Done. Gone. Yippee.

It had to happen. Things have been going almost unbelievably smoothly, a hitch was inevitable.

A couple of weeks ago one of the electricians told me that they thought that the panels in the dining room were made of asbestos. I mentioned this to Monsieur G., who poo pooed the idea, telling me to leave the wiring to the electricians and the rest to him. I was happy to believe him - after all we have the asbestos report, legally required to be provided by the seller, which says there is asbestos elsewhere (in the basement and the little studio, we were going to deal with that later) and nothing in the dining room or the little room that we are turning into a toilet and cloakroom. The panels mysteriously disappeared from the dining room, thus successfully removing the problem. I thought no more about it. Then last Friday, just before we left for London, another electrician mentioned that he thought the panels in the cloakroom were asbestos. Since they were about to make a doorway there I realised that I couldn't ignore this, so I told them to do nothing until I came back from London, when I would make an appointment with an expert to find out if it is asbestos.

Walking back to my car I saw a poster advertising the services of an architect who does asbestos reports. I called him straightaway, left a message, and when I got back late last night there was a message from him. He agreed to go round right away - his office is round the corner to the house - and confirmed that it is asbestos. Even I could see it was. He was reassuring though, promising me that it does no harm if you don't actually drill holes in it. The problem is that the electricians have been drilling holes for plugs already, and the plumber is due to. So I told the painters and the electricians that they have to stop work immediately in that room and give me 24 hours to decide what to do. I found myself in tears, to the absolute bemusement of the kind man who had offered his opinion, and Saeed the painter, who actually put his arm around me to try and comfort me - I couldn't really explain that I was really weeping about the most ghastly week that I have just spent with my mother in law. They all presumably think it's because I care so much about their health - which I do, but not to the point of weeping.

After midnight

Am sitting here, past midnight, trying to make a list of bathroom things - taps, sinks, shower trays, loos - for four bathrooms, and a loo. this whole project is insane, really. I can't believe I'm doing this. I don't even know how much money we've spent so far, or how much more we are about to spend. Just tons and tons and tons. And tons. And then some more. And how can a shower enclosure possibly cost 1500 euros?

My first list was a silly mixture of quality stuff and the cheapest you could imagine. I mean, who cares what a shower tray looks like? I gave it to the plumber this afternoon and this afternoon he came round here to tell me that I was mad getting this cheap crap, that I would regret it and that the pleasure of saving a few sous would be quickly reversed when things started to crack and need to be replaced. So I've sat here for the last two hours ploughing my way through catalogues once again - smarter ones this time, so generally less depressing, but still fucking dull - and making lists of toilet fittings. This is definitely the downside of renovations.

But we got a great quote from a kitchen guy who's going to custom make an island on an IKEA skeleton. The rest of the kitchen is IKEA with custom worktops. It's boring to read about but surprisingly fun to think about.

Took MIL to see the house. She was quite taken aback, I think by the size mostly. She really couldn't speak. I don't really know what she thought.

Actually I lied. I didn't get Vola taps, they are out of stock in the UK and if I order them now they won't arrive before we leave, so I got the next best thing, which I have to admit is kind of better - they look almost like Vola but don't cost as much, but are still expensive enough to qualify as decent quality. But not so bad that I will never forget how much they were.

I did want Vola, but now it's out of my hands...

Today wasn't as bad as I had feared. Monsieur G wasn't sniffy with Window Man and Window Man seemed to think that they would make only a minimum of mess (having warned me it could be pretty awful, and the whole house is pretty much going to be done by the time they come in, which I was beginning to be afraid could lead to a lot of extra decorating woes).

I spent an amazing day last Friday with an experienced brocanteur friend of mine, who knows how to reupholster and lay wood panelling and all sorts of stuff that is way beyond my ken. She has an amazing eye for stuff and how you can recycle it. The place she took me too, in the middle of nowhere, is a veritable treasure trove of tat and other stuff, parquet, iron railings, masses of terrible dark wood Victoriana, cast iron spiral staircases, enormous stone gryphons and dragons, station lights, beds that look like the one your granny died in. It covers an enormous patch of land, and we were there for hours, sifting through old mirrors and doors and trying not to give in to temptation. Of course in the end we did - that's what we were there for - and I bought an incredible mirror that came from a hotel particulier in Paris and will look fantastic in our living room above the fireplace. A few bits of it got broken when it was removed, he gave them to me in a pot, they looked like something nasty you might be asked to bite on at the dentist's. A whole pot of dirty, strangely shaped bits of plaster. We got three other mirror frames between us, which we need to spend a day cleaning up and painting, for 50 euros each (I'm not telling how much the first one was. Way, way more than I would ever have considered spending on a mirror, but oh, it's so beautiful).



H also gave me the idea of buying an old unloved chest of drawers for the bathroom, painting it, plonking on a piece of marble and sticking a sink on top. At her bidding I discovered the fortnightly Maisons Laffitte auction house, where lo and behold there was a perfect little washstand, complete with marble top. I overbid for it, to be sure to get it (luckily, since someone else wanted it) but just the cost of the marble justified it - 230 euros for the lot. Painted, topped with a Duravit sink and Voila! (if not Vola), it's going to be just about perfect.

tell me why I don't like Tuesdays

I'm dreading tomorrow. I have to get up at the proverbial crack of dawn, share a crowded train with a bunch of disgruntled commuters, schlep over to the absolute opposite end of Paris to sit with a book designer and input all the corrections to the text of the book I just translated, try to find my about-to-be eleven year old son a birthday present that he will like and yet that does not correspond to what he actually wants (his own computer - why do children grow out of lego? And what do we give them for their birthdays during the period that ends with them rediscovering how great it is, cf Michael Borowitz?), pick up tile samples (how can something like unbevelled metro tiles be so hard to locate in this city?), rush back to my house to be bollocked...

