Diary of a barn and house restoration project in france
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which provides much of the information below and more and presents it in a more orderly and indexed fashion. There are some photos are at the end of this document, that may help explain what I am trying to describe. Also contact details, for any queries or comments that you may have.
Before the diary section - some books you might consider useful or interesting:
November 2003.
Background
In August 2001 my wife, Susan, and our two young girls came to France in the summer with a tent and the understanding that they would not return until they had found a rural idyll that we could move to. After three weeks they found this, in the shape of a rundown old farmhouse and associated outbuildings, set in 16 acres of Lot-et-Garonne countryside. This was duly purchased and we moved to France in 2001, leaving behind a life of easy living, dinner parties and executive stress.
The photographs of the property were very flattering, so it was a bit of a shock when I finally saw the property three months later, the day before we were to move in. The same family had previously owned the property since at least 1870, and still live in Villereal, the local town. They, like all rural French farmers, had devoted all their time to farming and little time to house improvements.
Now, two years later, we have renovated an old cottage (17th century, we believe) and the Perigourdine farmhouse (built 1870 and currently our home) that are on the site.
On the same site as these properties we also have an old barn, which we have now decided to renovate. The barn is constructed largely of stone, with one wall of colombage (timber struts with a mixture of mud and straw between). We don’t know the age of the barn but estimate that it is between 200 and 300 years old, based on the building techniques used and an old map that we have seen that shows the property. Hence we are reasonably confident that the barn predates the main house, built in 1870. Perhaps the house was built on the site of an earlier house, or the little cottage provided the living accommodation at that time.
We have planning permission for this work, having applied for it at the same time as the permission for the old cottage. In France this consists of a ‘Certificat d’urbanisme’ (CDU) stage – that is, is the building needs to be approved for use as human habitation, and then a planning permission stage. Interestingly, it is easier to get CDU for a barn destined to be a gite than a house, because a gite is an ‘agricultural activity’ – hence it is an application to continue with agriculture on the site rather than to develop housing. We are assured that this will make no difference after the work is completed, and that we will be free to live in the barn all year, and rent out the house as a gite.
As part of planning permission we discussed the plans with an architectural designer, so we already have a general plan for the appearance and layout of the building. We are now therefore at the stage of planning the timing of the project, considering the practical difficulties, and obtaining estimates for the costs of the work. This diary of the renovation will include the problems that we encounter, the costs involved, advice on some technical aspects of the renovation and so on. I hope that it will form a useful guide for anyone hoping to renovate a property themselves and entertainment for those who are not considering it. I will try to include general advice where possible, especially concerning those aspects of renovation where we have learnt something useful about the techniques used, additional costs encountered and so on.
We are often grilled about our experiences of renovation projects by people who we meet or who stay in the cottage, and I hope that a ‘start-to-end’ account (‘soup to nuts’ as one of my old American bosses would have described it) of this next project in some detail will be interesting to like-minded people. Inevitably some of the many incidents that occur in day to day life here will enter into the diary, partly because they are relevant and partly because they are more amusing than a detailed description of wall construction techniques. In any event they all help paint the scene of our lives in France.
November 2003
The property
Our property is sighted in the north of the Lot-et-Garonne area of south-west France, near the border with the Dordogne department, in Aquitaine. The property comprises four buildings fronting onto a courtyard, and is very typical of the properties in this area. There is a large Perigourdine house, in which we currently live; adjacent to this is a small, much older, cottage which we have successfully rented out as a gite since its renovation was completed in early summer 2003; the other side or the courtyard is a large stone barn; and at the top of the courtyard (it is on a slight slope) is a ‘tobacco barn’ – essentially a large wooden structure with a roof but no walls – that we use for car parking and storing wood.
Interestingly, although the little old cottage is only three metres from the house and has a floor area of 55 square metres, we were unaware of its existence when we bought the property. All external walls had been cemented over, and various chicken coops and rabbit hutches built on, and the interior was clad in various wooden and concrete block walls. There was little light in the building. Hence it was extremely nice to suddenly discover that it was not a concrete garage that we needed to demolish, but an ancient cottage. The entire colombage wall was intact underneath the concrete, including an original window opening with handmade security bar. Perhaps it had survived so well because it had been covered up for so long. Apart from one small section of wall that was too weak to be retained, all walls and the original roof structure have all been retained.
It is extraordinary how often we here similar tales. Some friends who bought a small town house near here found that part of the cellar had been blocked up, and when they reopened it they found a soaring room six metres high, constructed around original 12th century arches. The arches had originally formed part of an arcade over the pedestrian pathway, but had been blocked up as in some long forgotten rebuilding work, and now remade the room forms the centrepiece of the house. Other stories of stone staircase discovered under carpet and wooden planking, windows that have been long blocked up, magnificent stone fireplaces concealed under modern fireplaces and so on are all common.
Our property was owned and operated as a farm until about 2000, at which time the elderly owners moved into the nearby town and decided to sell the farm. They and their ascendants had occupied the property since 1870 or earlier. We bought the property in summer 2001, many other purchasers having been deterred, we have been told, by the ‘amount of work involved’. The property generally was in poor condition but all the roofs were largely intact which had prevented the property entering the stage of rapid decline.
The 16 acres of land surrounding the property is mostly grass and meadow, with an acre or so of woodland, and stands on a small hill providing lovely views over the surrounding countryside, in an area very popular with holidaymakers. It was a miracle that my wife and children found this house – in the two years since we arrived, we have not seen a better property for twice the price, even given its original dismal condition. The location and the proximity to the local town are simply almost impossible to find even now, just two years later, for anything like the same price. The poor superficial appearance of the buildings, both inside and outside, had certainly deterred people from looking beyond the spiders and mice and seeing the house behind.
Because of all these factors we were and are convinced that the site will make a good holiday location and have now decided to proceed with the renovation of the barn. We have already had a swimming pool installed at the property which will much significantly boost the rent that we can earn. The popularity of the little cottage with holidaymakers has reinforced this belief. We will then (probably) live in the renovated barn and rent out the house and the cottage to holidaymakers, from 2005 onwards.
Therefore we can live in the house while the work on the barn is going ahead. This is a big advantage. Living in the house at the same time as renovation work has been carried out has proved difficult at times, with the noise, the dirt and the disruption often being substantial. Because we rent out the cottage during the summer months, we can not work at the property during at least the period from the beginning of May to the middle of October, so the work will need to fall over two winter periods. Of course, the property must be left at the end of ‘winter one’ looking attractive rather than like a building site. We hope that the major building work will be completed this winter and the remaining heavy work next year, with the house being available for rent by summer 2005. Meanwhile Susan is carrying out the work outdoors, essentially landscaping fields of weeds into a more attractive garden and meadow landscape, continuing the work that has already been started.
Where to start the project
There are essentially three approaches to renovation of an old building.
One is to find a project manager or building contractor who will run the whole project from start to finish, and will deliver a completed building in due course. This project manager will sometimes be an architect who will also advise on the initial planning of the renovation. After initial discussions the involvement of the client should be reasonably low during this kind of project. Costs, of course, will be higher. If there are language problems, it will be possible to find an English speaking project manager, although experience suggest that this also substantially increases the costs. It is absolutely essential to only use a project manager approach based on personal recommendations of people who have been satisfied with the work of the individual, or to ask for references from existing clients. You or I or anyone else can call themselves a project manager, but it will not necessarily mean we are good at the job.
When we obtained estimates for our cottage, this approach indicated a price of £600-700 per square metre of building to be renovated. Why so high? Although a project manager will only charge approximately 10% of the total project cost as their ‘charge’, they have little incentive to keep your costs down, and will often wish to use their relationships with existing builders, or even their own builders, to do the work. Also there are a significant number of people who can afford to buy a ruin and throw large amounts of money at the restoration, almost regardless of the cost, since it may still appear relatively cheap. If you are the kind of person who can afford to do this, and is happy to do this, fine. There are certainly plenty of companies and individuals who will be happy to separate you from your money. But you need to be aware that this is what you are doing. The component charges of the build (the masonry, roofing etc) are also likely to be higher than if you deal directly with builders yourself, and since you are not getting separate quotes for all the individual parts of the job, it is hard to know if ‘new roof £25,000’ is a competitive quote – separate estimates for each section of the work will enable you to get the best price / quality for each individual part of the work.
Approach two is to project manage the renovation yourself, finding trades people to do the work as required. There will perhaps by certain aspects of the work that you believe you can do yourself, partly in order to reduce costs and partly for the personal satisfaction. This approach has the significant advantage that you can use builders etc who have been recommended and who are familiar with local practices. It has the disadvantage of being more stressful, especially when trying to coordinate the visits of various different groups of people e.g. plumbers and masons and electricians and struggling with the language. This approach might well be slower than the first approach, although this depends on the quality of the project manager. This is the approach we took for our cottage, and ultimately cost around £400 per square metre
The third approach is to do most of the work yourself. It is perfectly feasible to replace a roof, install a septic tank or create a new window opening yourself, if you know what you are doing. This will take much longer of course, but will be much less costly. More feasible for a small building perhaps, it is still important that the work is of ‘professional’ quality. When looking to buy a house we saw many properties renovated in this way, and generally they needed as much work doing as an unrestored property – more sometimes, since it was also necessary to undo the poor quality work first. And still the owners expected to gain the price of a renovated house for their properties. Covering a poor quality wall with wood panelling does not make a good wall, and adding new electric sockets to ancient wiring does not make your electricity safe! If you are able to take this ‘diy’ approach I would estimate a cost of £300 per square metre to be renovated, £200 if you are very able perhaps.
For the barn we will be adopting the second approach, with a sprinkling of approach three based on the experiences we have gained over the past two years. Hence for the barn, with a habitable space of 225 square metres, we expect to spend about £70,000. This is slightly distorted in cost per square metre terms by the inclusion of a 75 square metre mezzanine floor in the plans, basically an empty space, of which more later. It would be extremely easy to increase this cost by adding arched doorways, more expensive floor tiles, underfloor heating and so on.
It is commonly suggested that you should live in a house for six months without making any changes before starting work. That enables you to get a feel for the building, think about how the space could best be organised, and clarify your requirements, and avoids making expensive mistakes. The principal is the same even if the building is not habitable, as with our barn. It is difficult for most people to look at a large empty space and visualise how this space would best be used. ‘Spatial perception’ I think it is called, and it is an attribute more common among good architects, landscape designers and artists than among bankers and accountants.
Certainly it is hard for us, and we spent at least a year considering all the options, looking at magazines and so on before we spoke to an architect. We hope that we have now resolved the difficulties involved, and have a clear picture of how the finished space should look. It is common, I think, to over-convert a barn. It is easy to add lots of doors and windows, to split the height of a barn into a ground floor and an upstairs, and finish with a house rather than a barn conversion. We hope to keep the large open space and the height since that is the appeal of the building, and to preserve some sense of the history of the building after it has been renovated.
