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 side the floor is 45 centimetres higher than the bedroom and mezzanine side. The structural walls had all been built on the lower side, and carefully measured to be just over two metres high. Unfortunately the door between the kitchen side and the lower side had also been built to the same level – hence when approached from the kitchen it had a height of just over one and a half metres – well below my chin. I delicately pointed this out to the mason who smiled at me patiently, announced from his scaffolding that it was two metres high and proceeded to demonstrate with his tape measure that I was wrong. I am sure he was as surprised as me to find it was a child sized doorway and of course happily pulled the lintel and wall down again. Still, this may be a warning to you if you are not always on site to check things out. It would have been much harder to correct if the cement had all dried and the mezzanine floor laid on top of it.
Likewise we have now noticed that the kitchen window finishes ten centimetres lower than a kitchen unit. The plans show the width and height of the window that will be fitted but not the height from the bottom of the window to the floor. Oops, we are still wondering what to do about this.
The new supporting posts have been placed under the weakest point of the main roof beams which makes us much more confident that the roof won’t fall in. They were able to use large beams from the corner of the roof that was being demolished for this, which was good news. Also the two main supporting posts have had the bottom 20 centimetres removed and large stones inserted instead – another comfort since the bottom of these posts looked incapable of supporting a cup of tea never mind a roof. These two jobs were cheap, quick and easy for them to do which is strange since we had originally thought they would be difficult and expensive and we considered not doing the barn conversion at all because of them.
The interior of the barn is surprisingly light, which we are very pleased about since that is the main concern with a barn conversion. However we have broken one of the cardinal rules of barn conversions to achieve this – we have added four Velux windows in the roof. Susan brought a copy of Grand Designs magazine back from England at the weekend which told us that the cardinal rules of a successful barn conversion include, among others: (1) no roof windows (2) no new openings in the walls (3) no chimneys. We are in the process of breaking all these rules, which is shocking behaviour, but as I have said before we want to live in a barn conversion, because of the space and the height, but we don’t actually want to live in a cold dark barn. The thought of not having a woodstove (hence the little chimney) is appalling to us, as we sit here on a cold snowy day in February. To be fair I suppose it now looks from the outside like an ‘inhabited barn’ rather than a cow barn, but we think it looks very good and are very happy with it. I hope we are not entirely without good taste, and roof windows and chimney are easily reversible if a future owner likes the cold and the dark.
I have to say that the barn renovations in the magazine all cost far more than ours for the same floor space, and some had filled in the original large ‘cart doorways’ with great swathes of glass. So they looked more like ‘inhabited barns’ than ours. Of course, if we were spending £300,000 on the conversion we might well have done the same, but I am not sure.
March 2
It seems to always be the case that after builders have worked on a house, there is a huge amount of general rubble to clear away afterwards. I wonder if I was elderly or more demanding if they would do it for me?
Around the back of the barn I had told the builders that they could leave some of their rubble, because it could form the foundation of the future terrace. We discussed the level of the terrace and so on. I have now just spent the day moving general stone and rubble to this area from other parts of the ‘building site’, but also levelling the large amounts of rubble that were clearly higher than any terrace could ever be. They seem to start off with good intentions, and then get more frantic as time goes by until they are just emptying stuff everywhere. I would have asked them to come back and level it for us, but we don’t want any more bulldozer tracks to the back of the barn – they take longer to get rid of than the rubble mountain.
Likewise the pool of oil on the courtyard floor – was it an accident or did someone just empty there old oil on the floor? I have also had a huge bonfire, again, and we are slowly starting to look presentable. Unfortunately I have also started demolishing the old concrete block sheds in the courtyard, which is even more rubble to clear away.
On the plus side, they have essentially finished all the major works several weeks ahead of schedule, so there should not be a great problem in making things look nice by mid-May, when the first gite guests of 2004 arrive (we have rejected bookings earlier than this, to avoid having holidaymakers plodding through the mud.)
The pointing of the stone walls underneath the colombage has been done a bit hastily, and we will ask the builders to redo it, but otherwise we are pleased with the work, ahead of schedule and on budget. Remarkably we have also just had a quote for the windows and shutters which is slightly below budget – since we have now committed to about 75% of the total costs of the barn, either with work completed or estimates accepted, we are now reasonably confident that we will not have a large overspend. Three doors (of which two are large picture windows), about eight windows, and shutters for all, will cost about £4,000 all in if we accept the quote.
The only potential reason for not accepting this quote is that if we go to a specialist window maker, we can get more efficient double glazing (argon filled and with a 16mm gap between the panes of glass) than the menuisier here can provide. On the other hand, the windows would then be made of less attractive wood and would cost a bit more. For us to choose I suppose, but I think we will stay with the quote we have received.
I should add that none of the workers we have had here treat their ‘devis’ as an estimate, but always as a firm quote. Excepting late changes to the work which we discuss as they arise, the final bills are always exactly as the original quote. We almost never agree to additional work without being clear of the cost in advance, however small the job seems, and this probably helps to avoid over-priced extras from turning up unexpectedly. On the two or three occasions when we have not agreed a price, because the work involved is so small, we have found that there is, with some workers, a tendency to overprice the work (or for us to misunderstand what ‘small’ is). I suppose that if I am paying £20,000 to a roofer, he may think an extra £500 is too small to mention, I may think it is a long weekend in Italy. Of course, I used to be an accountant and investment analyst so may not see money in a conventional way…
March 6
The big clear up has started, removing the heaps of debris that lie all over the place. I am moving most of the rubble to the back of the barn, where it will one day form part of a terrace. ‘Rubble’ includes the rocks from the walls that have been demolished to make openings, and the larger of these are being kept on one side and will be used to make the terrace wall. Some of these rocks are big enough to fill a wheelbarrow on their own, so it is not always funny lifting them. When I need a break from moving unmoveably heavy rocks, I pass time on the potting shed demolition – this is my favourite job, because I can see the view across the countryside emerging in place of a concrete block building as I proceed.
Of course there may be people who don’t consider such work to be a pleasure, and would need to budget for a grand clear-up and landscaping exercise to follow the building works. One architect we spoke to shortly after arriving suggested it would cost £80,000 for the barn conversion itself, and £30,000 for the terracing and landscaping work around the barn. Hence we hope to do much of this ‘outdoors’ work ourselves.
Following complaints from visitors about the number of nails that lie strewn around the courtyard threatening their car tyres, I have also swept that. Trust me, this was a bigger job than you are thinking. The last thing I want to do is to save money by clearing up myself and then have to give the money to someone who has burst a tyre when they come here. Also next weekend is the birthday party of one of the children, and relationships with the local community will not be helped by their cars being coated with a fine layer of cement.
March 12
I have passed a good few days moving rocks rubble and rubbish, and we are starting to look acceptable. Because the work has been finished ahead of schedule there is no risk that we will still be looking scrappy when the first holidaymakers arrive in mid-May.
I have also finished demolishing and removing the old concrete block shed at the edge of the courtyard, which has made a big difference, as hoped, by opening up hitherto undiscovered views across the countryside. Now we will just need to focus on gravel and plants, but this has to wait until the mason has made the staircase in the barn.
The mason visited a couple of days ago, because I had asked him to redo the pointing of the stonework in the barn, which had become very patchy. He agreed without a murmur, since there had been a problem when it was originally done. The roof had been off when the pointing was done, and when rain had hit the colombage wall above the stone walls, the old wood had leaked some resinous substance which had stained the walls. The mason apparently had pressure washed the walls to remove it, but this had unfortunately affected the pointing. Incidentally pressure washing is called ‘Karcher’ in France, after the company that makes the pressure washers (like ‘hoovering’ in the UK) so my lengthy efforts in French to discuss ‘cleaning with water at high pressure’ were met with bewilderment until the work Karcher cropped up.
While he was here we also discussed the forthcoming staircase. He had not studied the plans carefully and expected to build a ‘straight’ flight of stairs. In fact, there is a 90 degree left turn towards the top. Despite his unconvincing explanation about why I would prefer not to have this left turn, I have stuck to the plans. In fact there are good reasons for this turn, including headroom in the toilet room under the stairs, and access to a possible future bedroom on the mezzanine. He was not best pleased, I think – presumably a staircase with a turn is significantly harder to make – and while he is a very good mason he is not always very good at getting measurements exactly right. On verra, as we say.
The windows have also been ordered and will arrive in about five weeks. Windows were something that we pained over in great detail. One opening or two, sliding door or not for the picture window, wood or aluminium frames and so on. I ended up getting two quotes for the windows and shutters, one from a large chain of window suppliers (who did the windows in the main house two years ago) and the carpenter who did the roof (who did the windows in the little cottage last year). For essentially the same windows (oak frames) and shutters, the carpenter quoted 6,000 euros and the shop quoted 11,000 euros. This 11,000 quote included 2,500 euros for fitting the shutters, which sounds like an excessive amount.
The shop windows have the advantage that they are ‘better’ double glazing, with a 16 millimetre gap between the panes of glass instead of 12 millimetres, and the space filled with argon instead of air. However they have the downside that they can’t make ‘special’ windows to fit the two ‘non-square’ gaps that we have, and can’t make a single window as big as a door – they propose a separate small window above the main window to compensate.
In reality, much of the difference is because the windows are ‘non-standard’ sizes, despite the plans showing standard sizes. In a new, brick built, house it would be easy to get the openings exactly right, but it seems this is harder when cutting opening in old stone walls. Although they are very close in size to the plans, a couple of centimetres difference with most openings means that the window needs to be ‘made to measure’ instead of ‘standard’ and with the shop this adds a lot to the cost. I did hear of someone who demanded that all their windows be redone to fit standard windows, but I don’t know if that was for a new house. Certainly I doubt if the mason here would or could redo the openings here with two centimetres difference in size without making the alteration look worse than the original.
The final problem with the shop is that they charge 50 euros to visit the house, measure exactly, and then provide a final quote. This 50 euros is deductible from the order price, but is not refundable even if the final quote is much higher than the original. I object on principle to paying for a quote. So we have ordered the windows from the carpenter, and expect delivery in the middle of April.
Regarding the shutters, I had said that we want ‘barres and écharpes’. That is, the wooden bars that hold the shutters together look like a ‘Z’. In fact, more authentic and traditional is to have the horizontal bars only, without the additional sloping bar. I discussed this with the carpenter and he assured me that his shutters would be solid enough without this sloping support so this is what I have ordered. He smiled happily and told me that this was the right decision. This is the same person that essentially refused to demolish the shelter at the front of the barn, as an act of violence against the patrimony of his country.
It is curious that almost all shutters sold are made with this sloping support, and then supplied in an unnaturally orange colour wood. I think this must be special ‘use for gites only’ style, since you can often spot a gite by these shutters. Meanwhile the magazines devoted to house restoration complain heartily about their ‘inauthenticity’.
