wide niche just right for some shelves. Shelves are the things that occupy my mind most of the time nowadays, being of course the thing that one simply never has enough of, ever. I think in this house we might finally have enough shelves, and some lovely ones too. Quite by chance I discovered the gorgeous String System and have managed to justify the purchase of it for the kitchen by promising (to myself, since I don't think anyone else really cares) that the rest of the kitchen will be dirt cheap IKEA:



(Except that IKEA kitchens aren't dirt cheap any more, but nothing is really, considering that the euro seems to be the only currency not in complete freefall at the moment.)

Monday, March 24, 2008

F***cking shepherdesses


Funnily enough, one of the people I know who uses toile de jouy in a non-ironic way popped in to see the house today, and in the process reminded me of what a sensitive business this renovation thing can be. I knew from the minute she stepped over the threshold that it was a bad idea, and every step she took confirmed this. The sharp intakes of breath I'm used to, but I couldn't quite forgive the endless slightly disparaging remarks about the plans we have for decoration (the old 'How can you possibly have an IKEA kitchen in a house like this' which I'm fairly used to and pretty much impervious to, but her snottiness went much further than that, to the extent that I just want her to get OUT). She did that old 'With all the experience I have in renovating houses I think I know better than you' which of course gave me a headache with the effort of keeping back the words that were just desperate to come out, (cf toile de jouy and a certain kind of taste that may not be shared by all). She was all 'Oh', pursing her lips disapprovingly 'You're going to have to walk through the kitchen to get to the dining room, are you sure that that is a good idea?' Apart from anything else this is simply the layout of the house which we decided to keep; I sort of muttered feebly about that being the way that we entertain but she was totally unimpressed. And then she went on and on and on about how we were never going to be able to move in in July and we had no idea what we had taken on. 'But it has the makings of a lovely house, if you do think you'll be able to do it up properly.' I think she was hoping that I would ask her to help me, but given my strong feelings about toile de jouy and swagged curtains, I think that would not be such a great idea.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Finger painting

One freezing cold day in January, full of enthusiasm, we took the children to see the house. They walked around in a kind of catatonic trance, speechless, then in a rather muted tone said that they preferred to play outside in the garden. Afterwards we asked them if they like the house and, as one, they looked at us as if to say 'You have finally, definitively, lost the plot'. 'No', said A, speaking for them all. 'It's absolutely horrible.' We felt slightly crushed, and it wasn't until later that I realised that we had forgotten to mention that we would be doing it up before we actually moved in.

To be honest, it's hard for an adult to summon up enough imagination to be able to picture the derelict house in front of their eyes transformed into a comfortable home. I shouldn't have expected the children to be able to accomplish that feat. I decided that it would be best not to make them come to the house too often, to avoid total morale collapse. I am occasionally forced to bring them along with me when I have to see the plumber or whatever after school, and when I do that I endeavour to make them see how far it's coming along, but I's exclamation last Tuesday - 'It looks like a bomb hit it!' - suggests that he hasn't yet developed the eye.

Yesterday though I enlisted their help in painting sheets of sugar paper with Farrow and Ball paints to test the infinite variations of white that we are going to choose between. They enthusiastically set to, dipping their big brushes into dimity little pots labelled Hague Blue, Rectory Red, Great White, James White, off White and House White, expressing surprise and delight at the genuine differences between all these shades. When they had finished they spent ages consulting the colour cards and choosing which colours they want their rooms painted. I've managed to persuade R to have Borrowed Light, A wants Pavillion Blue and I wants, god help us, either black or crimson. Incipient Goth tendencies, anyone? It's tempting to say no, but that doesn't seem quite right, so I've said he can have a single wall in either.

It turns out that paint in France is either top quality imported or a really rubbish and yet amazingly expensive synthetic domestic product. I think that's because, unlike in England where the upper classes traditionally favoured paint, historically the French aristocracy and later on the bourgeoisie favoured wallpaper or, for the truly wealthy and aesthetically-challenged, fabric printed with small-scale monochome shepherdesses, a look that mysteriously persists in this age of decorative enlightenment amongst extremely wealthy Americans trying for that oh so sophisticated European look.