Initial considerations
The main considerations for any renovation project are the same. But there are special considerations when renovating a building that has not previously been inhabited or has been empty for a long time. Below I have considered some of these considerations and some possible solutions, with indications of cost where appropriate.
Structural stability. Our barn is solidly built, with no signs of cracking in the walls. The corners of the building and the walls all appear correctly vertical. Hence we do not anticipate the building falling down. The roof is reasonably solid although there is a crack in one of the main roof beams, which has subsequently been reinforced at some previous time. Currently the roof comprises tiles on wooden supports. It has been suggested to us that if we increase the weight of the roof with plasterboard, insulation and new tiling, as we must, the roof could cave in, not being designed for such a load. It may be necessary to add new support posts in a couple of strategic places. This problem has arisen because the main wooden posts supporting the roof are not central i.e. they do not rise straight to the apex of the roof. Instead they have been installed about 1.5 metres to the side of this line. Hence one side of the roof is much stronger than the other.
Availability of water and electricity – we have them on site, but not for the barn as yet. The connection charges in France are expensive, but we hope to run connections ourselves from the existing supplies. Here, as in much of rural France, there is no mains gas.
Lighting is also a difficult factor when renovating a barn. Our barn, like most, is currently a very gloomy place. The two or three small openings that already exist are not enough for a building of this size, and new doors and windows need to be added. But of course we want to retain the ‘feel’ of a barn. The challenge is to add these new openings so that they look natural for the building, although in reality barns didn’t have such openings. We also want to make the most of the views from the north side of the building, which are across open countryside. We are going to add a large door, which will act as a front door for the property, to the ground floor, and two new windows at the mezzanine level. Our architectural designer has offered useful advice on the appearance of these windows, for example the need to avoid symmetry and the need to use timber lintels rather than stone on larger openings, both to achieve some degree of authenticity. A large opening at ground level will not be out of character with the building, since many barns include such an opening for taking animals and machinery in and out of the building.
Septic tanks are subject to stringent rules. A condition of planning permission is that a septic tank system is installed according to rules laid out by the authorities, according to soil conditions, slope of the land and so on. We need to install not only a septic tank but also a large drainage field, consisting of a hole of 30 square metres and a depth of 1.5 metres, filled with layers of sand and gravel to act as a filter. This second requirement is because the main soil type is clay, so any outflow from a septic tank simply flows across the surface of the clay (40 centimetres underground) rather than sinking into the ground.
Heating an essentially open space of this size may not be straightforward, especially as the average height of about four metres will tend to suck all the heat way up above our heads. We will have central heating of some kind however – our last three years in houses without heating and temperatures down to -15 centigrade has convinced us! We now have a wood-burning stove in our house and will try to incorporate one in the barn. These stoves are very good, being highly efficient and essentially environmentally friendly. I understand that stoves are nine times as efficient as an open fire (i.e. three times as much heat with a third of the wood burnt). Modern stoves reach temperatures at which most of the substances in the smoke are also burnt, in a process called double-combustion. Whatever, the one in the house does a great job and is also nice to sit and look at, so we want another one…The barn doesn’t have a chimney at present, and the regulations require that a new chimney must reach to 40 centimetres higher than the apex of the roof, so we need to plan a chimney that is as unobtrusive as possible.
Given these considerations, and our other needs, we have come up with a design for the interior layout of the barn. The barn is approximately 180 square metres floor area; of which about 35 square metres is a separate ‘annex’. The main space of 145 square metres is to be divided in two with a wall running the length of the barn. This provides a kitchen / eating area of about 65 square metres, in which we will retain the full height of the barn. The other side will have a ‘first floor’ added, being bedrooms and bathrooms on the ground floor and a large open mezzanine level above, to act as a ‘lounge’. Hence the mezzanine will be open to the kitchen area, which it will overlook. We hope that this layout will ease the problems of lighting the interior, and also ensure that the barn ‘feel’ is retained. The ceiling height on the mezzanine will be between 1.5 and 2.5 metres so providing a more intimate feel than the high ceilings of the downstairs eating area. Final total floor area will be approximately 250 square metres.
We are less concerned with natural light in the bedrooms, which are north and east facing, although we have of course made provision for windows where necessary. The bedrooms and bathrooms will all be accessed from an internal lobby, as will the annex room. Originally we planned four bedrooms, but have now decided to increase the size of one of these and convert the fourth bedroom into a utility room. We can always add a bedroom to the mezzanine or use the annex as a bedroom if necessary in the future.
A key feature of the barn is its colombage walls – one end of the barn is largely made of colombage, as is one wall of the annex. Colombage is a traditional way of building, using large wooden beams, set about 20 centimetres apart, with a mixture of mud and hay (called ‘torchis’) used to fill the spaces. For practical reasons, we will replace the torchis, which is in poor condition in places, with bricks skimmed over with a lime and sand mix. As we wish to retain the appearance of a colombage wall for the interior and exterior of the building, this still leaves a problem of insulating the wall.
Anyway that is broadly the position at November 2003. We are now in the process of discussing the work with the mason, the plumber and the carpenter, and obtaining estimates for the costs involved. Meanwhile we are also proceeding with clearing out the barn so that we are ready when work is able to commence.
I should explain also that while our French is much better than two years ago – hardly difficult – it is still not easy to have a detailed discussion about our requirements with a French artisan. We do our best, they do their best, it is often a bit slow and we hope that we reach a satisfactory conclusion, but their remains a significant prospect for misunderstanding. I don’t recall any of the builders and other tradesmen that have worked here over the passed two years speaking a single word of English, except for the plumber who smiles and says ‘No problem’ quite often. The often quoted ‘fact’ about the French that ‘they all speak English’ is, untrue, although often they know more than they admit to, so be careful what you say…
November 15th
The plumber has brought a revised estimate for the central heating today, which we will accept. He will work here in two stages. The first is at the time that the mason lays the concrete floor, when all the large pipes will be laid in the concrete. The second is later on, when the barn is ready to receive central heating and sanitary equipment. We already know who our plumber will be, since we have a good plumber from our earlier work at the property. In common with most French workers here he works hard, works long hours when necessary, and does a good job. Our big discussions at the moment are about the cost of central heating.
Initially we investigated geothermal central heating, in which subterranean heat from the garden is used to heat the property. This is an efficient system, and currently quite popular in France, and several other countries. Essentially a liquid is piped around the land surrounding the property at a depth of about one metre, where it reaches a temperature of about 15 centigrade, all year around. This then passes through a heat pump (similar to that used by a refrigerator, but operating in reverse) which raises the temperature to 45 centigrade. This is then used for heating, ideally with an under floor heating system, since this is better suited to such low temperature water. The significant running cost is the pump which forces the liquid around the garden. Each kilowatt of energy used by this pump gives rise to three kilowatts of heating energy. So heating bills should be much reduced, typically by a factor of three. The estimate we received for installing this system was £11,000, not including the digging of the trenches in which the external pipes would be laid, and not including the special screed that needs to cover the pipes used in the under floor heating system. Thus for the barn the total cost would be about £14,000.
The reason we have decided not to opt for this system is that the pump, 7 kilowatts, needs to be on a great deal of the time, and electricity is expensive per kilowatt in France. We use a curious tariff for electricity, called Tempo, that we would like to continue using, that essentially charges half price for electricity for 300 days of the year, normal price for 43 days and then for 22 days of the year is charged at about five times normal rate. This tariff is designed to reduce demand for electricity at peak times, and the tariff for the following day is set each evening by EDF. If they think it will be a cold day they use one of the higher rates. Hence electricity is very expensive on cold days, when heating is required. This tariff would not be compatible with using a 7kw pump all day. We could of course change tariff but then we would pay a lot more to use the swimming pool pump in the summer, among other things.
Option two was ‘normal’ underfloor heating, based on an oil burning boiler. The cost for this system came in at about £9,000 plus a further £2,000 for the special screed discussed above, £11,000 total. I should explain that underfloor heating nowadays is fundamentally different to that of 10-20 years ago. The heating works at low temperature and the floor is at 28 centigrade, hence does not feel warm to touch and doesn’t give rise to swollen ankles and hot draughts. Many more pipes are used which enables the entire floor to be heated without having hot spots. Insulation placed under the heating pipes prevents the heat from travelling down into the ground. This also is a popular system that we have elected not to use, despite an apparent 10% saving in heating costs. After much research we are concerned that it demands a different approach to heating than the one we usually use, which threatens to increase our heating bills. I think that if the heating is on all the time during the winter this heating method is very efficient, but for more intermittent use the ‘thermal inertia’ of the floor would make it less useful. That is, if I turn on central heating with radiators it will warm the air much sooner than low temperature underfloor heating, which has to heat a great deal of flooring, cement and so on, before the floor surface starts to slowly warm the room.
Option three, the option we have selected, is an oil based central heating system using radiators. (In areas without town gas, oil is usually the most economical solution in France.) The main house had a defunct central heating system when we bought it, based on a wood burning boiler. The original cast iron radiators remained, and we will we reuse these in the barn, with the addition of some modern radiators on the mezzanine. These are very attractive old radiators and, with a bit of sandblasting, should be very elegant. This will also enable us to keep the cost of the central heating installation to about £8,000. Radiators are less ideal than underfloor heating in one key respect. The sensation of cold in a building is largely due to ‘thermal gradients’ – that is, areas that are at a higher temperature than others. This creates drafts and the perception that some areas are colder, although the actual temperature may be sufficiently warm. We hope that this effect will not be too material, and also that the radiators will make nice warm seats…
A related subject for houses both new and old is that of insulation. Times have moved on since the days when 10 centimetres of glassfibre in the attic was considered sufficient, and the subject is now rather complicated, with new materials available, and a greater knowledge of how heat is lost from a building. The focus is now on much greater levels of insulation, and the removal of weak points or ‘discontinuities’ as they are called. Thus wall insulation should be continuous with roof insulation and floor insulation for example. Rockwool and glasswool are not always ideal because they have a tendency to sag over the years, and to become home to insects and vermin which further increase this sagging (although more rigid versions are available). Hence discontinuities appear. These products are however lighter to handle, and often the most practical solution when insulating an existing roof from the interior. Typically these cost £5 per square metre for 20 centimetre thickness. When the entire roof is being replaced opportunities arise to install a wider variety of insulators. The main alternatives available include sheets of polyethylene mousse, and aluminium foil based insulators, although both are fairly new products and hence long term stability has not been entirely proven.