One other useful snippet of information. Many if not most new windows are supplied with little bars that divide the panes of glass into squares. I have learned that these little panes never existed on buildings before the 19th century, so are another example of something that looks quaint and original but is not.
Anyway, overall we will get our windows and shutters for less than the price that we had originally budgeted for windows alone, so we are happy.
Unfortunately the cold weather continues at night, it was minus six degrees last night. During the day it is has been bright and sunny with temperatures close to 20 degrees, however. As a comparison, the UK this week has had night time temperatures of about four degrees but daytime temperatures of about eight degrees. This is a very common situation. We get much colder here at night than most people would expect, but then also much warmer during the day. This would all be very pleasant except that we live in a house without central heating so can get a bit cold at night…
Further to my earlier comments about central heating, I read yesterday that generally speaking the heating should not be turned down at night, but should be left on all the time at 18-19 degrees (not 20-25 as is common). If you turn your heating down at night, certainly by more than a couple of degrees, all that happens is that the walls, floors and furniture cool down and then the heating works twice as hard in the morning to get it all back up to temperature. So the advice was – and this in a book about saving energy – to leave it on the same temperature all the time.
April 10
A month of tidying up, filling in bulldozer tracks, removing an old clay heap, and we are now looking pretty good. We have ordered gravel to cover the courtyard and that should arrive shortly, although it will perhaps take a week or two to spread out 15 cubic metres of rock. We are both optimistic that that will make us beautiful, although it is not quite clear whether it will slowly wash off the courtyard, and need raking back up the slope or will hold itself in place.
Not much has been done in the barn, since the external work had to be done first. But the plumber is slowly laying the future water and central heating pipes, and the electrician is coming at the end of April to start laying wires. I had anticipated doing the electrics myself but a number of dire warnings have made me worry that it would ultimately reduce the saleability of the property if I can’t demonstrate that a qualified electrician has done the work.
After the plumbing and electrics are in place I can think about laying the screed on the floor.
While I wait for the barn to become available I have been working on the shelter around the front door of the house. After months of worrying about how to prevent the water flowing against the front door, I have levelled the floor in front of the house, laid tiles (fortunately we have an excess of quarry tiles here – I over ordered when we first arrived) and made a small ridge between the tiles and the courtyard to keep the streams of rain at bay. This will also help keep our soon-to-arrive gravel from spreading across the porch area. Looks good, and means that during the summer, when we have holidaymakers here, we can use this door for entering the house. This will add to our privacy, and to that of the gite, so all should be happy. Not huge, but big enough for a seat and a couple of pots of plants, just like the Waltons.
The drain that the mason installed next to the barn also seems to be working, along with various other drainage that we have implemented, so we are pretty dry all around now – not bad after two years.
With hindsight it might have been sensible to get one huge long drain installed above the courtyard and below the field when we first arrived, but we hadn’t quite grasped that although we are almost on top of a hill we are actually slightly downhill from a large field which drains across us (the three acre field is all probably less than 50 centimetres higher up than the courtyard, but the impenetrable clay layer is only 20 centimetres under the soil in the field, hence the rain essentially lands and runs straight off)). Hindsight is a marvellous thing of course. I recommend anyone doing something similar to sort out drains at a very early stage in the process. Our main drain is about 60 centimetres deep, filled largely with small rocks, with a ‘perforated’ pipe in the bottom. A geotextile membrane stops the drain filling up with soil and weeds, and the I have turned the top layer of rock into an edged path, so it looks OK as well.
April 24
The gravel for the courtyard has arrived, a mere 30 tonnes, and we are now spreading it out. Thankfully the lorries that brought it were able to drive as they emptied it out, and this has done a very good job at distributing an even layer over the courtyard. So our workload is hugely reduced. Trust me when it comes to moving rock, you want to do as little as possible. The gravel is ’20-40’ that is, crushed rock with a diameter of 20 – 40 millimetres. Slightly larger than we had anticipated but in fact looks good and seems unlikely to slide away in the rain. This was on the advice of the local quarry owner. It is improving immeasurably the appearance of the courtyard, especially as plants in pots are being arranged, and goes very well with the grass and flowers around the edges. All in all, magnificent! We are in danger of looking like something from a designer magazine.
It is common around here to use ‘castine’ – rock of 0 – 40 millimetres diameter which is then pounded flat to give a durable surface. The presence of the fine particles helps to ensure a hardwearing surface. However we have not got this for three reasons. Firstly, it is best laid on hardcore, not existing tarmac, and we were reluctant to excavate an existing good condition, hardwearing surface. Second, water flowing under the castine will cause it to fail, as the fine particles are slowly washed away. Third, most important, the castine becomes smoother and smoother with time and use, and eventually ends up looking like tarmac – the very situation we are trying to resolve. None the less, full credit to castine in the right place, since it uses only rock and produces an entirely environmentally friendly, hardwearing surface.
Meanwhile in the barn, I have laid most of the ‘first slice’ of the first floor. This has been made with a resilient strip along the top of each joist, then chipboard screwed through the strip to the joists. The resilient strip is to keep the chipboard from the joists, since it is the sound of wood hitting on wood that makes much of the noise with upstairs floors. Later on we will add a layer of soundproofing and then floor with parquet, but this is some months away. Options considered for the floor construction (and excluded) include-
1) Putting plasterboard on top of the joists, under the chipboard, to create the ceiling of the room below. This was excluded because we have decided we don’t want the new joists visible in the rooms below. This is simply because we want halogen lights set in the ceilings for the bath and shower rooms, and because the new joists ‘clash’ with the old colombage beams.
2) Putting two layers of chipboard, separated by a soundproof layer. This is sometimes recommended because it makes a very solid floor with good acoustic characteristics. We have decided to see how efficient our existing method is, and then add further soundproofing from the underside if necessary, at the same time as the plasterboard.
May 10
The gravel has all been spread, using 30 tonnes to cover about 300 square metres. At least two other people have left with details of where we bought the gravel so that they can do the same, so it can’t be all bad. Total cost 420 euros. But people do seem nervous about whether they are allowed to drive on it, and tend to stop abruptly at the ‘demarcation line’.
The ‘basic’ first floor is now all in place, as are the shutters. The shutters are another big step forward to making the barn look completed, although this is an illusion that is rapidly lost when you enter the building…
The ‘extension’ that had a front wall of concrete blocks, but to a height of two metres only, and looked ugly, ahs now been clad with a wall in wood. This wood cladding (‘clin’in French) I have put vertically, and it looks very good. It is reminiscent both of old barns but also of ‘modernist’, bringing to mind for example the award winning building for the Henley Boating Museum. It doesn’t clash at all with the existing adjacent colombage and stone walls of the barn - ‘un bon mariage’ as our plumber described it. So people who stay in the little gite this year will be looking at this from their bedroom window, rather than concrete blocks which is good.
The plumbing essentials are all in place, ready for the screed to be laid on top, and the electrician is due to arrive today.
Speaking of the plumber, he is coming for dinner here on Friday with his partner so we are getting nervous about that. When we were invited to his house a while ago we were treated to a magnificent feast of several courses which included a blow-by-blow description of the source of the various ingredients. This cheese comes from a small farm south of Cahors, this wine is from a little known vineyard near Bordeaux and so on. We are concerned that ‘this is from the supermarket’ won’t be very impressive and Niamh is concerned that we will fail to match the meal they prepared for us, and will come up with pasta followed by ice-cream. The plumber speaks no English at all, apart from the expression ‘no problem’, which further adds to the challenges of the evening. Although our French is ever improving we are still a long way from being casual French conversationalists.
To help Susan and me catch up with the French abilities of the children, we are having a two month ‘talk only French in the house’ experiment which is going quite well so far (two weeks in).
Ismay has just returned from her three day school trip to the coast. Two nights away from home seemed a lot for an eight year old and we flattered ourselves that we would never convince her to get on the coach. In reality she was first on, and was too busy chatting to turn and wave as the coach pulled off. She had a very good time, and wants to go again as soon as possible. This is remarkable for someone who used to be so timid, and it is not clear how an event like moving to a foreign country with an unknown language has ended up improving her confidence like this.
I can’t fail to mention the cat. Our fifth cat in two years has turned tail and disappeared. We thought that now it is more than a year old we were passed the ‘risk’ stage. Needless to say, Niamh is distraught, we are more puzzled (are they run over, killed by foxes, or simply run away?) and Ismay shrugged and said she preferred dogs anyway. Where does she get this heartless streak? Not all bad news, since it makes it easier for us to get away for a few days at some stage. And no, we are not getting another pet. Although Susan has taken to talking about goats (to help keep the fields clear) and chickens (for eggs) with alarming frequency.
May 11
I had expected the electrician today – I thought a sole trader. In fact two vans of workers have arrived and are currently channelling walls and placing wires all over the place. I much prefer this ‘short sharp shock’ approach to work than having one worker here, continually called away to emergencies and other work. Not surprisingly, he asked me to describe the positions of the sockets and equipment, which I thought I had carefully planned until he asked me where the fridge would go. We are some way from having a kitchen so I had given no thought to such matters.
As in our other renovation projects, the positioning of electrical cables for lighting (and the electric lights themselves) is a challenge since there is no ceiling cavity where cables can be hidden. In fact most main lights will be put on the four main support posts rather than hung from the ceilings, giving us a bit more flexibility I think.
May 15
The big day arrives – the first booking that we had accepted for the gite. A big day, because we had set this date as the date when all the noisy, dirty work should be finished. In fact we are ahead of schedule, with all the ‘big’ work completed both inside and outside the barn. This includes the plumbing and electricity that is required at floor level so that we can lay the render. Also it is a sunny day, nice and warm, so the holidaymakers have arrived happy and pleased with the gite. A last minute tidy up, put the wine and coffee in the gite, and time left over for varnishing a couple of shutters, so a good day.
On the side of the gite business, we have decided to focus on trying to get repeat business this year, so are keeping the prices low and we know we are a great bargain compared to many of the gites available. And we look MUCH sexier than in 2003. Of course, that leaves us wondering if by being too cheap we put people off…for the moment our primary concern is that people leave happy and recommend us to their friends and family. If that fails we can always hike our prices much higher and ignore holidaymakers complaints – paradoxically, this would be more profitable for us, since it is easy to fill gites at over-inflated priced during the summer months, and an extra £1,000 income for the six weeks of summer would more than compensate for less weeks of occupancy in the slightly off-peak times. The only thing we are not sure about is whether our visitors think they see too little of us – we tend to have a policy of ‘leave them in peace unless they track us down’ - but we wonder sometimes if people think we are rudely ignoring them
The fact that we have nowhere to sit outside is troubling us again so I have been clearing an area behind the barn, adjacent to where our final terrace will be located. Last year we sat at the end of the orchard in the shade of some trees, but we are a bit concerned that it is possible to see the gite terrace from there, albeit at some distance, and we don’t want to give the (wrong!) impression that we are keeping an eye on these visitors. Although I have constructed a large shade area next to the house, this is with a view to it being covered with plants for next years holidaymakers – it looks a bit barren at the moment, and provides no shade whatever.