So there isn't really a tradition of quality paint or historic colours for interior paints in France. I suppose that's why all elegant Parisian apartments are painted dead white all over - a lovely elegant look if you don't have children and have had your mess gene surgically removed. Farrow and Ball is twice the price it is in England and even cheap paint from a big hardware store costs about what F and B costs in the UK - ie for synthetic paint in really nasty colours you could get delicious F and B if you can be bothered to make the trip. So it's kind of inevitable that when we go back to London in April to get the car serviced and MOTed (because yes we still have an English UK registered car that we can't quite work out what to do with) we'll load it up with paint. As well as lights - I've splurged on a few lovely lights that cost up to £300 less in England because of the drop in value of sterling. Leading to a recapitulation of the clouds and silver lining theory - although we lost a lot of money converting our money from sterling to Euro in January (having failed to notice that sterling had done a nose dive since last November) we will claw back a tiny fraction of it on buying our paints and our lights in England! Every little helps!

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

So much going on, a massive deadline I'm about to miss being the main reason that I've not written, as well as nightmare school applications (totally Kafkaesque - you pay 160 euros for each child to apply to a school for which they have to sit an exam and for which there are no places) and, of course, the house. 

I meant to have photos of windows to show you in detail what I've been going on about, but didn't get round to it. The house is so dusty that I'm not sure my camera even still works. (Also to please my blogging mentor, whose gentle criticism has been taken to heart). 

But things are looking up, after a weekend of worrying that I was losing my dignity, as well as betraying the house. I have found the windows I want! For the same price as the ones I don't want. A bit of pootling around on Google one night when I was feeling very low led me to a company that specialises in historically accurate windows. A man whose passion for history and architecture is such that he sometimes refuses to change windows if they have historical significance. And, almost unbelievably, the company is based about ten minutes from where we lived. I can't believe I hadn't found him before. 

The next day I called and couldn't stop myself blurting out how miserable I was about all the horrid shysters who had come to give me quotes for nasty windows that weren't going to look anything like the old windows.  I must have touched him because having said initially that he had no time to come for over a fortnight he then agreed to come on Monday afternoon. He walked around the house dating windows through their hinges and closures, pointing out the different styles of how the wood was carved, according to whether they were first Empire or Haussmanien. I was enthralled, and cautiously excited. After all if he cost twice what the others cost we just couldn't afford it. 

The next morning he called. When his name popped up on my mobile I started to shake, I was so afraid he was about to quote a sum so astronomical that there was simply no way we would be able to justify it. He gently suggested that I sit down, since I was going to be shocked - and then proceeded to quote a price that was literally fractionally more more than the other quotes I've got. I nearly burst into tears. 

He takes the metal closures from the old windows and puts them onto the new ones. He calls them the fingerprints of history.  

Thursday, March 13, 2008

In which Lydia Bennett wonders why all men treat her like a complete nincompoop

I thought I was doing really well, and today the carpet got pulled from underneath my feet, the veil slipped off, the illusion was shattered and all sorts of rather beautiful cliches got called into use. 
It's all about how people treat you, after all, life, isn't it? My day can be pretty much made by some arbitrary stranger being unexpectedly nice (obviously this is even more true in France, being that much less likely to happen) and of course vice versa - I don't know about you, but the morning can be completely ruined by someone behaving like a total fuckwit. Like the waiter in the cafe in Paris who once told me that if I wanted to pass as a genuine French person I had to learn to drink coffee properly (I had ordered a cafe creme, and he had got out of bed on the goddamned ceiling that morning).
We've got this big house, and it has a lot of windows, all of which are rotten, and anyway we wanted to do the environmentally friendly thing and insulate properly, which folks means special glass and a big bill. Well it was my husband who wanted to do the environmental thing (tax deductable, you see); I just wanted it to look nice. So I have been very insistent that I want nice new windows that look quite a lot like the old windows. It turns out that you can't just say 'I'd like to replace the windows, I'd like them to look the same as the old ones, have the same kind of 19th century fastening, but have better insulating glass'. I thought that was quite specific, but apparently not specific enough. I got three quotes and when I asked about each one in detail it turned out that each one was for the most basic kind of window that doesn't look a jot like the ones they are replacing. Another WTF moment: I had contacted one of the companies because they had done the windows in our stylish cousin's place in Paris and they were really beautiful and she couldn't speak highly enough of their workmanship. So I called and asked them to give me a quote to do the same kind of windows as in Mme T's flat, which they duly did.  The quote was so reasonable that I couldn't believe it, which turned out to be a fortunate lapse of faith, as when I questioned them in a bit of detail it turned out that the quote was for the very cheapest kind of window that you can get in wood (I suppose I ought to be grateful that it wasn't for PVC). When I realised, I called them to say that it wasn't what I wanted and they agreed to come back to talk about doing them properly. When I asked why they hadn't given me a quote for windows like Mme T's, even though that was what I had specifically asked for, the talkative one of the pair said innocently 'Ah! Vous parlez des fenetres qui donnent sur la rue! Nous on a cru que vous parliez de celles qui donnent sur le cour'. Which translates roughly as 'Oh! You mean the fancy ones in the main rooms! We thought you were talking about the really lousy ones in the servants' quarters!' Anyway they came up with a quote for sort of the kind of windows I'm after, done in traditional style with a typically French 19th century style iron knob thing to close it. It was no more expensive than the first quote, so I was pretty pleased, only when I looked at it properly they'd changed the glass to a kind that no longer qualifies for the tax break because it doesn't comply with environmental norms. It's all so technical and so detailed that it's only by chance that I realised: a month ago the figures 4/10/4 wouldn't have rung any warning bells, as I'm quite sure they still don't for most people. (I was recently trying to explain the various ways of replacing windows to a friend of mine, telling her about the controversy surrounding one particular technique - it's true, it's a bit of a hot potato of a subject for those who care about such things - and she interrupted with a look of concerned puzzlement and gently suggested that I should find some alternative form of entertainment to take my mind off such things.)


Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Is all property theft? Apparently so, sometimes

I probably shouldn't write about this, but since only two of you are reading it I'll take the risk. I was hanging out at the house last Wednesday, chewing the fat with the painters, as you do, when a man came to the front gate waving a sheaf of papers and asking to come in. There was something about the papers that made me unwilling to open up so we talked through the railings. He was the son of the now deceased owner of the house next door, and he wanted me to know that the house was being sold and that the new owner had been apprised of the possibility that a part of our garden actually belongs to his house. In an oddly affable way, considering what he was asking of me, he said that he just wanted me to sign an 'accord' about this, though without explaining what precisely he wanted me to agree to. Since obviously I'm not in accord with the notion that my garden is actually his I wasn't about to sign anything. I told him to get his lawyer to write to us and refused to discuss it any further, although I agreed to let him have my mobile number.

On Friday night, in the lobby of a cinema in London, my mobile goes. It's the new owner of the house, just ringing to let me know that he still thinks my garden is his but he's going to be nice and let my children carrying on playing in it. Just so long as he can access his garden through my garden whenever he needs to. He insists, and I agree with him, that the most important things is that we have good neighbourly relations, and he isn't going to do anything to jeopardise (I've tried spelling this four different ways, all wrong apparently) this, just so long as I recognise that it's really his garden and he's being a real gentleman about this. I tell him, as nicely as I can (I have a bit of problem which is that I can do really nice and really mean but I struggle with anything in between) that I don't think he has a claim on my garden but I appreciate the sentiment.

Yesterday I visited the service d'urbanisme of the commune to find out more. A nice woman shows me the website of the cadastraux, which is the French land registry and shows the boundaries of every plot of land. It is not quite the final say, in that it can be disputed, but according to our notaire, it's generally recognised to be the official map of your terrain. Nonetheless, according to the woman I spoke to at the cadastraux, it has no legal weight, it's entirely topographical...Still, reassuringly, it clearly shows that our garden belongs to our house and not to his. Last night he calls. I tell him that I've been to the cadastraux, that it unequivocally shows that the terrain belongs to us, and that he needs to stop bothering us about it. He tells me that he has some fifty year old plans that show that there used to be a wall there and that at that time that bit of garden belonged to his house. I ask him what happened in the interim, when and why the wall got moved and why it's not registered as still belonging to him. Then I asked him straight, does he want this land. He says no. I ask him in that case why he's pursuing it, if he doesn't even want it. As far as I can tell, officially it's ours and will remain so unless he brings a land surveyor in - as he tells me he is planning to do -who can prove that the cadastraux are wrong.

Somehow this feels like a feud straight out of Balzac. He just wants to be friends. I just want my garden. And yet he isn't going to let it rest.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

What's the time, Mr Wolf?