The sheets of mousse can be purchase with plasterboard or wood panelling on one side and slats of wood on the other, hence the interior of the roof is laid as part of the same process, and tiles are attached to the wooden slats on the other side. Hence this is a very quick system to implement and provides efficient insulation. The panels, which can be several metres long, are simply attached to the existing wooden roof frame. We used this system for the cottage renovation. Although the cost of these sheets is quite high at about £35 per square metre, they act essentially as a roof replacement rather than simply insulation.
The aluminium foil based insulators have the advantage of being very thin, typically two centimetres only. They consist of two sheets of aluminium foil encasing various other thin layers of material, typically bubble wrap type substances, further layers of foil, foam, and fibrous cloth. Typically two centimetres of this type of insulation is claimed to offer insulation properties equivalent to 20 centimetres of glasswool or rockwool. Hence it is possible to use this insulation without having a significant impact on roof height. These types of insulation cost around £10 per square metre.
Floors and walls should also be insulated where possible, perhaps with polystyrene or a foil based insulator. There are a wide range of possibilities for insulating walls, typically being polystyrene or glassfibre type products preglued to plasterboard. Some of these products can be glued directly to the existing walls, providing both insulation and an interior finish at the same time.
We will decide which product to use in due course, but hope to have a well insulated barn conversion to reduce the problems of heating such a large volume. The main problem for us is the walls, since we wish to retain the colombage and stone walls in much of the inside of the property, preventing the use of insulation on these walls. Because the barn has a large external overhanging roof (a nice sheltered seating area, perfect for barbecues) there is a total of 374 square metres of roof to replace, of which 240 square metres is internal to the building.
November 18th
The appearance of the eventual door and window openings occupies our time, since we are sure that the appearance of these has a significant impact on the success of the project as a whole. So wherever we go we find ourselves pointing enthusiastically at other peoples doors and windows and trying to understand what makes them successful or not. We are quite tempted by a modern approach of having single large pains of glass in thin, dark frames, either metal or wood, but are slightly nervous about doing this. We are well aware that a successful mix of modern and old provides the best results possible, but if unsuccessful this provides the worst possible outcome. I will set to with the computer to generate a computer simulation of the barn under various scenarios before we proceed. It took us three efforts to get the shutter colour right for the main house, an extravagance not possible when buying new windows. Also our planning permission clearly states that there will be no material impact on the appearance of the barn, and that where possible materials will be in keeping with the structure. We assume that this includes wood or metal, and are searching for a supplier of steel (or aluminium) frame windows where the struts and supports are narrower than conventional wooden frames. No success so far, since we also want the windows to be double glazed.
We are still waiting for a quote from the second roof charpentier (the one who advises that we install additional strengthening supports), and are advised it is now being prepared. However someone else has asked why we don’t have supports of brick, which could be a possibility. This also introduces the possibilities of steel supports, perhaps cylinders painted black, which would look good but would almost certainly set the tone for the interior of the barn as being ‘industrial’. This is undoubtedly the modern way, and certainly our other projects have attempted to combine the old with the modern, but I am not sure yet if this is the style we will adopt in the barn. This is more of a style and design question than a financial question I think. For example the old ‘crèches’ in the barn – the wooden fence-like structure with holes for the cows to feed through – is to be retained, for use as a balcony on the mezzanine, which will tend to preserve the old feeling, but equally we are likely to use halogen lights in the barn which give a modern feeling. Similarly the tiling used for the floor will be either quarry tiles as we used in the main house or enamelled tiles as in the cottage, which both set different tones for the interior. I have not yet formed a clear mental picture of the interior in this way, focussing until now on the use of space, but had perhaps better start to do so.
On a slightly different note, Susan has just taken delivery of about 60 trees and hedging plants ordered from a catalogue. We are effectively trying to ‘garden’ perhaps three acres of the property. The delivered plants are only about 40-50 centimetres high at the moment. Of course it is much cheaper to buy plants of this size than larger ones. She has planted these with the plan that when the renovation work is completed (about 18 months) we should have a reasonably well established garden structure in place. The front of the barn currently overlooks an open field, which will now contain various trees – like an arboretum, we hope. The hedging plants have been used in various ways to screen between the properties and around the swimming pool. In addition to the trees, shrubs and bushes already planted (of which there are many) we are starting to look like a property surrounded by greenery rather than weedy fields. Because there is so much land it would not be affordable to buy fully grown plants, so we have little choice but to buy small, or propagate existing plants, and sit back and wait. Part of the reason that we chose this area initially was the climate, being generally ideal for plants with plenty of heat and sunshine but also and sufficient rain. The soil is also generally very good, and so far plants have been very successful.
During the last two years we have had two of the coldest winters on record, and the hottest driest summer on record. Certainly the weather here so far has been a lot more extreme than that in the UK. One month we will have trees dying of cold, and a few months later we have leaves and fruit being burnt by the sunshine. Nonetheless a garden is emerging around what will be our house and business, and at relatively small cost. Perhaps the biggest challenge will be the last. The courtyard onto which all the buildings face is currently a tarmac area of about 300 square metres. This is very useful for builders and delivery lorries but not very beautiful to look at. After the barn renovation is finished we will need to break it up, at least in part, and turn it into garden. Two years away, but it occupies our thoughts since we want to separate the house and barn with trees or hedging that will have to run across this courtyard.
23rd November
Today being my birthday I received a book called Habiter l’Environment which is about ways to integrate houses in their surrounding environment. This has provided interesting ideas, and has focussed my thoughts again on doors and windows. It demonstrates that large glass sliding doors are a very good way to obtain an open view on the exterior. Previously we had ruled this out because it is not practical to use sliding doors as a main entrance. I think we will know have a main entrance at the other end of the barn (facing the courtyard), which we will keep quite discrete and use a sliding door at what will now be the rear of the building (the end overlooking open countryside). Certainly those in the book, with carefully selected planting and terracing immediately outside the window, are extremely attractive.
26th November
I have now written to the mason, the plumber and the carpenter to accept quotes for the work. This could be the point of no return. We are still optimistic that by the end of April, when work must stop for the summer, we will have a largely completed shell with floor, door and window openings, and a new roof. This is certainly not certain however, since we have taken longer to accept these quotes than we expected, due to problems in obtaining final quotes for the work on the roof.
I should add that all the tradesmen involved are local French artisans, rather than UK expatriates. On balance, we have found this to give the best results for a lower price. Most towns have their own roofers, masons, plumbers and so on who are familiar with the building techniques in the area and most, in our experience, will do a good job. Our experiences of hard-working artisans do not generally extend to the English tradesmen we have had to employ here a couple of times, who often give the impression that the work is disturbing the leisure time that they came to France to find. The French workers we have used certainly stick to their two hour lunch breaks, but generally work harder, and longer into the evening when necessary, to compensate.
There are two very time consuming jobs – floor levelling and tiling, and wall repointing. I will do these myself but they will almost certainly take well into 2005. This is not a concern, since neither prevents us living in the house.
One other large job relates to the large room attached to the barn, which will be renovated and made habitable. I will probably focus on this room first, so that when there is disruption in the barn I can carry on getting on with work. Plus we know from experience that having at least one room that is habitable and clean is a major bonus for a home!
Electrics I will do myself. There is quite a lot of planning involved since the goal is to conceal all the wires in the floor and walls. Hence it is necessary to lay the main cables between rooms either in the concrete or in the cement screed that covers the concrete. Lighting is the biggest challenge since cables need to run up walls in one form or another, preferably before the pointing is done. The big problem with old houses, barns and so on is that they do not have all he concealed areas that a modern house has. A modern house will have a void between the ceiling and the floor above, which does not exist in an older house. Similarly, the ceiling of the barn will essentially be the bottom of the roof – there is no convenient space between for concealing wires. So wires can be run along the top of beams for example, or concealed in the soundproofing insulation that separates the ceiling of the mezzanine from the flooring of the mezzanine above.
Outdoor lighting is also a big challenge, since the barn is essentially surrounded by areas that will serve as either pathways or patio areas. Hence outdoor lighting is required around almost the whole perimeter of the building, in addition to the provision for garden lighting that Susan has asked me to incorporate, along with lighting for the swimming pool terrace area.
27th November
Having accepted the major quotes for the work it maybe instructive to estimate the total cost of the work involved. This will help us also to understand any overspends as they occur.
At present the costs in euros, some actual some estimates, broadly breakdown as follows:
Laying new floor 7,000
Flooring / tiling 2,500
Roof including insulation 27,000
Roof windows 1.000
Inserting openings in walls 7,000
Doors/windows/shutters 8,000
Staircase 1.250
Pointing walls ourselves 2,000
Redo colombage (mason) 2,250
Central heating 11,000
Build mezzanine floor 8,000
Plumbing / sanitary ware 4,000
Electricity 2,000
Kitchen 3,000
Septic tank / drainage field 5,000
That is, a total of about 90,000 euros. At least 10,000 euros will be spent on other materials, underfloor insulation, internal walls, and external gutters and terracing and so on, so we have a current target of about 100,000 euros. For a floor area of 225 square metres this gives a cost per metre of about 450 euros. This is good if we can achieve this since a ‘normal’ guideline figure is 700-750 euros per square metre. We are saving 15,000 euros by doing the pointing of the walls ourselves, and more by doing our own floor tiling and various other parts of the work, which helps explain this figure.
(For the little cottage last year we spent about 30,000 euros for 55 square metres. Rent is about 6,000 euros per year, so we are pleased with the ‘return on investment’ of 20%)
29th November
We continue to empty the barn so it is ready for all the work to begin. Bonfires and trips to the rubbish dump are our preferred Activities for the time being. But what should I do with the hedgehog that is hibernating under a big pile of straw in the corner? And the large stack of ancient roof beams that were taken off the cottage but seemed to good to burn? And the tractor?
It is time to step up a gear, because the carpenter visited today and announce that he would be demolishing the existing raised floor structure next week, possibly even Monday. Hence I have two days to finish emptying the barn. He also said that he would be able to do the roof February or March. We are very pleased because this means that before the summer we should have the floor, roof and door and window openings in place, ideally even with doors and windows in. Certainly it suggests that the barn will be habitable by spring 2005, despite the slow progress that I expect to make with the building of the internal walls, laying flooring and pointing the walls. Not necessarily because I work slowly, but simply because of the areas involved. There will be 225 square metres of flooring to be constructed (screed laid downstairs, boarding laid for the mezzanine), then tiles or other flooring laid, and about 200 square metres of walls to be cleaned and repointed (not counting the exterior of the walls). The electrics and totally redoing the annexe room will also be time-consuming, as will the woodworking around the front door (we will have an opening of 15 square metres to fill when the barn door comes off – yes it is a big door at the moment).