The other last minute problem is the washing line. A property on top of a hill has two characteristics: good views, and nowhere to hide a washing line. Hence it is always visible from somewhere. I have put it as unobtrusively as possible but a range of brightly coloured clothes will always attract the eye…so soon I will make a fence or similar to ‘surround and conceal’ a designated clothes drying area, since next year we will have perhaps 10 people plus ourselves on site, which could be a lot of T-shirts. People do wear bright clothes on holiday, don’t they? And go shopping in clothes that they wouldn’t dream of wearing to Tesco in Dorking.
May 20
The couple in the gite are very nice, also appreciative of the property which is very pleasing. In my search for ‘quiet’ work for this week I have been cleaning and treating the wood in the ceiling of the barn, and painting the wood panelling between the old beams. With 200 square metres of laborious work to do, mostly at great height, I feel a bit like Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (apparently he didn’t actually lie on his back, but craned his neck, like me). I have opted for white emulsion rather than the Creation, but it is looking very posh all the same, and it is also nice to know that the wood is being treated against the wide array of wood-eating insects that live in these parts – Capricorn beetles, termites and so on.
The weather has been sunny and about 30 degrees all week so everyone is happy, and I am under orders that I have to open the pool tomorrow if it stays nice.
May 22
About half the ceiling now done – the easy half, above the mezzanine – but work will slow down for the next two weeks while I focus in the chape (render) on the floor of half the downstairs. This is the last two weeks until September when the gite is empty, so I will devote myself to heavy, noisy dirty work. The ceiling is perfect work to do when guests are here since it is almost completely silent, apart from my swearing when a blob of paint falls in my eye or the scaffolding wobbles too much.
If we can chape the ‘lower’ 80 square metres of floor during this time I will be very happy, since that is probably the main strenuous work to complete. About four cubic metres of render, being a lot of cement mixing. It will also mean that in due course we are ready to install the interior ceilings and walls for the bedrooms and bathrooms, another quiet job.
I have also ordered some yellow sand and some lime, so that I am poised to start pointing the walls in due course; slow work, but not very difficult.
The other job I have been focussing on is the terrace at the back of the barn, with the hope that we can have somewhere nice to sit for this summer. However, levelling rock and rubble and building stone walls has proved to be quite arduous with the temperature over 30 degrees. I am hoping for a slight cooling off during the next couple of weeks. The terrace will be quite large, perhaps 50 square metres, on two levels. It needs to be this size in part because we want an area for eating outside, but with the table and chairs not being visible from the large picture window in the new kitchen / eating area. It would be a shame to have such a good view and then spoil it with furniture.
June 3
After five days of hard work, the kitchen floor has received its render, and if I say so myself it is pretty good. For a large part of the time Susan was mixing the mortar in the cement mixer and I was ‘spreading and levelling’. Originally we had intended to render the lower part of the ground floor only, but everyone else in the family insisted that they want floorboards in the bedrooms, not tiles, so we have only rendered the kitchen side – about 70 square metres. This is now ready for tiling in due course.
The key to rendering is all in the levels. A slight error leads to a large error and a ridge or wave in the floor, which is then difficult to tile on, so I checked levels an excessive number of times. This is especially important in a room more than 12 metres long, since it would be easy to ‘appear’ level and then find that the level was wrong on reaching the other end. Remember, the concrete floor, usually laid by the mason is not level, it contains waves, dips and troughs, so it doesn’t work to simply put five centimetre thick battens of wood down at appropriate intervals and assume that all will be well. It won’t. And if you check levels using a spirit level on a long piece of wood between two points, remember that wood is almost never exactly straight but a ‘regle de macon’ is (see below). The key requirements therefore are:
- Plenty of sand and cement, and a wife who is happy to spend a few days mixing it…
- A good quality, quite long, spirit level
- A ‘regle de macon’ – a long, light metal bar used for spreading the mortar. This is cheap, completely invaluable, and way more effective than using a piece of wood.
- A tool for smoothing / compressing, with a large flat surface (‘taloche’ in France)
Common sense dictates that the cement mixer and the materials should be as close to the work area as possible unless you like moving heavy objects long distances.
Another little job that I have done is to raise the level of the window sill in this room by 20 centimetres, to allow the kitchen to be installed without obstructing the window. After considering whether to use stone for this, I decided in fact to use brick, and then ‘face’ the brick with my all time favourite ‘cheat’ product – slithers of tiles. Usually, old doors and windows around here that have been blocked in are filled with tiles, laid flat so that only the ends are visible. There is a product available from a company called Orsol that is essentially ‘tile ends’ – that is, a two centimetre thick piece of tile that looks like the end of a tile. These are glued with tile glue onto the brick surface, then pointed as with normal stone or brick work. Completely indistinguishable from a real ‘tile end’, because they are made with clay just the same a ‘real’ tile. I have used these previously on the fireplace in the house, immediately adjacent to real old tiles blocking an old window, and they are almost indistinguishable.
I should add that the same company also make ‘slivers’ of stone from reconstituted stone, to be used in the same way, to fake the appearance of a real stone house. I have never seen these used convincingly, except perhaps in the company showroom, although they are better than the stone cladding that is sometimes seen in the UK. I think, although I am not sure, that the problem is that people try too hard to accurately point the fake stone, rather than the ‘brush it all over’ approach taken with real stone. This leads to a too ‘perfect’ finish which thus fails to look hundreds of years old. in And it may be that sometimes I am admiring a stone house without realising that it is ‘fake stone’…
The bad news…having finished the floor, there is still seven tonnes of sand in the courtyard, which needs to be moved into the barn before Saturday, from when the gite is occupied. This will have the plus of putting the sand in the right place for where it is needed (for pointing the walls); the negative is that it looks like a big heap to move.
If nothing else, I have learned always to plan ahead with work. The work area needs always to be totally clear, and clean, before starting work. And never move heavy objects to a place where they will need moving again, but to the closest convenient place to where they will be used. This sounds obvious? Yes it is, but it is also worth repeating since it dramatically improves work efficiency. A half day of preparation, cleaning and clearing an area, always saves more time and stress than it takes to do, and leads to a better end result. Trust me; I’ve got it wrong plenty of times.
Anyway after that little lecture, a note that we have reached the point two days before the ‘summer season’ starts, and we remain ahead of schedule, and under budget. The big variable, I think, is the time it takes me to do the pointing of the walls (henceforth called ‘rejointing’ to avoid my confusion – the French is ‘rejointoiment’). I have allowed four weeks on my schedule, for rejointing all main interior walls – c’est a dire, about 100 square metres. Or five square metres a day, approximately.
The big threat to this deadline, apart from my own abilities, is that the tractor has been in the repair shop for three weeks and there is a lot of grass cutting to do when I get it back – probably four acres of grass 50 centimetres long – which takes a lot of time. And also the pool needs daily cleaning during the summer, and I like to have a cornetto around 4 pm every day, my gouter as we say in France.
I read today that a French estate agent had said that 99 per cent of Brits looking to buy a house in France could say no more in French than ‘oui’, ‘non’, and ‘parlez-vous anglais?’ and many can’t do much better after living here for a couple of years, especially (but not only) retired folks. While almost all estate agents do have someone in the office who can talk English, it hardly gets the British a good name, and will not stand you in good stead in future transactions. I speak as someone who two years ago had problems in the local builders merchant because I didn’t understand what a ‘seau’ was (do you?) and problems of this type continue even now, but that is not a good reason not to try in the first place. And by the way, a ‘seau’ is a bucket.
Might I recommend that if you are thinking of moving to France or buying a holiday house, you try a little bit harder than this, please? It is difficult to be fluent but it is not difficult to learn a few pleasantries and some basic vocabulary. It is difficult to learn every item that might appear on a French restaurant menu but it is not difficult to learn the French for bread, red wine, or salt. Although to say ‘un pain’ correctly is not as easy as it could be.
June 6
A big day in France today, being both Mothers Day and the 60th anniversary of the Normandy Landings. Contrary, I think, to common belief in England, the Normandy Landings are seen in France as a hugely important event that saved their country, not as a long forgotten event for which the French are insufficiently grateful.
For us, the big event was when Niamh came running over to find us in a state of hysterics. She had been in the lounge of the house when a snake had slithered over her foot, which not surprisingly scared her a bit. She calmed down after a while, but although we saw the snake (a thin black snake about 40 centimetres long – a baby ‘proper’ snake, or a slow worm?) it rushed behind the piano and we couldn’t catch it, rapidly losing all trace. So there is a reasonable chance that it is still in the house somewhere. This means the girls now wear shoes all the time in the house, check chairs carefully before sitting down, and both squeeze into the top bunk in Niamh’s bedroom to sleep. Curiously none of us are keen on finding a snake in our beds, even if it is small.
We are used to seeing snakes in the fields - long (150 cm) fat beasts with yellow or green markings down their backs, along with various occasional other bright green frogs and lizards, and toads as big as your hand, and also lizards like to get in the house from time to time, but we are all agreed that snakes in beds are unwelcome. During our first year in the house we had lots of wildlife in the house, including a nest of hornets; an invasion of hundreds of flies; lots of mice; lots of lizards, one rainy day an invasion of thin black slithery things a bit like the creatures on X-files; swallows trying to build nests in the kitchen and so on, but we are pleased that generally we are now wildlife free.
Leaving the doors and windows open means that things can enter freely, so perhaps at least the children will have now learnt to close the doors behind them…
Meanwhile in the barn, I have readied myself to start pointing the walls. Although I had already pressure washed most of the walls, so they are quite clean, I still needed to remove some of the loose ‘surface’ stones and clay. This I have done for a large part of the main wall, using the pneumatic hammer (this works with an air compressor, and is invaluable for this kind of work). So there is now three or four centimetres depth to the gaps between the stones. The first time I pointed a wall, I carefully researched on the internet and in books, and learned that I should remove all visible stones less than about 10 centimetres across, and also that the final result would look better if, where two large stones touched each other, I created a groove. Fascinating I am sure but having watched the mason at work I am now taking a more free and easy (and hopefully traditional - approach - if a stone is small and loose it comes out, otherwise it stays. And no effort to carve grooves between large rocks, which is frankly a complete waste of time and effort.
June 10
Well into the pointing now, I thought I had better make a report. I have mastered the exact quantities to use to get the right colour and consistency, which is something of a black art – people are usually very vague if you ask them what they used for their pointing, in part I think because they are concerned they have used the wrong mix. So, at the bottom of the diary I have included details of how to do it properly.