Much of my time at the moment is spent pretending to be someone else. Someone who understands French better than I do, someone who knows what she's talking about when discussing the intricacies of damp proof courses and RSJs, someone who cares about paint colours other than white. It's quite a familiar feeling - what parent hasn't marvelled at how wierd it is to be responsible for another human being whilst not feeling responsible enough to be looking after oneself? - but somehow lately the feeling has become acute. I've been feeling no older than 15 lately, and that's an improvement on the seven year old of last week. It may be a desperate attempt to shuffle off the responsibility of this whole project onto some other being dressed up as me, and it may just be that for some reason a lightness of being has crept up on me and made me incapable of a single serious thought (though heaven knows I was serious enough at 15, so it can't be that). Anyway I'm back in outer Paris after a refreshing pit stop in London last weekend to see my new adorable goddaughter Nell Bella Georgia Mabel Molly May Burton (and I may well have missed a couple of syllables there, apologies).
On Monday I went to check that the house was still standing, and found that the street was blocked by a line of fire engines. Fire engines serve multiple purposes here in France, from scooping up old ladies who've fallen over their shopping trolleys to rescuing children who've fallen down wells, only occasionally being pressed into service to put out fires, so it didn't necessarily mean anything bad. Overactive imaginations never listen to reason and it was inevitable that I would spend the seven minutes going the long way round picturing the dusty heap of bricks that was once my house forlornly occupying the plot. (I find if you imagine the worst it usually isn't that, a useful trick for warding off bad things.)
Well, the house is a mess, dusty and filled with rubble where once there were floors, but it is still standing, and some of it is looking downright lovely. This was the hall when we bought the house:


Now it looks like this:


I can't help thinking I'm right about white paint. This may only be undercoat but it's hard to see how it could be improved upon.

This meanwhile was a bedroom with a harmless bit of broken joist bringing the ceiling down which unfortunately you can hardly see:


Now it looks like this:

This, by the way, is what the salon/sejour looked like originally. I think I'd forgotten this because it was so disturbing, I can't shift the idea of it as the Bates Motel a la francaise from my mind:

It still gives me a chill to see it, even though its transformation appears to have exorcised the ghosts:


Oh, and my parents, my husband and Cath were right. The hole has been made in the kitchen wall, with two massive RSJs holding up the house, and through the rubble I can see that my whole life has improved with the destruction of the wall. Sorry folks. At least I know when I'm beat. And when I'm wrong:



Monday, March 3, 2008

Week 4

It's quite a good idea to go away for a week. Two things are good about it - one is that you allow your imagination to get carried away and think all sorts of dreadful things are happening because you aren't around to prevent them (ha! such delusions) and the second is that after a week all sorts of things have happened that are actually good - ie progress has been made - and nothing quite as bad as your imagination would have it.

So, beginning of week 4 and where are we. The living room is the room to hang out in at the moment. All the old shit has been scraped away, and a lovely layer of undercoat has been applied and the whole thing looks light and sunny and beautiful, far far more beautiful that it did before. No more tobacco coloured walls and net curtains like your granny's tights. The photo doesn't do it justice:

It's a bit of a shame that the electrician has yet to go in and do his thing - they're going to have to start all over again when he's done his worst in there, but so long as I don't have to pay twice I don't really care.

Upstairs, where the electrician has almost finished, is looking okay too, not quite as classy but not too bad at all. He was very patient with me this morning when I asked him to redo the lights by our bed. I'm sure he wanted to throw something at me but he managed to smile.



Because there must always be something troubling to balance out the smoothness, in another part of the house the ceiling is coming down. We always knew it was, we just weren't sure why. Now we know. The joists have rotted right through and snapped in some places. As with the living room, the photo doesn't really do it justice:


Trust me, it's worse that it looks.

Meanwhile predictably enough one of the Egyptian painters has decided I am quite the nicest woman he has ever worked for and is promising me a 'grand cadeau d'Egypte' when I next go in. I dread to think what it will be. We smoked a cigarette together this morning while he told me how much he loves the 'Britsch' and reeled off names of football clubs. 'Munchster? No? Chelsea? Roogby? No? Tea with milk?' When I agreed to the last he was clearly relieved and wished me Mazal Tov. Do I look like a typically English Jew or was that just a stab in the dark? Had he perhaps misplaced his glossary? Was he just searching for any non-Arabic/non-French word he could unearth or was I unmasked? I nodded noncomitally.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

How much did you say?!? *!?!?*!

Wow. I knew when we went into this we'd be in for some big surprises. But still. How much could it cost to replace a few windows? Your turn to guess! I'm going to have a stiff drink.