Hence at least a years work, possibly two years including terracing, kitchen, decorating and so on. Still, habitable in 18 months sounds plausible, with only finishing-off work after that time, even including several months of building inactivity during the summer. In any event, pool-cleaning and grass-cutting type Activities need to take priority during the holiday season. And grass-cutting is no small task, especially during the spring, with several acres of rampant vegetation to contain. And it will be nice to have a break ourselves, and to sit in the sunshine playing the happy holidaymakers.
1st December
Not much is happening at the moment, since it is raining, so I have passed some time drawing more detailed plans of where the electrics and plumbing will go. Also I have confirmed that the planned septic tank and drainage field meets the requirements set, particularly the distance that it is from the nearest well or water source. In fact the rule is that the drainage field must be at least 35 metres from a source, and ours is about 70 metres away, so that is not a problem.
The property relied on water from this source when we arrived, but we have subsequently connected to mains water. Partly this was because we worried that there would be too many farming chemicals in the source, from the agricultural land around us. (Water can be tested of course, but we were unconvinced that a sample at one point of the year would correctly indicate the year-round water quality. Many properties around here do use well water rather than mains water.)
While well water has theoretically been filtered through rock, our property is on top of a hill so I have a suspicion that really it is sourced from water that has passed through our 40 centimetres of soil, and then run across the surface of the impermeable clay beneath. This follows from a conversation with the water engineer who examined the soil here prior to our planning permission application (necessary in order that the septic tank is suitable), who said that there is essentially a thin layer of stagnant or slow moving water between the clay and the soil.
As an aside this is the reason why the area here, along the River Dropt, is essentially undeveloped by industry. Historically it proved almost impossible to construct roads that remained usable during the wet winter months, since they rapidly turned to thick mud. There is very little stone in the ground here, and this combined with periodic flooding this made it very difficult for transportation links. This contrasts completely with the nearby Dordogne area which is much rockier. Curiously only ten kilometres from here it is often the red soil of the Dordogne that is found, completely different to the soil here.
In fact, a week after we had changed over the water supply the pump froze up anyway (winter 2001 was very cold) and hasn’t worked since. One day we will attempt to repair it, because it would be nice to use this water for watering the garden rather than pay for mains water, but this project is someway away. The around the source is quite attractive, with an old stone outflow for the water, and Susan is planning a ‘jungle’ type garden around it. It would be even more attractive without the hut next to the source, made of concrete blocks and built to protect the pump from the elements. When we live in the barn this area of the property will get much more focus because it will form part of the outlook from the windows.
We do now have a full view of the barn interior, since the carpenters arrived this afternoon to demolish the existing raised floor. The ‘creches’ – wood panels with holes for the cows to feed through – have been retained as planned, but are in fact extremely heavy, so our plan for carrying them up to our new mezzanine and using them as a balcony may be a bit impractical. This is ignoring also the fact that we have not specified that the mezzanine floor can hold unnaturally heavy loads. In daylight we will examine them more closely to see if the weight can be reduced without destroying the structure. The interior is roughly the size of a village church, at 12 metres by 13 metres with a height of about 6 metres.
2nd December
All that demolition work yesterday has got me in the mood to destroy something myself, so I have been removing the hayloft in the annexe room, which is both too low and too decrepit to be retained. This room will also have a high ceiling, and will be about 35 square metres. The height of the wall on one side, perhaps 5 metres, brings to mind old-fashioned libraries with ladders to access the upper shelves. I certainly need to put the books somewhere…and usefully we do have the perfect ladder. We have found an old handmade ladder in the barn, made from old bits of timber that could be put to service with a bit of repair work.
Do people still make their own ladders from bits of tree? Or fences from flattened oil tins? Or structures to support vines held together with bits of old bicycle chain, presumably to save the cost of the wire or nails that would usually be used? Or rat traps out of old bits of wood? Or a barn wall made of old bits of gates and doors? All these things and others are here or were when we arrived. Some we have kept for nostalgic reasons, some we have burned because they were horribly infested with rot and wood-boring insects.
Anyway I am getting pretty excited about this room as I remove the old floor. It will be a more cosy space than the main barn, although 35 square metres with a five metre ceiling is not exactly poky. I dared to mention that I might plaster one or two of the walls rather than clean up the stone, but that didn’t go down very well. So, another 100 square metres of pointing is in store unless I can convince Susan that the modern look might be nice. The roof timbers in this part of the barn are even more extraordinary than those in the main barn or the house. We have a lot of timbers here that have obviously been used previously somewhere else – full of notches and old joints in unexpected places – but some of the wood in the annexe looks as if various lumps of ship have been simply reused without any kind of effort to make them look like roof timbers. The other curious thing is that several structural timbers still have the original tree bark on, which is good going after 200 years or so. Less exciting, two of the main roof beams are supported at one end on the colombage wall, which itself is not strong. One of the beams particularly is resting on a small piece of wood that has been nailed on to the colombage wall at some point and has now almost fallen off. Work required, this was not visible before because of the hayloft I have just removed blocking the view of the roof.
While reflecting on the annex room and looking at the roof timbers, I was struck by the idea that the roof might work well if laid out differently. It would be possible to remove one corner of the overhanging roof at the front of the barn, and this could improve the appearance of the barn. This thought set various other possibilities going, including the thought that we could actually remove the entire overhanging roof. After we had spent some time thinking about this
dramatic possibility, we further realised that we could remove the potting shed room as well (a concrete block building in front of the barn), and open up the courtyard a great deal. At the moment the front of the overhanging section of the barn is about 15 metres from the house. If we remove it, there will be 22 metres between the house and the front of the barn. This would have a positive impact on the courtyard as a whole, especially with a view to privacy between the two buildings and opening up the view from the courtyard, across open fields. Another plus point is that the building will look better without such a large expanse of roof. The negatives perhaps are that we would need to construct a new (although much smaller) shelter for the front door, and also that the overhang is made from some fine carpentry work and it will be a shame to get rid of it.
This idea should also save about £5,500 since we would not to re-roof the overhang if we remove it! Add back £1,500 for demolition work and a new entrance, and we still save a lot of money and improve the final layout. We have sent a letter to the carpenter telling him of our revised plan.
The potting shed, which is useful but ugly, will be demolished and a replacement incorporated in the tobacco barn. This will form art of a major restructuring that will involve removing about a third of the tobacco barn, recladding parts of the remaining exterior with new wood, and repairing the roof as necessary. It is just too useful a building to demolish entirely, and too expensive to demolish simply to replace with another large building – when the house is a gite, we will need parking for at least three cars, and we already need a room for the swimming pool pump equipment and umbrellas etc, several cubic metres of wood (for keeping warm in winter) not to mention building materials and machines, bikes and children’s outdoor toys, a tractor and a potting shed. So any replacement building would also need to be very large to house all these things. The only real problem with the tobacco barn is that it is very tall – about seven metres – so is not easy to pretend it isn’t there and it also it is not easy to access the roof without scaffolding, making it difficult to work on. The estimates we had for demolition alone were about £3,000 (floor area about 120 square metres).
Anyway as a result we finish today with a clear view of what needs doing with all parts of the courtyard and buildings – something it has taken us two years to reach a conclusion on. This will give a good result all around and I am very pleased. It is much easier, and more efficient, to work with an overall ‘big picture’ in mind. That only leaves a plan for eventual planting to be decided, that will further separate the buildings, giving each a feeling of privacy while allowing enough space for lorries to enter to deliver fuel, maintain septic tanks and so on.
5th December
Clean up work is continuing on the barn, but meanwhile there are a couple of jobs to do in the house which will take some time over the next few weeks. The first is to add a porch to the front door, and to tidy up the sand and mud that any visitors currently have to cross to reach the door before trampling it through the house. When I demolished a large old shed last year I kept parts of the structure intact, so that I could construct a porch myself with old wood. I have been examining these and think I can piece together a reasonable shelter about four metres by two metres without too much trouble. The bigger problem is that the courtyard slopes towards the door, so whenever it rains another pile of sand gets washed to the house. Also, there is no ‘step-up’ into the house, so I can’t simply build a slightly raised area outside the door to help reduce the water. So I think what I need to do is to dig out the courtyard outside the door and relay it with concrete. I can then support the porch on large stones at the corners of this concrete (to avoid the ends of the wood getting wet) and finally build a small wall along the higher side and part of the front of the porch to force water away from the door. In addition to this wall I might need a drainage channel, I am not sure yet. But what shall I make the wall from - bricks rendered over with cement, or stone? And will I be able to match in the colour of the mortar with that of the house? And how do I fix the porch to the house and what do I roof it with? It is these little problems that have stopped me just getting on and doing the work. The house is looking pretty good now and I am nervous that I might spoil the overall appearance if I get it wrong.
We know many people with damp problems here, which are being tackled in various ways. Few of them are very convincing except for digging out along the side of the house and putting a concrete pathway in. Old stone houses just don’t have a damp proof course, and are designed to ‘breathe’ the moisture away. This generally works very well but leaves a higher residual level of damp in the house than in a modern house. Hence curtains and soft furnishings placed near a wall are liable to suffer. Originally our house was designed with the living accommodation upstairs and some animals and storage downstairs, hence the damp was not a big problem, but now that we have extravagantly used the whole house for living in we need to keep it dry.
The slight slope of the courtyard and the water flows it creates cause us quite a lot of headaches. The courtyard gets a lot of water that runs off from a field that is at a slightly higher level, and also water from the roof of the tobacco barn, so we are very prone to water flowing against the house and the stone barn (and straight through the tobacco barn). Ultimately various drainage arrangements will be necessary to reduce this. However a ‘grand plan’ to tackle drainage overall is not worth implementing until we have finished demolishing the outstanding roofs and buildings, since this work will change the patterns of water flow. Clearly I don’t want to install a drainage field for a problem that won’t exist in a few months time anyway. That said, at the moment we have a lot of water that runs straight into the barn when it rains, and I will need to resolve that before the major work begins.
I can put gutters on the barns that will help direct the flow of water, but the house has a very steep roof, typical of the Perigord area, that does not lend itself well to gutters, either in practical terms or aesthetically. There is nowhere to put a gutter without it sticking out like a sore thumb, and these houses were not designed to have gutters in the first place. Another day, another problem…
Still, on the plus side the house front door has a door now, unlike two years ago when it had an entrance more like a gate, held together with bits of old metal that had been carefully nailed on with gaps large enough for vermin to easily pass through. So at that stage we had numerous birds, mice and insects setting up home in the house, along with a stream of water under the door when it rained. It is quiet disturbing to have birds flying around when you watch television, a bit like sitting in the bird house at London Zoo. All just happy memories now, alas.