June 14
The large wall on the left of the barn is almost completely finished – about forty square metres in a week – and is doing a very good job of transforming ‘barn’ into ‘house’. Honest, it looks very good. As I have said before, I expect, even if you don’t want to do the pointing yourself, the money spent on a mason will be recouped at resale time. Plus a pointed wall is dry, naturally well insulated, and protection against the insects and small animals that will otherwise enter your house through the walls. Yes I know that old ‘not pointed’ walls look nice and rustic, but that doesn’t make them funny to live with when you have an invasion of flies in the house and a heating bill twice as high as it should be. They are also dusty and grimy, and impossible to keep clear of cobwebs etc.
Meanwhile we now have the tractor back at long last and have started reopening the paths. Not easy when the grass is almost a metre high, and mixed with the occasional patch of thistles. Still, the docks are much fewer this year. Our original policy of cutting as often as possible was specifically to reduce the number of docks, since they are the biggest problem when they get established. The practice seems to have worked in the large field that I mow all the time, after about two years. We understand that it can take five to seven years of regular hard mowing to remove all traces of thistle and dock, so I am pleased that two years has had such a big impact.
Today the farmer is coming to cut the hay, and since we all like to see the big round hay bales sitting around the fields, this is very exciting for us.
June 19
Susan has forced me to take a couple of days off, so I have been to lunch, to Chateau Biron, played tennis, gone for a bike ride and so on. All very pleasant. All the kind of things that we thought we would do often when we lived in France but never seem to get round do. Although we do try and have two games of tennis a week. I say games, although that is a bit of an exaggeration. We are both very poor players, but improving slowly. Free holiday offered to any tennis coaches out there…
Since the pointing is going well, Susan has announced that she also wants a stone wall in the bathroom, so that has slowed me down slightly as well. However, still ahead of schedule and I expect to finish the pointing next week, so I have been off to order all the plasterboard and metal structures for creating all the internal walls and bedroom ceilings, which I will start when the pointing is finished. About 300 square metres of plasterboard will be delivered next week, along with sundry bricks etc.
We are now completely confident that we will be in the barn for the winter, so have started to turn our thoughts to the marketing of the house as a gite for 2005. The big issue for larger houses is that they are always going to attract family groups, and these are related to school holidays. Hence good quality larger houses command good rents, but for shorter periods of the year. Hence the problem is how to attract people into the house slightly off-season – May, June and September. Clearly, once the house is available for rent, we would prefer it to be occupied at a lower rent than empty in these periods. The solution we have arrived at is to offer a discount for groups of four or less people in the house in these three months. Hence for small groups or single families the house will cost the same as a two bedroom gite. All very interesting, I hear you say. But that leaves one challenge as yet unresolved. Internet holiday property search engines always ask the holidaymaker how many people the accommodation should hold and then base the properties listed on this. If we say that the house has four bedrooms, then it will never show up on a search by a family of four. If we say three-four bedrooms, people will assume that bedroom four is a small cupboard in an attic and if we say ‘sleeps 2 – 8 people’ a group of eight will be deterred. We don’t know the answer to this conundrum yet but are working on it, since ‘off-season’ rent has a significant impact on the overall return from the property. Of course we can make all this clear on our own website but we have to get people there in the first place. All suggestions very welcome, as always.
Cutting the grass in between time, it is one of my favourite tasks on a sunny day, as the buzzards and kite circle overhead, the swallows dive-bomb me, and the occasional snake slithers off to somewhere safer. Now THAT is why we came to France.
June 26
The pointing is finished, with just the gaps around the doors and windows to finish. I have also been turning my attentions to the gaps between the walls and roof, and to a triangle of wall built of breeze blocks at the apex of one wall. For reasons unclear to me, the work completed by the roofer had left gaps all along the join, where the newly positioned old roof beams rest on the wall. After much pondering about what to do with these gaps, I have at last come across the solution. The challenge is largely one of insulation. Stone walls are well insulated, when they are pointed, and our new roof includes good insulation, so it is important to avoid having a ten centimetre space between the two which is poorly insulated.
To recap, heatloss from an uninsulated building is very broadly analysed as:
Roof 25%
Doors and windows 15%
Walls 15%
Floor 15%
Joins between walls and floors and roofs and windows 15% (point thermique)
Normal air exchanges due to opening and closing doors etc 15%
Hence it is very important that the wall insulation, for example, meets the roof insulation. My solution has been to use a substance called extruded polystyrene – not the same as expanded polystyrene. This is a wonder product, coming in large sheets that are easy and clean to cut to shape, and even having tongue and groove edges for slotting the sheets together in larger areas. I have cut pieces of this to fit the gaps, then squirted mousse into any remaining gaps and around the edges. So we now have a continuity in insulation between the walls and the roof, that I simply need to cover over with plaster or lime mortar. Likewise, for the triangle of breeze blocks mentioned, I have cut sheets of this product to the exact shape and size needed, and slotted them together. The cost of this insulation is extremely small for the benefits provided, and avoids our concern that in the barn with its high ceilings the heat will simply rise to the ceiling and pass out by these gaps.
Other Activities this week have included the commune annual dinner, and the open evening at the primary school at which Ismay performed in a small play. Both entertaining in their way, now that we are a bit less traumatised by passing an evening of only speaking French. Also Susan has found a local lady who she is going to talk to for an hour or so a week, in return perhaps for helping in her garden, in order to help with her spoken French.
On a more serious note, England are now out of Euro 2004 football tournament, having lost to Portugal. The jokes that Niamh suffered at school on Friday as a result will perhaps be withdrawn, since last night France lost to Greece in their own quarter final. And a whole day of Wimbledon was lost to terrible weather. Shame, we have had about six weeks of almost unbroken nice weather, thanks, although a mid-week storm helped with the dryness of the ground.
June 29
Having now finished the pointing, I have started clearing things away for the next, cleaner, stage of the work. This will be the construction of the interior walls and ceilings, using plasterboard fixed to a metal structure, with glass wool in the middle to help with sound insulation. These metal structures are a very good idea, and consist of metal rails on the floor and ceiling, with metal uprights (montants) placed between these every 60 centimetres. The uprights have holes precut so that electricity cables and so on can be passed through the wall. This is one of the most common ways to build internal walls in France, and promises to be much easier and cheaper than constructing a wall structure in wood. The plasterboard is then simply screwed on to this metal structure with self tapping screws.
Another common method to build internal walls is to use ‘squares’ of plaster, about 60 centimetre across and 5 – 10 centimetres thick with tongue and groove edges. However this doesn’t leave a cavity in the wall, so cables need to be individually buried.
Anyway, it is preferable to fit the ceiling first, then the walls, then the floor. This order permits electric cables to be put in place in the walls before the floor is constructed, hence the cables will then be hidden under the floor. I will hire a machine that hoists plasterboard to ceiling level to do the ceiling, since it doesn’t cost much to hire and will save me from trying to hoist huge sheets of plasterboard above my head.
For putting plasterboard against existing brick or stone walls, I will use glue specially made for this purpose. I understand that in ‘the old days’ people built timber structures on the wall to ensure that it was flat, then attached their plasterboard to that. Big blobs of glue sounds cheaper, quicker and easier.
July 16
I haven’t done anything at all this week because we were on holiday. We went to Languedoc-Roussillon and stayed in a gite, of course, between the sea and the hills. All very pretty, with the hills and the sea, although the area is I think overrated unless you want a seaside holiday. The towns that we saw, with the partial exception of Ceret, were largely drab with large amounts of new developments and uncontrolled new building works. The architecture is frankly not beautiful, although there was a small scattering of nice houses around. We are a bit spoilt here in the Lot-et-Garonne / Dordogne area I think with a huge number of beautiful towns, villages and houses. I expect I am being unfair, many apologies if you live in Languedoc - your cathar castles, high on the hilltops, are certainly groovy.
More interestingly the little hamlet where we stayed – a very pretty little hamlet incidentally, – was clearly in the throes of renovation, with some of the houses having been renovated for several years, some more recently or currently being renovated and some not touched at all. I would guess that in a few years the majority of the houses in the village will have been ‘done’. It is apparent that there, as here, the local builders took several years to ‘learn’ what people wanted when they wanted a renovation, with the more recent renovations having much more focus on getting the stonework, shutters, roofs and so on ‘just right’. Clearly a renovated village will look completely different to the original village, but as I have said before I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. The removal of old concrete structures and corrugated iron sheds adds a great deal. On the other hand, Issigeac, a small town near here, is largely unrenovated and is a largely unrecognised jewel in France. I am less sure that that will be improved as the renovations take place, since the town genuinely looks as if it has been untouched for centuries. But the renovations have started…anyway, enough lecturing from someone who is making a barn look like a house.
Since being back I have plasterboarded the ceiling in the downstairs area of the barn, so the bedrooms and bathrooms are starting to take shape. There are two ways to lift plasterboard to ceiling level and hold it there while attaching it. One is harder, and involves two people and a series of struts. The other is much easier and involves a machine. I hired the machine. Once the plasterboard is placed on the ‘lifter’ a handle is turned that raises the plasterboard to the ceiling level and holds it there. Without the machine the job would have taken two of us at least several days – with the machine it took me two and a half days to do 80 square metres of ceiling, including all the cutting to size around the edges and so on. Cost of hire for two days was about £20 – money very well spent. It was still not easy for me to put the plasterboard on the machine on my own, since plasterboard is unavoidably heavy and large, but unfortunately Susan was busy doing other things…watering plants mainly, since it hasn’t really rained for two months. It is forecast soon, although rain is forecast here at least five times as often as it actually arrives.
Pretty much all towns will have a place where large machines can be hired, and I would certainly check these out before buying machines that will not be used very much. If you can’t find a hire shop, check in the local builders merchants or diy / bricolage store since they will often hire things out, and if not will be able to direct you.
Unfortunately it is only now that I have started building the internal bedroom and bathroom walls that Niamh (11 next month) has realised that the space she thought was going to be her bedroom is actually going to include a bathroom as well. Much investigation with a tape measure and she has announced that her new bedroom, at 19 square metres, will only be two square metres larger than her existing bedroom. Apparently that is not good enough. Happily we would prefer to have this bedroom ourselves, since it has an ensuite showerroom and we are less likely to spread toys and books across the floor, so she will perhaps end up in the third bedroom. Thirty square metres must surely be enough for even the biggest gang of pre-teenage girls to amuse themselves?
Which reminds me that a couple of days ago when I was teasing her about looking after me in my old age, she replied without any hesitation ‘I don’t think so, mon pote, you’ll be straight off to the maison de retraite’. Isn’t that touching. (‘Mon pote’ is ‘my old mate’). This was just after she had seen Susan wearing a ring she hadn’t seen before and asking if she could have it when Susan was dead, and me responding that if I lived longest I would sell it and spend the money on wine. At least ten years in the local retirement home should work wonders with my French language skills.