Way back when, oooh, at least a month ago, I found someone to replace my windows in a way that seemed to respect the house. All that was great, except that inadvertently I upset my lovely Monsieur G, who was fully intending to do it himself, albeit not very well nor very cheaply. I was nice but firm, because it is after all my house, but I could tell that I had really offended him, and he was making quite an effort not to be shirty with me. He found a subtle way to be shirty with me after all though, and it's all coming out now. The Window Man called me on Saturday to ask for a meeting with Monsieur G to talk about the mess that they are going to make when they put the windows in. I transmitted the message only to receive a sulky earful in return, insisting that he didn't want to meet the Window Man, that the mess was their problem, and by extension mine, but certainly not his, and that if I insisted on being ripped off by some shyster I would have to sort the problem out myself. It took all my reserves of niceness to pacify him but this I fear will run and run....

I have managed to order taps and paint in England. Unbelievably noone in France has even heard of Vola. I got so fed up I just ordered them from a shop in Primrose Hill. C will be driving a car back loaded with the equivalent of four baby elephants (enough paint for the whole house, three lights, a chair and six taps). I can't quite say vive the falling pound, since I'm not exactly going to be unaffected, but at least we are squeezing something positive out of the imminent global recession.

My friend A, who knows everyone round here, looked knowingly at me the other day when I delightedly told her that every time I go round to the house, whether it's Easter Monday or a snowy Saturday afternoon (there was an inch of snow on the car this morning, like an unseasonal harbinger of discontent for the Olympic flame that barely made it through Paris today for all the protestors), the painters are in there diligently stripping away, or plastering, laying glass fibre paper (a new one on me, which a little scarily hides any superficial cracks in the walls, but I am assured that if anything serious is going on it will split, which I suppose is a good thing) or layering on lashings of undercoat. They are so far ahead of schedule that they are ready to polish and varnish the floors.

The first floor and downstairs are looking coolly beautiful in their underclothes:





According to A, the reason they are steaming ahead with my house is every other project these guys are supposed to be working on (including a grim tragedy when a very beautiful old house that always makes me think it would sit well in Charleston, north Carolina, in its lacy prettiness, burned down a few months ago almost to a shell (noone was injured, it caught fire during the school run, which may or may not contain a moral for us all, if you can find it)) is languishing, whilst my builder's entire team is doing overtime on my place. Do I care? I most certainly do and I jolly well hope they will continue to focus all their attention on us and ignore everyone else.

They are so bizarrely ahead of schedule that they have started on the third floor, which they weren't meant to get to until October:













That is going to be my bath one of these days. I asked them to reinforce the bathroom floor; the bath apparently weighs 200 kilos when empty and obviously a good deal more filled with water and me.

The plumber is hard at work like a mole in the cellar. Every so often he pops up for air. He really does look like a mole, he's small and a little squat with whiskers and chubby cheeks, and as you would expect from a mole, holes are appearing all over the house (ready to receive the 20 odd renovated old cast iron radiators that I ordered last week).

Tomorrow I'm going to bite the bullet and order taps and baths and things. I'm bored of thinking about all that so I suppose the only thing to do is to do it and then forget about it. We still haven't ordered the kitchen either. I can't stand all this decision making.

Am feeling a bit wobbly about the next step. I have to make real decisions about what I want it to look like and I am finding myself incredibly reticent to do this. What happens if it looks horrible? I'm kind of on my own with this because C, whilst competent on many fronts, is hilariously rubbish at anything visual. I discovered when we were painting our house in London that his answer to the question 'What colour shall we paint this?' - where 'this' could be anything at all, from the front door to my eyelids - was always 'yellow'. It was sort of funny and cute and anyway I always disregarded it but now I find myself wishing that he could engage at least vaguely with the question. Actually to be fair he has been - I've got my ridiculous swatch of Farrow and Ball nearly-colours on large pieces of sugar paper that I dutifully shift around rooms to catch rays of sunlight or dusky shadow to see how they change, just like they tell you to do in decorating magazines and boy have I read a few of those, and having chosen two not-whites for the living room (to go with the hastily-purchased orange and red saris that we bought in Madurai to make curtains - I know, they sound horrible, but actually they're gorgeous and anyway I have a thing for orange silk curtains) he suddenly objected to one of them on the grounds that it was 'too yellow'. Uh? You like yellow, don't you? The off white he objects to isn't yellow at all, which makes me wonder about all the other semantic misunderstandings that may pepper the history of our relationship.

But back to my wobbles. I went to the house today and began to wonder if everything was wrong, from the hole in the kitchen wall to the larder to the way we've divided up our bed and bathroom, to where the children are going to sleep. Everything. It's worth admitting that the house is a bit of a mad hotchpotch of different bits that have been added on every so often over the last 150 years and we made the decision to leave it that way, which maybe was not the right decision. I feel completely paralysed now. We can't go back on the things we've done but I suddenly can't bear to commit to anything further. I'm almost going off the whole project, which is a bit like being six months pregnant and changing your mind, in that at this point it's not realistic to think that I can run away to live in an igloo in Greenland. Really tempting though.