6th December
The plumber rang this morning to ask why I had changed the date of his working here. My daughter told me it was a fireman (pompier) on the phone rather than the plumber (plombier) which didn’t help matters. I had referred to spring in my letter accepting his estimate, where previously I had said February. Oops, we English are not always as bright as we could be. As he explained, February is winter, March is spring. Glad to see that he works on a Saturday though.
I also made my favourite find to date, although it was largely too decrepit to keep. It was a very old door that had been used for flooring in the barn hayloft. No nails had been used in its making; it consisted of very thick oak planks and cross bars entirely held together with old wooden pegs. Since it was a very large door I have managed to keep a few bits in the hope that one day I can make a table or similar from the remnants. The rest had to be burnt, but it was very sad burning such beautiful old woodwork, and even though it was falling apart in my hands I felt a real sense of contact with the past as I threw it in the flames. Over the last two years I have demolished and burnt three very large old sheds, a chicken coop, a garage and various small lean-to buildings, so the ‘neighbours’ are now accustomed to my huge bonfires, but this one was even bigger than most, made more exciting by the howling winds which sent the flames horizontally across the floor and off towards the barn.
Niamh (our ten year old daughter) was explaining to her friend today that we were going to live in the barn. Staring into the gloomy interior, her friend was to say the least unconvinced. Still, I think our children are starting to see it as a future house now, probably because they have seen the house change from ‘it’s disgusting, I can never invite a friend here’ of two years ago to ‘it’s a better house than anyone else’ last month.
9th December
I have passed a pleasant day in pressure washing the floor of the annex room. It seems unlikely that I can lay an attractive tiled floor successfully on years of compressed manure. While this is proving difficult to clean, the walls in the room are coming up nice and clean. It is a huge advantage doing this kind of work before any significant other work has been done, since pressure washing with water works very well and is a much more pleasant task than sandblasting. In the interior of the house it was not possible to use pressure cleaning with water because the house would have been flooded. I would estimate that using water to do the job is about 20 times faster, hence one day’s quite pleasant work instead of 20 days unpleasant work. The only problem is that the walls, being stone held together with clay, are apt to dissolve. Hence some care is needed to make sure that I don’t simply wash the building down. In reality this is easier and less risky than it sounds, as long as the water isn’t targeted for long at the joints between the rocks. It does beg the question, of course, as to why we are going to pay a lot of money to get new openings inserted into the barn when I could simply make the holes with a hose.
I can’t do the walls in the main barn yet, because the floor consists only of earth and rabbit holes. So I would be wading in deep mud very quickly. I will wait until the concrete floor has been laid first, and hope that I can sweep the water out of the barn after cleaning it, rather than fill it up like a swimming pool. Anyway, it’s best to keep concrete damp for a while after it has been laid, so they tell me…
12th December
The little pressure washer that we bought in England several years ago has given up working, so I have been to look at replacements. I had not realised what a range of possibilities there are, with prices of several hundred pounds being common. No big surprise that my little budget model didn’t like working so hard then. One thing we have learnt since being here is that cheap tools just don’t last. If you need a drill, or an air compressor, or a cement mixer or a jigsaw, and so on, if you buy at the cheaper end of the range available it will invariably be too fragile when faced with hard work. There is a good reason why there are drills for £40 or drills for £240. The sturdier and much more expensive tools are made to last under hard working conditions and are meanwhile a pleasure to work with rather than a hassle.
So I have bought a powerful pressure washer, and it is a pleasure to work with. A hundred years of compressed manure coming off the barn floor is not exactly a pleasant job, as I found while I passed an afternoon splashing myself with unpleasant smelling substances, but it is quite rewarding seeing the floor emerge (the annexe room and about a third of the barn have concrete ‘cattle stall’ floors – the rest is not washable, being earth). I had little choice about which model to buy, since each model specified the area it was reasonable to clean without the pump melting, and all but the largest specified a maximum of 20 – 100 square metres. Including walls, floors and patios we have at least 500 square metres of stone and concrete to clean. Anyway, it is a lovely yellow and blue colour so money well spent.
15th December
The final signing of the sale of our house in Gavaudun went through today without any hitches. We had bought this house about 18 months ago, when we were told that renovation of the barn would be prohibitively expensive, and have now sold it since we have found that we were misinformed. Therefore we are pleased for various reasons: the house worked well as a gite; we made a profit on the sale – not easy in France after 18 months, since purchasing costs add about 12% to the purchase price; and perhaps most importantly, the proceeds of the sale will be used to pay for the barn renovation.
It also proved rather time-consuming running the gite, although it was only 15 kilometres from our house. Despite agreed arrival times for gite guests of 4 – 6 pm on a Saturday, the vast majority rang up at about six o’clock and announced something like ‘We are just approaching Bordeaux (two hours drive from here), so we may be a bit delayed’. Another evening sat waiting in the gite for hours on end…
Another curious aspect of the gite was the central heating. This heating was included in the rental price during the colder months, and was always set at about 21 centigrade. But people being people, and wanting value for their money, generally adopted the ‘we have paid for it so we will use it’ approach, and immediately turned the temperature up to about 30 degrees. A little tropical paradise in Lot-et-Garonne. I suppose I am the same if I stay in a hotel with a ‘help-yourself’ buffet breakfast, where instead of my usual bowl of cereal I will happily eat my way through an endless amount of sausages, croissants, fruit and cakes and still wonder if I could take a roll with cheese away with me. Don’t you love human nature? It does tend to discourage us from winter lettings at the gite next to our own house, at least without separate charging for heating, since huge levels of heating obviously much reduce the profit made on an already low winter rental rate. This is a shame because we receive quite a lot of enquiries about rentals in January and February.
Also we spent a lot of time driving backwards and forwards to the gite for mowing, cleaning, general repairs, checking for mice or storm damage and frozen pipes and so on. So although it was a lovely house that we bought at a good price, on balance we are pleased to be focussing all our efforts here at one location. Demand from people wanting to buy a place in France was remarkably large, despite the fact that we only used one small advert on an internet property site (we wanted to avoid the 7% estate agency fees levied in France) and I suspect we could easily have sold it for a higher price, but who knows. I understand from friends with British television that ‘France fever’ is raging in Britain with people happy to sell their family silver or their family to buy an old ruin in a remote corner of France. This is partly a consequence of the cheap flights to many places in France that have opened up new destinations over the last couple of years, and partly the relative wealth that people in Britain have accumulated as a result of ever-increasing property prices. There are many arguments for and against doing this, which I will leave you to work out for yourselves.
We were equally cheered up when the notaire (solicitor) told us how nice our own house was looking and how we had bought at exactly the right time. Prices here have risen here a lot over the past two years, and nice old properties for renovation are now very difficult to find at almost any price. Susan said ‘I hope you are right’ and the notaire knowingly smiled and said ‘I know I am right’. So hopefully our retirement fund (or ‘home’, as we call it) will not let us down, when we sell it as a successful property with gites at some (probably distant) future time and buy a small place for ourselves. I digress.
Curiously, in France the sale proceeds are not paid to us immediately but we were told ‘you should receive a cheque in about eight days’. Ignoring the fact that eight days time is almost Christmas, so I imagine the cheque will actually arrive even later, it makes me wonder how it would ever be possible to buy and sell a house on the same date in France. It often takes many months to sell a house, so it is necessary to sell a house before buying a new one, and then the money is not available to pay for the new house for a couple of weeks after you have had to vacate your old house. I assume that the banks supply bridging loans but it seems a curious system.
We have mentally allocated the funds from the sale of the gite to an implausibly large number of projects in addition to the barn renovation, including the courtyard restructuring, sorting out the tobacco barn, planting an arboretum of specimen trees and having a couple of holidays. I think we will wait until the final bills for the barn arrive before we start buying century old olive trees and sunning ourselves in Martinique, just to be on the safe side.
The mason accosted my in the bricolage (diy) store today and told me he was going to come around next Saturday at 9 am and would also like to see the plumber here, so I have returned to drawing out final plans for the location of toilets, sinks, radiators and so on, so there is less scope for misunderstanding. Because we have changed the position of the access to the annexe room I need to make sure that is clearly communicated as well. Originally the room was to be accessed from a bedroom, and to be a playroom for the children. We are now going to make an access from the internal lobby which involves running a corridor straight through the place which was to be the bathroom; hence there is an impact on the plumber’s work. We now think the annexe will be too nice not to be accessed freely by all, and that being accessed from a bedroom may be too restrictive in the future. This solution is not ideal, since a small bathroom will not be so easy to fit separate shower and bath into, but we think it is a compromise worth making. It will also, I think, add a bit of interest to the building since we will be approaching a very large room through a very narrow corridor. I think this element of ‘surprise’ will be quite attractive (I seem to recall reading that this is a technique used successfully by a leading UK interior designer).
It is more difficult than I would expect to make space for bedrooms, bathrooms etc in such a large space, without compromising the ‘barn’ look. Hence, I suppose, the reason why many barn conversions are constructed as a conventional house layout.
On a similar theme, I read an article about the countryside recently that suggested that ‘the countryside’ as such – that is, as a commodity worth preserving – did not exist until quite recently. Clearly it was there (!) but the inhabitants saw it as a resource for growing crops, for keeping livestock and so on, rather than as a thing of natural beauty worth preserving. Not unlike many current house building companies perhaps. I don’t know how true this is, but it is an interesting idea. Certainly the previous owners of our property never hesitated to build a shed or concrete outbuilding if it was needed, with scant regard for the impact on the overall appearance. Clearly if they didn’t see concrete blocks, but saw a new shed, why would they hesitate to build it?
While many architects focus on designing buildings where the building is designed around the requirements of the occupants, there are few that would use concrete blocks as the main construction material without subsequently covering them up with a more attractive material.
There is much concern about the countryside being lost to manicured lawns and hedges, at the expense of ‘real’ farming, but perhaps the offset to this is that the overall visual impact of the countryside is actually being improved by being renovated, despite also becoming more sanitised and less ‘authentic’.
I think that generally those of us who chose to renovate old houses pay great interest in the ‘tradition’ of the area, the building techniques used and so on. Removing the detritus of the last few decades is often a good thing, when the focus of the additions has been on cost and amenity rather than visual appeal. As I have come to understand it, this is because the architecture of an area is developed over many centuries, and relies heavily on local materials and local requirements. Also, buildings come to be appropriately designed for their environment over the course of time – shade areas, flatter roofs, and devices for reducing the impact of the wind and so on. If a different type of structure is added, for example a concrete block box, then it simply does not suit the environment.
On the other hand, while adherence to tradition is very important, there is an equally important aspect to consider. We don’t all want to live in houses with the layout and amenities of an 18th century cottage. Current needs are very different. We want bathrooms, telephones and hi-fis, and we also want light, hot water, insulation and heating. Incorporating these needs is essential, and it is important to recognise that living in a museum may look very nice but will not usually be very comfortable.