July 21
In two days time it will be exactly six months since the mason arrived and work began on the barn. The changes in that time are substantial, it seems like years ago that I was carting old wood out of a dark and dingy barn. And I think we are on target for moving in November this year (our original target was May 2005) – I have an unofficial target date of November 23rd, my birthday.
The internal walls are going well, and I hope to complete them before the end of July. It is nice to see the layout taking shape, and gives us much more feeling for the finished ‘product’. Not that it is always easy lugging plasterboard around – have you ever tried cutting plasterboard to a shape that fits around stairs and then placing it correctly? A sheet of 2.5 by 1.2 metre plasterboard, 13 millimetres thick, weighs about 30 kilogrammes, so heavy but not impossibly heavy. As with so many of the jobs I do, it seems to be exactly as heavy as possible without quite being unmanageable.
The weather continues to be dry and hot, although we have had a couple of storms this week, which causes its own potential problems. A local lady is currently having her house walls ‘bonded’ together with iron bars to stop them falling apart – the house is very old but the two record-breaking hot dry years in succession have caused the clay to crack more than ever before, taking the house with it. The lesson to learn is again, just because a house is old doesn’t mean it will stand for ever unless it is looked after. Two of the properties near us are abandoned and are cracking and falling down very rapidly. After a roof starts leaking or wall cracks appear it is a matter of two or three years before a house can become a ruin, beyond repair. Why are there abandoned properties falling down nearby, both in beautiful locations, when demand for this type of property is high? Because they are surrounded by plum orchards and the farmer is interested in those, not the houses, as I understand it. But if you are buying a property at the moment that sits on clay in the south of France, it may pay to be extra vigilant to the possibilities of subsidence.
Since our own house isn’t subsiding, we are pleased to simply enjoy the weather. Weather forecast here for the next three days – sunny, temperatures 34 – 39 degrees, weather forecast London, overcast, temperatures 18 – 20 degrees. Tough choice, huh.
July 31
I am still doing the internal walls, which are nearly finished now. Later in the week I may even be at the stage to get a paintbrush out – decorating instead of renovating and building, now that will make a change.
I have also ordered all the flooring materials this week, and even more plasterboard and metal frame for fixing it to. This additional amount is partly because we have now decided to insulate the north facing stone walls. Although not obligatory for a thick stonewall, we have had problems with cold north facing rooms in the past and want to be sure the rooms are not unheatable in winter. The weather continues to be hot, but the barn is staying quite cool, except for the holes and gaps not yet blocked, which seem to operate as a heating system – as I walk past them I can feel a breeze of hot air entering the building.
Incidentally the minimum costs for flooring are approximately as follows per square metre:
Tiled floor on cement screed – tiles 15 euros (it is possible to buy acceptable tiles for 10 euros per metre if you shop around) plus materials for screed 5 euros (if doing it yourself – otherwise 15 – 20 euros). Total 20 euros.
Floorboards on wooden supports – floorboards 14 euros plus supports 4 euros. Total 18 euros.
Parquet on sound proofing / underlay – parquet 22 euros plus underlay 4 euros. Total 26 euros.
So by having parquet in a 30 square metre room you might pay an extra 200 euros. But the parquet is quick and easy to fit, whereas tiling and floorboarding will take significantly longer.
It is probably best to take the view that most of the difference is in the price of the materials used – tiles, floorboards and parquet can all easily cost 50-75 euros per square metre. And floorboards will be difficult to use if you have underfloor heating. Myself, I like tiles because they are cool to walk on, look good, and are easy to clean when I accidentally empty half a sack of cement on the floor.
I have ignored laminate flooring because I don’t like it, but it is cheaper than the options above and may be OK for certain rooms. I have also ignored carpet because I don’t like it. Although it is very popular in the UK, very few houses around here seem to use it and I haven’t seen a ‘carpet warehouse’ type shop since we arrived in France. Perhaps the climate, the creepy crawlies and the outdoor life don’t lend themselves well to carpet.
Other esoteric options could presumably be found, for example the heavy laminate tiles such as Amtico (I DO like Amtico in certain circumstances) but are expensive to start with and finding an experienced fitter may be difficult). Someone told me that it is possible to drive to Italy and buy a load of marble tiles very cheaply, which might be your idea of a good weekend out. Again, these are likely to need professional fitting at great expense.
Incidentally the store Lapeyre in France has a good selection of all these products and you can look at them online if you want more indication of prices.
In any event I will be laying all three - parquet, tiles and floorboards - during the coming weeks and months.
The highest part of the ceiling is still proving a challenge to paint. My scaffold enables me to work to five metres height but that is not quite enough, so I am having to use a paintbrush grasped in an extension handle as well. As if that isn’t bad enough, the top metre of ceiling is of course where all the rising heat ends up. So although the barn as a whole is nice and cool, as soon as I get to the top of the scaffolding my head is in a ‘cloud’ of hot air. There are still some small openings and gaps under doors that I haven’t blocked in yet, and as I walk past these I can feel the breeze of hot air pouring in. Clearly these need closing up or glazing in due course, if the house is to be properly insulated.
For the large part these holes are the original ‘windows’ of the barn – small holes about 15 by 25 centimetres to let light in. The usual way to block these is by directly mortaring a piece of glass into the hole, there not being enough space for a frame. However the glass tends to crack sooner or later, due I suppose to the slightest movement of the building or the expansion of the glass with temperature. Of course it would be easier to simply block them in, since their role in providing light is over, but it is nice to have shafts of sunlight coming in through these odd holes so I’m going to keep them. I have ‘half’ blocked some of the more inaccessible holes, blocking up the outside but keeping a small ‘alcove’ on the inside for candles or similar. Very romantic, I’m sure, to have candles flickering away in half a dozen places in the stone walls. In reality the children will probably keep tennis balls in them, and spiders will pass a quiet winter. Now, where can I buy a duster with a six metre handle?
August 6
Because of a youth spent supporting CND (remember them?) I still think of August 6 primarily as the date that a bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. I think it best not to reflect on whether the post cold war world is materially safer or better to live in than the 'old world', or even whether the nuclear threat has diminished, so I'll get on with my work.
We have at last struck the ‘correct’ balance between ‘old’ and ‘new’ in the barn. The wall down the middle of the barn, separating the bedroom area from the kitchen has been finished and I have given it a coat of white paint. The effect is stunning, with the angular white wall looking very modern against the old beams. So we will leave it white, make a balcony from tensioned wire, and get the shiny black kitchen that we want. We are both convinced that this contrast between very old and rustic and very modern is completely correct. So from most places we will have an overall impression of ‘original’ but with glimpses of modern.
As yet, I have no idea how to make a high-tensile wire balcony that is secure enough and rigid enough to be safe, but we have a structural engineer staying with us next week and also I have a structural engineer brother who has worked on lots of modern buildings. I will discuss the balcony with them first – the general idea is to have strong multi-strand wires at ten centimetre intervals, stretched horizontally. Clearly the fittings to the wall need to be strong, which is not a problem, and the wires must be strong enough to be pulled very rigid – again, not a problem. The main questions relate to the intervening support posts (how many and how are they attached), and how to turn a corner around the top of the stairwell. Both easily solvable with a bit of research I imagine. We have about 16 metres of balcony to fit across the front of the mezzanine lounge to stop young children falling into the kitchen.
Speaking of modern, we have today been to visit some friends who are on holiday in the area. We met them in Domme, about 45 minutes drive from here. One can only be struck by the architecture and the historical villages around here, but I had assumed that the official grading of a village as ‘one of the most beautiful villages in France’ must be easily obtained. Our drive passed through Belvès, Monpazier, Beynac, Domme, Limeuil, and La Roque Gageac all of which have this classification. Monflanquin and Pujols, also classified, are a few miles south of here. In fact I have now discovered there are not so many villages in the whole of France that have been approved – 142 of them, I think, in a country about eight times the size of England. So to have eight of them so close to here confirms that that we do live in the ideal place!
This all adds to the pressure to get a renovation right, of course. If a place has remained broadly the same for 500 years it is perhaps not ideal for the Brits to arrive and mess it up? There is very little to spoil the scenery in the vicinity and we don’t particularly want to be the first.
Summer traffic on the road around Beynac and La Roque Gageac is a bit busy for me, so I am pleased that we ended up here rather than ‘Dordogne central’. We still never really see a queue of traffic here, even in summer, but it is easy to imagine that in another 10 years the Monflanquin – Villereal – Monpazier – Belves – Domme ‘artery road’ will be promoted heavily and full of smiling happy tourists. Oh well, that should keep the deer off the road and we can always move to Poland. Luckily most people have not yet grasped that the northern Lot-et-Garonne region is so close to the Dordogne region. Ssshhh, keep it to yourself. Unless you want to stay in a beautiful newly renovated gite…
August 16
We have had a few friends and relatives in the area this week so little progress has been made in the barn. It is nice when people come who have not seen the property for two years, and they all seem suitably impressed by the transformation. This is nice, among other things because we like to know we are not seeing the property through rose-tinted spectacles after spending so long working on it, while turning a blind eye to the tobacco barn (needs work) for example. Funnily enough our gravelled courtyard is perhaps the biggest hit with returning visitors – it is amazing that we spent two years confused about how to do it in the first place and then completely transformed it for less than £1000 and a week or two of hard slog.
We have a friend here who, inspired by the courtyard, has himself ordered 38 tonnes of gravel to do his own courtyard and paths (already very attractive, but it has been damaged and churned about by recent masonry work on the house). This will work very well for him as well, I am sure, but before you do the same try digging a few wheelbarrows of it yourself. A spade will not ‘enter’ the heap of rock (20 – 40 millimetres diameter) like a pile of sand, but simply stops as soon as it hits the rock, giving a painful blow to your elbow. This makes it very hard work to dig and spread out – and 38 tonnes (20 cubic metres) is about 1000 barrow loads. We used 80 tonnes here but the lorry was able to help with the spreading by emptying the load while slowly driving along, reducing our work load substantially. Anyway, five minutes per load including filling the barrow, taking it to its destination, emptying it and raking it flat (again not easy) makes 5000 minutes or 85 hours. That is, three weeks of non-stop heavy work, assuming you have the strength to work flat out and full time at heavy work. I don’t. If access and garden permits, it is well worth hiring a little digger for a couple of days to help with this work, although if it rains the tracks left by the digger will also themselves need repairing or filling afterwards…All this by way of a caution - be sure you only embark on tasks that you have the capability to finish or the cash to pay someone to do it for you. 20 cubic metres of unmoveable rock in your driveway is not funny.