So it is the clash between authenticity and comfort that causes many of the challenges in a restoration, especially of a building that was not even designed for people to live in, like our barn. Good architects can integrate ‘new’ materials – steel, large areas of glass, and so on – in a building without compromising its impact on the environment. The rest of us struggle. It is much easier to find examples of poorly designed ‘improvements’ than well-designed examples. We want to live in a barn conversion, but we don’t actually want to live in a barn.
All this leads me to the subject of our barn roof overhang. We had concluded that, although it was an original feature of the barn, it was not sensible to retain it as part of a house. Also it would be expensive to renovate. Our carpenter came around today to discuss this with us, and to point out the many problems with its demolition. These included: the colombage would be exposed to the elements, and would suffer as a consequence; the demolition would be expensive: the new roof would need to be extended to protrude 20 centimetres from the front of the house to protect the façade from the elements and this would entail lots of expensive work. Overall, he made it clear that it would not save us any money to remove it, but really he was saying that he though it was a mistake to demolish it because it is an integral part of the building. So we will keep it, but without replacing the tiles or doing any other work on it. This does mean that the roof will know have two tile types – canal tiles on the main roof, and ‘manufactured’ tiles on the overhang, with a ridge joining them together. Perhaps not perfect but overall a satisfactory solution. About one third of the overhang is a newer addition that we will still remove, that will help improve the appearance of the barn. The carpenter was happy about this. The important point therefore is that a second opinion can be useful to help you see things in a different way, and local knowledge can make an important contribution. Although many people who have looked at our collection of derelict buildings have had no vision at all of how it could look, others have more experience than us in the best approach to take.
An interesting structure, the more recent addition to the roof, that will still be demolished, has been built ‘to a budget’. So instead of using proper posts to support the roof, it has been supported on a mixture of old tree trunks (with bark intact) that are in turn supported on wobbling rocks. This might have rustic appeal, but will probably fall down soon enough anyway, in all probability on the head of someone who is leaning on one of the tree trunk supports. Worse, I have thrown several hay bales into this area, and have just noticed that the children have used them to construct a den, supported by old shed doors leaning on these wooden supports. Perhaps not the best idea.
The net result is that we will save money since we don’t need to pay either for retiling or for demolition of the overhang. If we are not careful we will end up spending less than budget, leaving funds perhaps for a shaded terrace on the rear of the barn.
December 20th
The mason and the plumber had a productive meeting at the barn this morning. The mason is unable to give precise dates for his work to the plumber, so they have agreed that the mason will leave small trenches in the concrete floor where the pipes and conduits can be laid afterwards. Not uncommonly I struggled to keep up with the conversation between them, but was confused why ‘rigole’ came up so much, since I knew that ‘rigoler’ is the verb for ‘to joke’ – as in ‘tu rigole’ – ‘you are joking!’. Hence I assumed that rigole was a noun for ‘a joke’. After I had heard this a few times, and was becoming suspicious that they were treating the work too lightly, I asked them to explain. Rigole, I have now learned to their amusement, also means ‘channel’ or ‘small trench’. So, in due course, we will have a few rigoles in the barn.
Our idea of putting the boiler in the utility room of the barn was not met enthusiastically by the plumber, because ‘eventuellement’ it may release curious smells from time to time. This I suppose is a feature of oil boilers, since I don’t remember a ‘town gas’ boiler in England ever emitting curious odours. (Incidentally, ‘eventuellement’ is another unexpected French word, meaning ‘possibly’, NOT ‘eventually’). So he has proposed that we put the boiler in a little room – which I need to build anyway to house the fuel tank – on the outside of the barn. I would have thought that problems with frozen pipes would have ruled this out, but apparently not. A bit of a shame really, since the boilers in France tend to be large, robot-sized things, in bright red or bright blue, and look pretty sexy.
Still, at least now there will be room for a big freezer in the utility room, to store all the vegetable that we will get around to growing one day when the building work is finished. During the summer months we have a bit of a problem with ‘gluts’ of food, especially fruits such as peaches, figs, cherries, blackberries and nectarines, in that we have huge amounts for a short period – we have quite a lot of fruit trees. We hope to be able to spread this bounty out through the year a bit (yes, peach slices can be frozen effectively) in due course. Curiously, the property is surrounded by orchards of plum trees but we have almost no plums ourselves.
One ‘slightly off the subject’ anecdote I will relate. We (well, Susan) spent a lot of time clearing about 500 square metres of land shortly after we arrived, to be our potager (vegetable garden), in an area that had previously been rough field. This was hard work, but reasonably productive despite our losing battle to keep the weeds at bay. Then we ‘discovered’ the little cottage and decided to make it into a gite. This left the potager on the doorstep of the gite, so it had to be moved. Even now, a year later, the occasional lettuce or onion suddenly springs up in the grass that has replaced this potager, to the surprise of our guests. The moral of this story is that forward planning is key if time is not to be wasted on the overall project. The clearer the picture that you have of the final result, the less time will be wasted. This applies equally to time spent putting piles of wood, tiles, rubble and so on in places where they will subsequently have to be moved again. This has not been uncommon in our lives, which is why I am pleased now that we have a master plan for the site as a whole. I seem to remember that lack of a clear strategy was often a problem at companies I worked for ‘in the old days’, so I think we are not alone with this problem.
December 23
I have spent the morning dragging the last of my collection of 18th century roof timbers from the stone barn to the tobacco barn. These are very heavy and perhaps it would be easier to collect stamps or old postcards. However they come up very nice when they are cleaned and treated, and one day I will use some of them, somehow, to build something. I saw similar old beams advertised in a magazine about house restoration in England and have convinced myself that they are too valuable to burn, since gentry in the Home Counties will pay dearly for them. All I have to do is get them there. In fact we have such an extensive range of old things that we have found here – hand grenade, old garden tools and a motorbike among them – that we could perhaps open our own salvage yard. We met some people here recently who had advertised all the things they uncovered on eBay website, and sold pretty much everything by all accounts. Of course their collection of wartime love letters might have been more interesting than our sheath of 1950’s Articial Insemination documents (I discovered the children happily playing ‘cards’ with these, along with various unpleasant looking medical substances that they had kept in a tin as their ‘treasure’) and I would need to specify ‘buyer pays postage’ for a couple of tons of worm eaten old wood, but I reckon there is money to be made…
December 27th
It was entertaining to watch Niamh (10 years old) at Boxing Day tea. While the rest of us simply piled cold meat, cheese and salad on our plates in our normal fashion, she carefully spread salad leaves on her plate, then crumbled Roquefort and cornichons among other things on top, before adding the salad dressing (which she had made, with much worrying about whether she had added too much lemon juice). I wouldn’t mind so much but her tea looked like something you would buy in a restaurant while mine looked like a heap of leftovers. Even Ismay (7 years old) battled to be first with the lettuce, while ignoring the ham and cheese. She then tried to accompany this with a slice of bread and Nutella (chocolate spread), so I think there is still room for improvement. The French children generally are Nutella obsessives and eat it for as many meals as possible, frequently also having a baguette with a bar of chocolate in (ever tried it?) for an afternoon snack, a bowl of chocolate milk with breakfast, and a mid-morning snack of a chocolate bar. So how do they mostly stay so thin? Perhaps because the nearest burger restaurant is about 25 miles away? It’s a mystery, but there is much less visible child obesity here than there was where we lived in England
Susan won’t let me work on Christmas day or Boxing Day, something about ‘family first’. So apart from a quick burst of audio-editing on the computer which I am doing for a friend, I was compelled to put my feet up. Of course, between sessions of eating and drinking and having discos for the girls or trying to mend toys that have failed to last 48 hours I am still able to reflect on our projects.
One tradition in our family is that we get small presents for each other for Boxing Day, just to extend the festivities as long as possible, and I had suggested that a magazine would be a good idea, as long as it was not one about house renovations. I have duly received ‘Elle Decoration’. I suspect that Susan had some influence on this since the UK edition was her favourite magazine for many years, while I was reading about music or Hi-Fi, but I will overlook this trickery because it is Christmas, and she bought me two excellent CDs for Christmas. The French edition of this magazine is also very good. If you don’t know Elle Decoration, its main appeal is that it contains pictures of houses and flats that have been expensively furnished and decorated in a modern style. This of course muddies the waters for us since we fluctuate between a modern style for the barn interior and an ‘authentic old’ style. If I see pictures of old buildings I like that style, then if I see an interior decorated with modern plastics or zinc, for example, I like that. Elle Decoration seems to show properties where these two opposing styles are combined to good effect, so I am studying that at the moment (while listening to my ‘Meanwhile Back In Communist Russia’ CD – how does she find them?) in the hope that I can understand better what style would be most suitable for us. The potential resale market for converted barns with neon signs in the lounge, stainless steel kitchens or polished concrete floors is not an irrelevant part of this problem. Most buyers are looking for something slightly more sedate, I think.
I recommend anyone redesigning or restoring a building to accumulate magazine pictures and books and so on. Then find pictures of exteriors or interiors that you like, and try to think why you like them. A couple of hundred pounds on magazines and books is money very well spent if the ideas can translate into adding thousands of pounds to the value of your house, and make it a nicer place to live. Likewise the house renovation magazines that I buy are not often immediately applicable to the work I am doing, but they come into their own when I am later planning a bathroom, a shutter colour or anything else for the building and I am looking for ideas. As with tools, and the materials for the restoration itself, if you try too hard to save money you will end up with a worse result and ultimately you will make a lot less money.
This is not to say that it is always worth spending as much money as possible. Buying an IKEA kitchen and a more ‘upmarket’ work surface for example, or a fitting a basic white bathroom equipment with expensive taps can get very good results for less money. Cheap floor tiles well fitted and coordinated will look better than poorly selected expensive tiles, and cheaper curtains in a plain colour will often look better than expensive curtains in a designer fabric. Looking at magazines will guide you with these things, because you can see how other people have approached the same problem. ‘Kitchen from IKEA’ occurs with alarming frequency with these expensive houses.
One little axe I will grind while I am on this subject is the ‘house makeover’ programmes so popular in the UK. Apart from the obvious fact that these transformations frequently look cheap and tacky, why would you pay a specialist to tell you that you can’t sell your house because you have dark brown walls, piles of rubble in the garden or tiles falling off in the bathroom? Keep the property clean and tidy with light colours and plenty of light and you are half way there. Repair the obvious defects, hang a couple of pictures, mow the grass and chuck the clutter in a box in the attic and you are pretty much sorted. Oh yes, I do miss all that UK television in France. Still we have done OK from the knowledge that people will pay a premium for a property that is nice and clean and recently painted, so who are we to complain…
Of course when you are buying a house you must look from the opposite direction. Ignore the paintwork and the things that cost little to put right. Ask how thick the insulation is in the attic, or to see the service record for the central heating boiler. Open and close the kitchen cupboard doors and drawers and look at the roof carefully. These are the things that can cost real money to put right. Then ask whether the double glazed windows are filled with argon, and shake your head sadly when they admit they have no idea – that should baffle them.
December 28th
One of our friends is having renovation work done and has had a problem that you might want to consider if you are renovating a house in France. Remember that windows almost open inwards, and that shutters open outwards. So if you put a sink, a bed or a cupboard in front of a window, it will be difficult to open and close the shutters. Similarly a kitchen window behind a sink can not be opened if the tap is tall or the window is low. Our friends find that the plumber has put a multitude of water pipes below a window, with a casual comment about the need to box them in. Easily done, if not beautiful, but it will then be very difficult to open and close the shutters. House insurance policies in France invariably insist that shutters are closed when the property is vacant, so you can not simply decide to always leave the shutters open. It is possible to buy attachments for shutters that make them easier to open and close without dangling from the window, but these may not be beautiful and will not always solve the problem. Just a little example of the kind of thing you need to consider when planning your house, and will almost certainly overlook.
This need for forward planning brings swimming pools to mind. Our pool, by necessity, is a little distance from the house, and during the summer we bemoaned the fact that we could not supervise the children playing in the pool without sitting by the pool ourselves. For us, with a gite, it was not desirable to be overlooking the pool from the kitchen, since it would be offputting for holidaymakers to have us gawping at them from the window. In any case, the things that people do in swimming pools in the sunshine does not always bear close scrutiny... However, many people have their pools immediately adjacent to the house, separated only by a terrace. In the summer we were very envious. Then autumn arrived and all the swimming pool covers went on. The view of a pool in the winter, with a dirty cover on it, is not very elegant, so we are now celebrating that for more than half of the year we can look out on grass and trees instead of dirty green plastic. Neither option is ‘better’ but it is worth thinking carefully about the location of the pool before the bulldozers arrive.
I also amused myself today by knocking up an ‘artist’s impression’ of how the finished barn would look, using photograph manipulation on the computer. Constructed from a photo of the barn, and with various doors and windows added using photos of windows from our other buildings, the composite was met with a resounding ‘but that looks awful’ from Susan and the children. I have now substantially improved it by reducing the thickness of the door and window frames, and removing the little ‘cross-bars’ from all the windows. However this has emphasised the importance of getting these details right if the finished result is to look good. It also makes it clear that while the architect’s drawings are useful up to a point they are not sufficient for making more detailed decisions. I am now under orders to prepare these composite photos for all sides of the barn so that we are clear about what we are aiming for. I recommend this approach to anyone else renovating a building. I used Adobe Photoshop which is quite expensive, but Adobe Photoshop Elements is much cheaper and easier to use, and I think would be able to achieve much the same results. It was certainly interesting to see the building as a finished product. The same composite can also later be used for testing shutter colours or terrace design, for example, so is well worth the effort.
January 12th 2004
Not much has happened in the barn during the last couple of weeks, so I have been progressing with a couple of other outstanding tasks in the house. My focus has been on the ‘lobby’ – an internal room with a staircase leading upstairs. The big problems in this room are the floor and the stairs.
The floor is made from the original ‘terracotta’ tiles, and is very nice. There is certainly no suggestion that we should replace it. However decades of dirt and grime have played their part, so I have been doing a lot of scrubbing. The best substance for removing the old grime and surface cement is hydrochloric acid so I have been splashing that about with gay abandon. Not very good for the hands though, as you might imagine. That worked quite well, so I then decided to remove the old grout from between the tiles. Using, curiously, a little tool designed for removing grout from old tiles, I managed to do this quite successfully. This was helped by the ‘grout’ largely consisting of 100 years of compressed dirt. After applying linseed oil liberally to the surface – this prevents the new grout sticking to the tiles – I thought I would be clever. Since many of the joints between the tiles are very narrow, I thought I could brush dry lime all over the surface, spray it with water, and that it would set nicely. This does not work, because the water doesn’t soak into the lime, it simply sits on the surface. So I then removed all the new lime, cleaned and oiled the floor again, and did the job properly with lime premixed with water. This has worked very well. It is worth remembering that lime should be used rather than cement for all ‘jointing’ type work, be it floor tiles or the stonework of the walls of the house. There are several reasons for this, including (in no particular order):
- The manufacture of cement is very environmentally unfriendly
- Lime can ‘breathe’ better than cement so is better for the building, but will still prevent rain and water entering the building
- Lime doesn’t crack or shrink in the way that cement does, and will ‘automatically’ fill any little cracks that do appear, so lasts better
- Cement is very hard and extremely difficult to remove from old rocks and tiles, hence the next time these are worked on they will probably need replacing rather than simply cleaning, if lime has been used it can be removed quite easily
- A cement mix will tend to be harder than the tiles and stones, so these can crack if any slight movement of the structure takes place. A lime mix is softer that the tiles and rocks so will not cause this problem.
You can see that I am not a big fan of cement. Incidentally lime (‘chaux’ in France) costs no more than cement.
Anyway, the pointing of the floor being complete, I put on another couple of coats of linseed oil to make sure the tiles are well sealed. I will wax them shortly. I haven’t mixed turpentine (‘terebenthine’, added one part to two parts oil) or drying agent (‘siccatif’) with the oil on this occasion, although I did when I was treating the kitchen, which suffers from much more use. The floor is now looking pretty good, retaining its old and worn appearance without just looking dirty. And for a total cost of less than £50, and a couple of days work.
The stairs are a bigger problem. The staircase is of old oak with the handrail worn to a magnificent shiny patina. The treads however are significantly worn away at the front, which makes the already steep staircase quite slippery and dangerous. The upright bars that support the handrail and stop people falling are largely missing, due to a combination of woodworm and children slipping on the stairs and breaking the bars. This is not ideal in a house which will be a gite in a year’s time. However, I want to retain as much of the original as possible. It would be possible simply to replace the treads entirely, but new treads are unlikely to match the original staircase. Also this would be costly and or difficult since it would involve dismantling the whole staircase – the treads being set into the main support of the staircase at each end.
It would also be possible to fix new treads on top of the existing treads, or to cut a strip of one centimetre width from the front of every tread and thus remove the offending worn areas. The former of these options would conceal the original stairs, so was ruled out. It would be easily done however, since new ‘noses’ for steps are available that attach to parquet that is laid on the step. The latter of these options has been ignored for the time being, simply because it is irreversible and I am not entirely sure that I can make a good job of it. I may do this at a later time if necessary. The option I have chosen is the most simple and the most sure, but may not be the most beautiful. I have bought aluminium ‘tread fronts’ – thin strips of aluminium expressly made to reinforce treads worn at the front, and I will cut these to size and glue one of these to each step. I am happy with this, because it is inexpensive, doesn’t involve doing anything irreversible, and will largely keep the original stairs on view. If it doesn’t look right I can go back to the plan of cutting a strip off the front of each step at some later time.
The protective bars up the side of the staircase that stop children and elderly relatives from falling to the floor below are a problem I have not entirely resolved yet. I think I need to drill out the remaining ‘stubs’ of the broken old bars, and insert new bars. The practicalities of doing this without dismantling the stairs are to be tackled over the next few days.
The staircase not being a standard ‘off the shelf’ size, a totally new hardwood staircase would cost about £2,500 to £3,500 – or perhaps £1,500 for a staircase in pine or similar. It is easy to spend a lot more than this. Relaying the steps with parquet and specially made wooden fronts is about £35 per stair and the new front strips that I am using cost about £5 per tread. I am not a big supporter of tearing out an old staircase to replace it with a new one, or of covering up the original stairs, so I am happy to try the cheaper option. A good carpenter could presumably cut or relay the steps (take them out and turn them around?) or insert ‘new’ old oak fronts on the treads for £40 - £70 per tread. I have not got an estimate for this however. I have seen a similar effort elsewhere that had not been well done and I worry that I would spend £1000 and it would look worse. I would need to be very confident in a carpenter’s abilities before getting this done.
While I have been doing this work in the house, Susan has been outside using a pickaxe to excavate drainage channels across the end of the house. These seem to be working quite well at carrying water away from the house are now being well tested by heavy rain. I have been reflecting on the best way to do these for such a long time that she decided just to get on with it, so I have been taught a valuable lesson. I will in future always reflect on difficult jobs for as long as possible.
January 17th
The heavy rain has been continuing for about two weeks now. Susan has taken to looking mournfully out of the window at the streams, puddles and flooding and asking why we can’t have ‘normal’ weather – it is always either very hot or very cold, very wet or very dry. I have been trying to put a roof on the ‘porch’ that I am constructing around the front door of the house but usually get stopped by rain after about 10 tiles.
I am using old canal tiles that we have laying around that are a remarkable invention of the Romans, I understand. Although I don’t know what the Ancient Greeks would have used instead. If you have never seen canal tiles they are like a piece of clay pipe about 40 centimetres long, cut in half lengthways, squashed a bit flat and tapering towards one end. They are laid as a column of consecutive ‘U’ type channels, with the tapered end at the bottom of one tile sitting in the wider end of the tile below. Further rows laid on top, upside down, cover the joins between the tiles. So essentially you end up with a roof made from lots of columns of gutters.
These tiles don’t need fixing to the roof structure, apart from a bit of cement, oops, lime along the top edge to stop rain leaking in where the roof meets the house wall. They hold themselves in place with their own shape and weight. The only drawback is that they can not be used on steep roofs. Although these tiles are found in many parts of southern Europe I don’t recall ever seeing them in the UK, although I can’t imagine why not. They also look suitably rustic and sexy. As you may remember it is these that will be used on the barn roof, with the slight difference that they are to be stuck on top of corrugated sheeting, for an absolute assurance that no water or draughts can get in whichever way the wind is blowing. If it’s good enough for the Romans it’s good enough for us.
The best way to lay these tiles, I believe, is to lay them on wooden battens that are themselves laid at 45 degrees – that is, with a corner pointing up – running from top to bottom of the supporting structure. This involves cutting triangular notches out of the main frame to support these battens. The curve of the canal tiles then rests snugly against the sloping sides of the battens. I used battens of 40mm by 40 mm. It is possible, and more common, to do the same with battens of wood simply nailed flat to the support - although this gives much less contact between the tiles and the battens, it is also much easier. Battens of perhaps 60mm by 25mm would then be used, although this depends slightly on the exact size of the tiles.