August 31
I have been working on lots of things and have not had time to update this diary for a couple of weeks. Since the website statistics show that there are hundreds of people each month who look at this page that is a poor show by me. Although I only hear from less than 1 percent of these visitors, so it is possible that people all find it by mistake. Please let me know…
Work is progressing, but a bit slowly perhaps. Most of the interior walls are finished, except those where the electrician and plumber will need to access the ‘inside’ of the wall during October and November, and I am currently passing a few days tiling the kitchen floor. When we laid the screed on the floor we tried very hard to keep it level, of course. This is paying dividends now, because the tiling is much easier on a completely flat floor – even a three or four millimetre difference can put the tiles out of line, which in a room of about 70 square metres rapidly becomes very difficult to correct. It is taking a bit longer than I had anticipated, but that is mainly because after about eight square metres I get bored and go and do something else instead. As you enter the barn from the door there is a straight view down 12 metres of floor to another door, hence any ‘wobble’ in this line would be immediately apparent, and illuminated by the far door, so this line is acting as my ‘baseline’ from which I am arranging the other tiles. Incidentally for tiles over about 20 centimetre square, it is best to use ‘double encollage’ (double gluing) with glue put on the floor and also a thin layer of glue put on the back of the tile. This encourages good sticking. Also the floor is well moistened before starting so that the glue doesn’t dry too quickly – this also adds to the ultimate strength of the floor.
Meanwhile we have resolved a couple of challenges with the gite due to faulty kitchen equipment. One guest reported that the fridge door fell off – this fridge is less than a year old – who ever heard of a fridge door falling off? – which I was able to repair. Also way back in July one of the oven controls came off – the oven is also new, do oven controls usually fail? - so we have been asking people not to use that particular ring of the hob. We ordered a replacement, and six weeks later we are still waiting and pursuing it. But then another fell off, and it seems inappropriate to ask people to use an oven ‘but don’t use either of these two rings’ so we have switched the oven for a completely different one that we had in our own house. In all my life I have never known fridge doors or oven knobs to fall off, so why does it happen in the gite where things need sorting out immediately, I wonder. It is a bit difficult to explain that it might take two months to get a replacement when someone is only here for a fortnight. Having sorted out these problems, the mower managed to break a crucial part. Although we can use our little tractor for most mowing, the swimming pool is now fenced and inaccessible to a tractor so we need to hand mow. If the replacement part doesn’t come soon people will think they are swimming in a meadow, so Susan is off to try and borrow a neighbours tomorrow. The repair centre forgot to order the part, and then went on holiday for two weeks with the mower locked in their workshop. Again, not too serious in ‘real life’ but irritating when you are trying to keep things looking nice for holidaymakers. Fortunately people are very nice, and have written us some very nice comments about their holidays so we have setup a ‘testimonial’ page on the gite website. This would be harder to do if someone wrote ‘the fridge door fell on my foot’ rather than writing ‘lovely gite’ and so on.
An additional task for the winter will be to redo and increase the terracing around the pool, since there will be more people here next year. Unfortunately I am going to have to redo it all on concrete foundations, since the sand base for the paving slabs is not working very well. Although it started off very solid, I think that when the ground gets very dry and the clay underneath cracks, the sand tumbles into the cracks and the slabs move apart slightly allowing weeds to grow through. So this will be an extra little task for the cooler months. Not too serious really since at the moment the pool terracing is arranged for less people than we expect to have here next year, when the second gite opens for business, so I needed to substantially increase the area of the terracing anyway, but of course it does involve getting several cubic metres of concrete made and moved to the pool, which will be hard work.
13 September
My ‘workplan’ is beginning to indicate that we may not be in the barn by end November. This is not because of unforeseen delays but because of the practicalities of getting the plumber and electrician in at exactly the right time, while allowing me to lay the downstairs flooring in between their visits. Because the gite here is booked until the 25th September we can’t get the electricians until the beginning of October. We are allowing one more week of possible booking after that but then not taking bookings from early October, so that we can be sure we can move out of the house and into the barn before winter (January and February). Still, our real target was always spring, and I am still confident that we will be in before Christmas…
With the kitchen floor largely tiled now – all 65 square metres of it, and I should finish it today (grouting aside). It now has the look of a barn that you might like to live in, as long as you like a cement mixer in your bedroom.
Another subject that has been troubling me is the balustrade for the mezzanine lounge, and I think I have now resolved this. After much deliberation on tensioned wires and so on, these have been eliminated as a possibility due to safety issues. Since the balustrade consists of one part nine metres long and another part six metres long, the key problem is to be sure that the posts, placed every two metres, are attached strongly enough to the floor. After inspecting balustrades everywhere I go, I have now found a satisfactory solution, I think. I have bought 18mm threaded bars that I will cut into 33 centimetre lengths. I will then drill 17 centimetres down into the joists below, and the same into the bottom of the posts, with a long 16 mm drill bit. The threaded bar will then be screwed into the floor joists and up into the bottom of the post. If this still isn’t strong enough I can add additional square brackets afterwards, but I don’t think this will be necessary. Certainly this arrangement will be stronger than the readily available ‘off the shelf’ fittings I have seen. Between the posts I will then add horizontal 15 mm iron bars, hoping to keep the look of ‘modern meets rustic’. Thank you to those who have guided me towards this solution – I’ll be in touch in due course if I fall to my death in the kitchen below.
The kitchen floor being tiled, we are again racking our brains for the best layout for the kitchen. You might think it would be easy to squeeze a kitchen into a room of 70 square metres (750 square feet), but we seem to be struggling, not because it won’t fit but because we want it to look good from all angles, including from the mezzanine; not be to obtrusive when you come in the front door: not to look too big or too small: to be practical to use; to be super sexy; and to be not too expensive. It must also have plenty of places to sit and eat, including a breakfast bar, and we don’t like seeing into the kitchen area from the dining table, but we want people cooking to be able to chat to those sitting down. H yes, and a cosy corner would be good – large rooms are very nice but it is equally important to have little spaces within those rooms, I think. In both the house and the gite we have ‘food preparation’ areas that face into the room, which is much nicer than facing a wall, and we want to do the same thing in the barn. I don’t like ‘kitchen islands’ –I suppose they are practical if your arms are two metres long or you like walking in circles a lot, but I don’t. ‘U’ shaped, ‘L’ shaped, or two parallel lines seem to be the best contenders so far, but I am currently sketching out plans with a kind of triangle, with rows of units forming the sides of the triangle, and the corners of the triangle permitting easy access from all directions. Virtually the only physical constraint is that the kitchen sink must be under the window, half way along the long wall. Any suggestions – the room is 12 metres long and six metres wide, with an entry door at one end and a large patio door at the other end – are very welcome.
Not to mention the problem of choosing a finish for the units, where we are teetering between lacquered red, gloss black, or light wood. I suspect wood will win, though, since red will attract the eye away from the rest of the barn too much, and we don’t like light worksurfaces – and black worksurface with black units might be a bit too much.
September 24
Cancel the above plan, we have had visitors from the UK this week and one with a much better eye for such things than us indicated in the nicest possible way that this was not a good plan at all. Straight lines to emphasise the room and the space is what we need. Actually, one straight line of units down the middle is what we need, with no units against the wall at all (why didn’t we think of that?) but it’s too late as the plumbing and wiring are already in place. So we will have two parallel lines.
The banister is looking good and feeling strong, and manages to give a sense of ‘enclosure’ to the mezzanine lounge without obstructing the view of the overall bar from downstairs. I had not appreciated how difficult it would be to drill perfectly vertical holes in the floor and also in the bottom of the posts, so it was a bit trickier than expected to get perfectly upright posts, but I think I’m there now. A two millimetre error in a 15 centimetre deep hole becomes a lean of almost two centimetres in the balustrade post as a whole. I fear my glasses or my eyes have an error because holes I tried hard to make exactly vertical seldom were.
Meanwhile, down in the attached room to the side of the barn (that will be a bedroom) I have been putting in the insulation – again, the thin ‘aluminium foil and bubble wrap’ type – so the walls are looking all groovy and space-age, until I cover it over with plasterboard. This insulation butts up well to the ceiling, which contains similar insulation, so avoiding a ‘point thermique’ where all the heat can escape. This room is down a narrow corridor from the main barn, and also at a slightly lower level, and is separated by a thick stone wall, so no heat from the main barn will reach the room. This, combined with my daughter announcing that she doesn’t want stone walls in her bedroom, she wants somewhere to paint and to stick posters, means that we can have floor to ceiling insulation in the room behind the plasterboard.
The colombage in this room, of which there is about four square metres, is to be left untouched on the interior so that you can see the ‘mud and straw’ as originally used, although. I will crepi the outside, to help insulation and stop insects coming in. The five metre high (internal) stone wall will only be plastered to about two metres height, with repointed stone above. We are keeping these two facts secret from my daughter for the moment…
…although we are also not mentioning that I intend to add a six square metre platform halfway up the high stone wall, with ladder access, as a kind of den area within the room.
September 27
It is a battle to get on the computer now, because Niamh has bought SIMS 2, a computer game and has been using it non-stop for two days. Yes, I know, two days on the computer is not sensible but it was interrupted by the occasional walk and bike ride, and she has waited a long time for it. SIMS 2 is also a great game, in which you create familes of people and then try and look after them, feed them, find them jobs and so on. Honest, it is much better than I am describing it, with the characters being very realistic.
I have successfully completed the plasterboard wall in the side room, which is now starting at last to take shape. One end of the room is being divided off, to create a boiler and fuel storage area accesed from outside, so I will start building this dividing wall soon. First I need to talk to the plumber about how much floor space I need to allocate to these things, so that I only remove the minimum possible from the bedroom area. We have had a couple of cooler days this weekend and the family are starting to panic that they will have to spend winter in the house, unheated, rather than in the barn, so the pressure is on for an early completion. Three years with very little heating is enough, I think.
October 19
Yet again, too long since my last entry. So, what have I been doing? Lots of things, but quite a lot of focus on the toilet room and the bathroom, and other areas where it was necessary that things were done before the plumber can recommence. Unnecessary to rush so much perhaps, since he can’t start until the second week of November. Likewise the electrician who was due to start today, and didn’t. I rang to find out why and was told he is on a training course all this week and it wasn’t clear whether he could start next week either. Still, I soldier on, and both of these people are committed to our ‘completion’ date in mid-December so I am not too concerned.
One curious anomaly with the plumber and the electrician is that the electrician asked that the walls be constructed before I lay the floor, so that he can add the cables that are concealed in the floor. This I have done. Meanwhile the plumber has asked that I do the floor before the walls so that he can determine the exact height of the radiators before he completes the pipes in the walls. But I can’t really just do bits of floor where the radiators are going to go because the parquet flooring needs to be laid as one continuous floor to avoid awkward joins. It is sometimes hard to keep everyone happy at the same time.