January 19th
Returning to the ‘uprights’ for the stairs, this has turned out to be a much easier job than I anticipated. The remaining stubs of broken uprights were simply tugged out with pliers, and new iron bars have been inserted. Cheap, quick and beautiful, just my kind of task. So we now almost have a safe staircase. Not quite, because there is no banister across the top, so it would still be easy to topple over the edge, but I will get to that in due course. Hopefully before gite guests arrive in 2005.
January 23rd
The big day arrived a month early. Because there has been so much rain over the last four weeks, the mason rang at 2.30 and announced he would be here at 3.00, because his other jobs had become impossible in the rain. I spent half an hour trying to move the remaining things out of the barn – I thought we had another month to go, so a few things remained. At 3pm they arrived, and trucks, vans, bulldozers and so on filled the courtyard. By 6.30, when they left, the floor of the barn had been largely levelled and several trucks of rubble removed. Since the floor is largely earth, we have also been left with a very large pile of earth for Susan to scatter around the garden.
This reminds me of something I read recently concerning earth floors, such as this one and the one we had in the house. Apparently these ‘terre battu’ (‘beaten earth’) floors are not simply a consequence of not having a floor laid, but were at one time (until 200 years ago) quite sophisticated, with clay being spread on the existing floor and then beaten flat. Some places in France even had a special dance that was performed on the floor to ensure it was well flattened! This explains why the floor in the house was so difficult to hack into. And now I feel guilty because I wasn’t simply digging earth, but was destroying a historical feature of the house.
January 24th
The heavy rain continued through the night and somehow formed a stream into the barn. Yes I know, we should have dug the drainage channels first not later, but we have had an exceptional amount of rain recently. Anyway this was a bit of a surprise for the mason who arrived promptly (yes it is a Saturday) to continue work on the floor and found his foundation trench had filled up. ‘La piscine’ he now calls our barn. Still he is working enthusiastically and trying to pump the water out faster than it comes in. I mentioned to him that we would be pleased if he could dig a drainage channel for us…
January 26th
Well, they didn’t work on Sunday so we had better complain about that. But today they are back, along with numerous lorries of hardcore, gravel and so on. It is OK for us because we have a large tarmac courtyard, but what happens to town dwellers that have nowhere for large numbers of vehicles and quantities of building materials to go? Anyway, it is kind of fun watching the floor taking shape and discussing where the water and waste pipes should be buried in the concrete – which I think is being poured tomorrow. Unfortunately it is still sporadically raining very heavily which does not help matters and means there is mud everywhere.
January 31st
The week has been pretty hectic morning to night. The pouring of the concrete was an event, involving both concrete lorries and a huge ‘pump’ lorry. This lorry looked a bit like a fire engine, and had a huge (40 metres long) articulated arm that bent itself around until it had reached the furthest recesses of the barn. The other end of the lorry had concrete poured into it and this got pumped into the barn. Unfortunate perhaps for a friend here at the time, since the queue of lorries across the courtyard and down the drive stopped them leaving for a couple of hours.
Other work started includes the renovation of the colombage wall at the front of the barn – which is already looking good although the final crepi (render) has not yet been applied, and a couple of large holes have appeared in the barn walls which will soon be windows.
These windows have stone down both sides, in keeping with the building, and a truck load of stone has been deposited in the courtyard. Never mind using it for doors and windows, we would like to keep this heap as a monumental sculpture. All reclaimed from more derelict buildings, some of the stones still have ancient holes and gate hinges still attached. That will confuse future owners of the property, when they try to work out how a gate or door would have been found in such-a-such place. Last year we had a derelict pigsty demolished as part of the renovation of the cottage and I can’t help wondering if we are now paying to get the rock back.
Anyway they will continue doing the walls, doors and windows next week so within a week or two it should start to feel pretty much like a house, although we know from the cottage that when the roof gets taken off a building, it rapidly looks like a derelict shell. It was very worrying when this happened with the cottage, since you suddenly get the impression that you are spending a fortune on the basis of a few old stone walls.
Anyway, it is certainly all happening very quickly and the children have already taken to roller-skating around the barn. Exciting times. I have a had a bad cold all week, which combined with the miserable weather and the mayhem all around has stopped me doing much work myself. To be honest I feel a bit of a fool doing jobs like, say, digging a hole through the tarmac in the courtyard with a pickaxe (for planting a tree) when I am surrounded by workers with bulldozers and pneumatic drills who could do the job in a tenth of the time. So I am reasonably happy just peering out of the windows for the duration of the large works.
February 1st
The rain has gone and we are promised that it isn’t about to come back. We have had a beautiful sunny spring day and are keeping our fingers crossed that the worst of winter is behind us. Winters here are pretty rough but thankfully very short. Also I think that the nature of our lives now – living and working outside, being in the countryside – makes us much more prone to ‘bad weather depression’, and we have all been walking around in the sunshine smiling inanely. I have started building a little shelter over the door of the cottage so that gite guests can get out of the rain while they find their keys and so on. More timber and canal tiles of course.
February 3rd
Good news and bad news today.
The good news is that I have finished the little porch for the cottage and that looks pretty good. The openings in the barn for the ‘picture’ window and the kitchen window are finished and they are good – the views from the picture window over the open countryside are amazing. The stone and wood borders and lintels for the openings certainly look old and authentic – the timber lintel for the big window looks like something that has been at the bottom of the sea for a hundred years.
The bad news is that the good weather has meant that the mason has to return to his previous job for the next two weeks. Understandable, since he only arrived here a month early on the basis of heavy rain, but a bit of a shame since we have got accustomed to the rapid changes here. We won’t know what to do with ourselves when there isn’t a new wall to look at each day.
He has also made the opening through from the barn to the adjoining ‘little barn’ (now to be our bedroom, rather than the playroom originally planned). The mystery is that this opening, bordered by concrete, costs almost as much as a large opening of reclaimed stone – 600 pounds compared with 900 pounds. With a doorway only about 70 centimetres wide, overweight people will forever be unable to enter this room, but it will be very nice descending the small staircase into a bedroom with a vaulted ceiling and a colombage wall, from such a narrow corridor.
February 11
A week on, and we have not seen the mason since. However we have a new excitement in our life because the roofers are here. In a flash of an eye they have removed the old tiles from one side of the barn, levelled the surface, and put the voliges (wooden planking that will be our ceiling) in place. They are now unrolling the insulation on the roof – a thin aluminium and bubble wrap sandwich. The voliges, as we were warned, are a slightly bright yellow colour because of the treatment used. After the roof is finished we can either wait for this colour to fade, or paint over it. Since 260 square metres of ceiling is a lot of painting, especially on rough wood, we will probably leave it for the time being and see how much it fades over the next few months.
February 16
It is now Monday. The mason returned in the middle of last week and has completed his last two openings for doors and windows. Half the roof is finished to the stage where it is ready to have tiles put on. The yellow wood is not as bad as we had feared but will still need painting, I think. This week should be a big week. With both the mason and the roofers here, we expect that most of the large works will be completed, although perhaps it will take two more weeks. It is especially exciting for Susan because she has gone to England for the week and anticipates great things by the time she returns. Incredibly, as with the cottage last year, the main work will probably be completed several weeks ahead of schedule.
During the weekend I had another of my huge bonfires, to get rid of the huge piles of old wood that were building up, and then took advantage of the many large ladders around to do some work on the tobacco barn. This included removing some rather dangerous old wiring that was still connected to the live system; removing some old wood panelling that was threatening to fall on someone; and replaced a wooden roof beam that had cracked perilously and was threatening to deposit hundreds of roof tiles on the car. So I am pleased.
One last job had to be done because the water authorities are coming tomorrow to inspect our new septic tank and drainage field. This is a big job since it involves digging a hole as big as a swimming pool, and filling it with various layers of sand, gravel, pipes and membranes. Anyway, a tree had sprung up just below the drainage field that we installed last year, from the stump of an old dead tree, and I was worried that they would consider the roots of the tree to be a threat to the drainage field so it needed to be removed. About three metres tall, this was not easy. Digging around it didn’t work, so I ended up tying a rope around it and pulling it out with the tractor. This has, not surprisingly, broken the main root. I have replanted the tree in a more sensible place, but I am not optimistic about its chances, which is a shame since it is very attractive, of a type known as a ‘tremble’ tree in France (possibly an aspen elsewhere?)
February 19
Storming progress until now this week, with the colombage wall now finished and the roof rapidly taking shape. The colombage wall, which cost quite a bit to get done (about £3,000 for 100 square metres, including inside and outside, and including building walls in the large openings where barn doors once stood) would have been worth paying three times as much for. It is very good and definitely makes the barn look sexy.
I thought that nothing would be done today, because this morning there was snow on the ground and sleet in the air. South of France weather is not all it is cracked up to be in the winter and Susan told me that spring is more advanced in the North of England.
However it takes more than bad weather to slow down the workers here, and after a brief hour chopping the bottom of our main support pillars and putting large stones in as more secure supports they were back up on the roof in their waterproofs carrying on as normal.
The builders have started building the internal walls, and since there is no roof above them yet they sent their apprentice up to staple polythene onto the roof beams. Slipping and sliding around he didn’t look very impressed by the idea, but the roofers continued to amble around as if they were in the park. For myself, I wouldn’t go up there unless there was a large cash incentive and a safety harness.
Seeing the internal walls going up is very exciting since it gives a feeling of rooms to the space. Although it is much darker in the barn now it has a roof on and internal walls. The mason seemed a bit surprised when I reminded him that gaps needed to be left in the walls for the doorways – French humour perhaps – and we have spent lots of time discussing the space required.
…
As I was writing the above I suddenly had a mental picture of the walls I had been looking at earlier with the mason. We had spent a lot of time looking at the width of the double doorways, but not the single doorway that leads to the ensuite bathroom. And I suddenly realised that I couldn’t remember seeing the beginnings of the doorway – the walls were only 20 centimetres high when I was there. I rushed out to find the walls now more than a metre high…and no bathroom door. After a day working in miserable conditions I’m not sure he was best pleased to find that he had forgotten, but he smiled politely and started pulling bricks back out. My offer of drinks – usually some want beer, some want coffee - was certainly met enthusiastically with calls for beer all round. I would have thought a coffee better when you’re freezing cold but I’m no judge, evidently. I suspect if I had offered them a bottle of wine each they would have been more pleased.
February 26
Another big day – the roof is finished. So both the mason and the carpenter have left us alone, with the raised mezzanine floor inside the barn being the only ‘gross’ work left to be finished. The structural internal walls are complete, just leaving the ‘non-structural’ partition walls to be constructed by me during the summer.
We had one more hiccup with the building of these walls. The floor in the barn is split level because of the slope in the ground – hence on the kitchen