Many of the internal walls are completed to the stage of being painted white – that is, they are ready for final decoration. I have done this in part because so many people express astonishment when I have said I expect to move in this year. I need to convince myself at least that the end is in sight. The walls are mostly of plasterboard on metal framework, with the joins between the plasterboard sealed with an adhesive ribbon and the gap skim plastered over. Since I have been working in the darker recesses of the barn I have had the 500 watt fluorescent lamp shining on the walls as I paint them – this is a very good way of being sure that the join is not visible. If you can’t see the join under strong direct light you shouldn’t see it under ‘normal’ lighting.
The main reason that people think we will not be ready in time for Christmas is that the wooden floor has not yet been laid in the bedroom / bathroom areas, so the electric and plumbing conduits are still visible lying across the floor. This floor should only take two weeks for me to install, and will immediately make the barn look ‘liveable’ finished. But as I say, I can’t start until the electrician has been. In any case there are advantages in doing most of the wall painting before laying the floor, since a few splashes on the existing concrete floor are of no importance.
The ‘toilet’ room is essentially complete – we have bought a bowl sink and I have made a shelf to put it on from some heavy old wooden planking that I found in the hayloft of found in the original barn. An ancient oak door I think, now sanded and varnished, we all think it looks great except Ismay who said critically ‘that wood looks old!’ – an unexpected reaction from someone continually surrounded by old wood and stone.
The bathroom is a bit more modern, but not much, with green mosaic tiles under the sink – nowhere else yet but they will be used above the bath as well – which go very well with the stone wall at the end of the room. Susan tracked these down at Castorama (large shop) in Agen for about 18 euros per square metre, for ‘real’ mosaic tiles (lots of small tiles stuck on a backing web to hold them in place) rather than ‘fake’ mosaic tiles. We think this is a bargain find and are very pleased with them.
Talking of tiling we have a friend who has just done some wall tiling and didn’t clean the tiles adequately when the glue and grouting were still wet. It is not funny removing dry glue and grout from ‘rough surface’ tiles, so be careful. Especially with mosaic tiles, where there are lots of places for glue and grout to reach the surface.
The other big and exciting thing we have done is the kitchen. Yes, another IKEA kitchen to install. I have put the units together and they simply need putting in place after the electrician has done his stuff. The doors are a mix of birch (stained) and stainless steel drawer units and look very good together, and in the barn. With our old Britannia, industrial stainless steel type cooker (we used to be able to afford such things) the kitchen is looking very promising.
I am a big fan of IKEA kitchens, less a fan of IKEA France. Customer service, especially after- sales service, is rarely a strong point in France and even IKEA France is a victim of this. Yet again, I spent ages in the waiting area before they came to tell me that one of the items was missing and they would have to send it on to me later, although the stock records clearly showed that they had it in stock.
Curiuosly the same thing happened in Lapeyre Agen very recently. Susan asked if they had a certain tile in stock, they checked and said yes so she ordered some. An hour of waiting, and after paying, they said they couldn’t find them. Because she had to rush back to collect the children from school she agreed to return the following week to collect them. A week later (Agen is an hour from here) she returned and they still couldn’t find them. After a long dispute – they thought she should accept a ‘credit note’ rather than a refund – they grudgingly approved a refund in principle, but were unable to make this refund themselves, it had to be approved by Paris. We are still waiting. I think most retail units in Britain would accept that if they say an item is in stock and you buy it, then a refund would just be handed over as soon as the item is found to be unavailable. Never in France.
Anyway, this was on the second visit to IKEA – on the first visit they had supplied only two drawers for each three drawer unit so I had to go back the next day. All very well but Bordeaux is a two hour drive from here so pretty much a whole day passes in the car or the IKEA waiting area. My other gripe with poor old IKEA (I love them really) are their delivery charges. I know they want us to take our own things home with us but I just can’t get ten metres of worksurface in our car. Delivery charges to us from Bordeaux IKEA start at 110 euros so we have ordered a very similar worksurface more locally.
We do know one or two people who are a bit snobbish about IKEA kitchens and assume they must be poor quality because they are so cheap – not true I think. We have three now and have had no problems with any of them. They are NOT the same as a DIY kitchen of the 1980s with their doors that were impossible to adjust and that needed hours of construction work. They really are quick and easy to put together and as good-looking as any others around, and they are solid enough as well. Somebody told me they were difficult to fit in rooms with irregular walls and corners, but doesn’t that apply to all kitchens? Don’t pay more (unless it’s for the Lapeyre laquered red kitchen, which I love)!!! I have just this week heard of two separate families who have driven back to England to buy an MFI or similar type kitchen. Why anyone would do this I don’t know unless it is a ‘problem with the language’ thing.
Thinking of language, I read in the Economist recently that ‘only’ 27% of English business managers believed they could conduct a business deal in French, a significant fall from 20 years ago. Yeah right. I would be amazed to find that two percent could do it.
The kitchen layout has been settled at last, as two simple rows facing each other. One row is against the wall centred around the window, the opposite is between the two posts that were added to support the additional weight of the roof. After six months of racking my brains, sketching ideas and creating 3D images I think we have settled on the same plan as day one. Still, it is better to reach a simple solution by considering all options and eliminating them rather than by only considering the most simple option. The most simple option is not always the best, or so I have to tell myself.
As the barn rapidly approaches habitable status the talk has started to turn to room colours, with Susan and the girls coming with increasingly esoteric ideas, mostly revolving around ancient frescoes (Susan), Moroccan drapes (Niamh) and ‘black with white dots’ (Ismay). So I think I will have my work cut out for a good few weeks after we have moved in, both painting and negotiating . Susan’s fresco idea comes from her love of a particular room at nearby Chateau Biron, with walls faded over several hundred years. No problem replicating that then. My interest at this stage is mostly because typically a wall that is going to be simply painted only needs a final coat of matt white paint, but a ‘paint effect’ needs a final coat or two of ‘silk’ paint. No one has asked my opinion on colours yet, I don’t know why. I thought I had quite a good eye for getting colours right. Usually it is me battling for more colour while Susan asks for a variation on off-white, light cream, and so on. The range of standard colours available is typically much less in France than in England so some degree of mixing colours or using pigments is necessary if the ‘standard’ colours are to be avoided.
Is it necessary to avoid the standard colours? Do you need twenty types of tomatoes or lettuces to choose from in Tesco, or screwdrivers in Homebase? Once you have got used to an unlimited choice it takes a while to adjust to not having that choice, but it may be easier and no less satisfactory not to have the choice.
I will end with an anecdote that perhaps helps understand the French people a little bit better. Susan was at the home of a French lady recently whose husband has recently died, and the lady is about to sell her house. The estate agent had proposed a price equivalent to £400,000 (it was a very nice house). The lady had been shocked by the value given to the house and spent some time discussing the matter with her son. After much effort they arrived at a value of the house of slightly less than £350,000 based on the original cost of the house and the amount they had spent on improvements, and the house is now about to be sold at that price. The universal reaction in Britain would be to laugh, or to say something rude about the lady’s mental abilities. When you have finished laughing however it might be worth considering whether in fact the wrong person is laughing. Je crois que oui.
Likewise I read recently that part of the reason that France is not booming as fast as Britain and America is because the French save too much – typically 10 per cent of their income - whereas British and Americans save almost nothing, on the basis that their ever rising property value will somehow support them in old age. If the French spent more of their income, and borrowed more to spend on the basis of rising property values, and had banks willing to lend more and more money on property to keep property values ever rising, they too could have a booming economy. Yippee. Sadly it doesn’t work like that, as most people know deep at heart. Works a treat for one year or two years or five years but eventually it stops working and everything crashes back down again. From the ‘tulip bulb’ boom several hundred years ago to the more recent technology and housing booms, there is no new economics. It is basic economics that sets prices in the long term, not claims about new types of industry (claimed: internet businesses need a new kind of valuation because they are growing so fast) or new periods of low interest rates (claimed: high property prices are justified because the mortgage burden is less at times of low interest rates).
These things are a bit ‘preachy’ but are I think key to the differences between the French and British / American attitudes to things. If mortgage and interest rates are so low why isn’t everyone saving more (answer of course – because interest rates are so low…), but spending even more. Work hard but not every hour possible, see your family and friends, and have some money in the bank. Not altogether a bad option I think, compared with working relentlessly under pressure so that you can afford a house and spend 20 years closely monitoring its value.
That’ll be enough diary for the moment I think. Next time I’ll try and get back to being more informative about building costs and methods.
8 November
The plumber and the electrician have both resumed their work now, so I am happy but not doing a lot myself in the barn.
I have been laying the floorboards in part of the downstairs and find that everyone has a different solution to doing this. The floorboards are quite narrow at nine centimetres, and are ‘tongue and grooved’. The problem is that I am laying these onto a concrete floor, rather than wooden joists. When laying floorboards on wooden joists, it is a simple matter of putting a band of sound insulation along the top of the joists and then nailing through the tongues of the boards and into the joists.
This approach doesn’t work on concrete! It is necessary to ‘imitate’ the joists by putting wooden battens on the floor first and then nailing the floorboards to these. The question is, how should these battens be fixed to the concrete floor, if at all. A poured concrete floor is not completely level, and long pieces of wood are almost certain to have slight twists and bends in them, and this stops the floor from being a ‘perfect fit’ on the concrete.
One ‘expert’ told me that the best way is to hire a nail gun that can fire six inch nails straight through the battens and into the concrete.. I am a bit nervous about a nail gun this powerful and will not be doing this…but long screws could be used instead that cross the wood and go into ‘rawlplugs’ in the floor, to achieve the same effect with less danger to life and limb.
In our case the battens are six centimetres by eight centimetres, although it is equally possible to use significantly smaller battens. Why so big? There are elctrical cables and plumbing pipes laid across the concrete, and by using bigger wood I can cut notches out of the wood where it crosses cables and pipes, rather than using lots of shorter bits of wood.
Someone else has said that each batten should be laid on a bed of plaster, to even out irregularities in the concrete and to hold them in place.
And I have just read in ‘Maison and Travaux’ that ‘although it is possible to anchor the wood in place, better result will be obtained if the wood is not fixed to the floor at all’, presumably on the basis that the creaking of a floor is the sound of the nails that hold the floorboards moving about, and that is quieter if the whole floor can move together if necessary.
Hence the dilemma. Searching the internet hasn’t helped, so I have tried different approaches in the two rooms I have so far laid. In the first room I used long screws to hold the wood down, and in the second I used plaster. I can report that the ‘screwed’ floor appears significantly quieter than the ‘plaster’ room, despite being much larger and hence having more scope for irregularities. Surprising really, I was quite convinced that the plaster would work well. I don’t know if I will try the third, ‘floating’ approach since the ‘screwed’ approach has worked pretty well, and I am concerned that if the wood bends and twists it will rise up and carry the whole floor with it, throwing bookcases and televisions all over the place and turning bedtime into a major mountaineering challenge.
The screws I used are about 20 centimetres long, and made such that the plastic plug and the screw both cross the wood AND the concrete – not as more usual, with the plug in the concrete only. This makes an important difference to fitting speed – I can simply put the wood in place, drill through the wood, then use a long masonry drill to drill the concrete through the hole I have already made in the wood – hence the holes are exactly aligned. The plug and screw are then put in the hole and hammered (not screwed) down into the hole. Hence about 30 seconds total for the whole process using a drill with interchangeable drill holders.
If doing this at home, remember that waste pipes for sinks and toilets are buried in the concrete so try and avoid drilling into these. And if you have underfloor heating you shouldn’t be doing this at all, you need a flooring material that is more suitable.
Final point – apparently the most common mistake that people make when fitting wooden floors is forgetting to leave a small space, roughly a centimetre wide, around the edge of the floor. I’m not quite sure why this is so important, something to do with expansion, but it must be done if you don’t want the floor to expand into a wave and ripple arrangement or the walls to be pushed down by your expanding floor. Or so they tell me. Hence plinths around the edge of a room, to cover this space.
Our shiny red boiler is sat in the courtyard looking beautiful while the plumber works out how to get it down the uneven stone path to its final destination. It certainly looks the part, Ferrari red and almost two metres high. If necessary we will leave it where it is and pretend it is on old phonebox. Slightly less beautiful is the fuel tank, huge and white plastic, that came with dire warnings that the sun musn’t shine on it because it will be damaged irreparably. I thought plastic took hundreds of years to break down naturally, if at all. Clearly if a day in the sunshine will do the job, we need worry less about environmental issues. As I look at it, I do envy all you lucky folk with town gas that simply turns up at your house through a pipe.
9 November
Because I have been driven from the barn by plumbers and electricians (the electricians are already here, it is not 8.30 am yet and the plumber was here until after 7 pm yesterday) I have been focussing on our tobacco barn. A large old wooden barn on the ‘west’ edge of the courtyard it is currently used for all manner of storage, and for parking. Altogether it has a floor area of about 100 square metres. Largely without walls, it is a wooden structure of sturdy posts which support a roof. Historically it would have had wood paneeled walls and be sued for drying tobacco, no now such a big crop in the area. Our instinct has often been to knock it down, but almost without exception everyone else that we ask disagrees with us, for a variety of reasons – it adds to the character and sense of history of the place; it is a useful storage and parking space; one day we could get planning permission to renovate it into a couple of gites (we are unlikely to do this, but several tobacco barns around here have been successfully turned into houses or gites and a future purchaser of the property may want to do this); it is of historical interest; it could have a ‘sports and activity area (table tennis etc)’ for the gites, and so on. For the time being I thing we are going to keep it and tidy it up a bit, so I have made a start on that while I am unable to work in the stone barn.
This will include ‘rendering’ the parts that have been filled in with bricks and breeze blocks, replacing a couple of rotten wooden beams, putting gravel on the floor, and demolishing the ‘lean’to’ end (to make more room for parking, since there will be more people staying in the gites next year). There will then be plenty of space for parking, and also our large woodpile, along with a stack of old roof-beams etc.
If and when we sell up here it is not clear whether it will add significantly to the value, for the reasons above, or detract from the value on the basis it is not a ‘beautiful restored old stone building’. Who knows. It would almost certainly permit another gite or two to be added if necessary. But on the other hand, we might end up selling the barn and the house separately, with a hedge or fence between the two perhaps, in which case the tobacco barn might not fit in so well.
I suppose that we should act ‘with our hearts not our heads’ in such matters, but unfortunately we are not rich enough to always do that. And I am not quite sure what my heart is telling me in any case. Each time that we discuss the tobacco barn we change our minds about the best approach. A similar problem is faced by many people with attached barns, old buildings and so on. It is very exciting at first to think that you can convert a multitude of old pigeon towers, bread ovens, stable blocks and lean-tos into a magnificent dwelling, but in reality it all costs money and or time, and most of us don’t have enough of either to do everything we would like. I am eager to clear out all the brambles in the wood and make it a beautiful place to walk about, but will I ever get round to it?
Sometimes I think that there is too much enthusiasm to expand a building into its associated outbuildings without first getting the house itself properly sorted with some creature comforts. Talk to an architect or think about what you are trying to achieve in terms of living space – will you spend time in that third lounge even if it has got two old stone sinks and a bread oven in it? Message – don’t start what you can’t finish, and only start something that will actually make the property a nicer place to live. Otherwise just spend your money on a pile of good books and a few cases of wine, and store them in the outbuildings. A half finished huge house is not a nicer place to live than a smaller but completed house. The kitchen is the centre of the house and is far more important to get right.
November 22
The electrics is finished, including the feed from the distribution box in the house. About 3,500 euros, significantly less than we paid for the rewiring of the house, and a much better job done, including all wires buried in the stone walls where necessary. This price didn’t include the trench between the house and the barn which I had to dig (and subsequently refill) myself. Hard work, especially where the trench crossed the tarmac and hardcore courtyard. We didn’t want to get a mini digger in to dig the trench because it often takes as long to rectify the damage caused to the surrounding garden as to dig the trench itself, when a digger has finished driving all over the place, especially if it rains during the digging process. If the trench had been in a less ‘gardened’ section we would have done this though.
The electrician has also installed a phone line across to the barn, so we are almost up and running, heating asise. The downstairs floor is proceeding well, and looking good with a medium oak’ stain. Hint: I think that ‘knotty’ pine flooring, which is cheaper than ‘not knotty’, looks better and more authentic when stained a dark colour, although probably wouldn’t if it was being left a more natural colour. The lobby floor is now finished so the lobby and the entrances to the bedrooms and bathrooms is almost complete. Definitely starting to look like a habitable house now, the lobby is a large area (about 14 square metres) so helps add to the feeling of space. Doubtless it will be piled high with shoes and coats after we live in the barn. I have also stared laying the upstairs parquet, which is making a big and rapid difference to the appearance.
I haven’t written in this diary for a while, for several reasons. The main reason being that we have been busy moving into the barn…
Since just before Christmas we have lived here in the barn and are now becoming settled in. There remain several things to do, including tiling the concrete staircases and making doors for the internal rooms, and bits of painting etc, but all ‘significant’ jobs are complete. The plumber, who had always said that he would be finished by the 15th December, had been saying it with the private thought that there was no way we would be ready, so he didn’t need to rush. When he saw the progress at the beginning of December he became concerned that he would be holding us up, and rose admirably to the challenge and worked until 9pm for a few days so that the heating was finally turned on by the 11th December.
I am pleased to say that the heating, both with the wood-burning stove and the central heating, works very well despite the high ceilings, and initial signs are that our fuel consumption is not too high, so our insulation seems to be working well.
The barn is way better than we had hoped, to actually live in rather than simply to look at. The mezzanine lounge, at 80 square metres, could have seemed dauntingly large. But with the ceiling beams above sloping away to a height of less than two metres at the edge, the room successfully feels cosy. And we can sit at one end, while the children watch television at the other end, without being disturbed by the noise. Likewise the kitchen, with its two parallel worksurfaces, is a pleasure to work in, and the central position of the units in the large room, helps eliminate any feeling that the room is simply too big.
The views from the kitchen and lounge are, as we knew they would be, incredible, although they do lead do some arguments about who can sit and face the window. And to repeated demands that I make a start on the terrace outside as soon as possible.
There is almost nothing we would do differently if we were to repeat the exercise, even if our budget was been twice as large. Perhaps marble worksurfaces in the kitchen, or ancient recuperated floorboards instead of stained pine for the bedrooms would be ‘nice to have’ with a larger budget, but neither of these seem slightly important compared with the feeling of light and space that we have here.
The total costs for the work are about £75,000. This compares with our initial estimate of £70,000. Early on I listed our estimated costs (in euros) as about 105,000:
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
Other materials 10,000
These costs have been pretty much accurate. The overspend is largely on items that should have been included under ‘other materials’ – that is, I underestimated the amount to be spent on items such as sand, lime, wood, light fittings, the balustrade for the mezzanine, insulation for walls and floor, locks, plasterboard and wall structures, wall tiles etc, machinery needed eg pressure washer and various tools, housing for the fuel tank, satellite dish and cabling for the TV, metal screening to put between the woodstove and the nearby wall (to prevent a fire risk), wood treatment chemicals, paint and varnish, and so on. Not by a huge amount, and it was not practical in advance to accurately assess these items, since there are so many aspects, but a future budget for a similar project would include 20,000 euros rather than 10,000 for these things.
The electrical work was budgeted as 2,000 euros on the basis that I would do the work myself – we ended up deciding to pay an electrician, and the bill was closer to 4,000 euros – although this includes a telephone connection which I had initially overlooked. Flooring and tiling probably cost a little more than 2,500 euros since we were tempted by the oak parquet for the mezzanine, but sanitary ware was less than 4,000 euros since we bought it ourselves rather than accept the plumber’s recommendations.
Last special mention goes perhaps to the ‘hot water circulating pump’ which costs a few hundred euros. This pumps hot water continuously around a pipe that passes by all the sinks, showers and bath and ensures that hot water is available immediately, despite the taps being perhaps 15 metres from the hot water supply. An extravagance I know, but very nice to have.
Of course it is crucial to understand that the work cost these amounts largely because I did a lot of work myself, but also because we tried very hard to ‘shop around’. If all the work had been done by tradesmen, the bill would have been materially higher – at least 200,000 euros, I would think. Still very reasonable for a property of 260 square metres, though. Tradesmen will usually ‘suggest’ products e.g. taps, tiles, shower screens that may not be the best value for money. So a good approach if you don’t like ‘getting your hands dirty’ might be to use tradesmen to install products that you have sourced yourself.
On the other hand, some caution is needed – for example our plumber looked aghast when we said we going to buy toilets ourselves, and gave us dire warnings about toilets that don’t flush so well as others, especially cheap toilets. We gave in on this, and accepted the plumbers recommendations. We held out on taps however – we have bought attractive taps for 40 -60 euros where he was suggesting 300 euros each for taps that look very similar. Even if we have to replace the taps sooner, it is hard to see why we would have wanted to pay so much extra.
I have referred several times in this diary to insulation. Do not underestimate the importance of insulation in your building project, for the comfort, the financial savings, and the environmental benefits. We have several friends near here who have ‘1980’s’ insulation levels in 200 square metre houses and pay 2-3000 euros a year for heating. We anticipate less than 1000 euros. We have just spent Christmas in a 300 square metre house in Canada, with temperatures averaging -20 centigrade outside, heated by a wood burning stove of perhaps seven kilowatts and intermittent use of a paraffin heater of about five kilowatts. The house was always warm, and will cost only a few hundred euros equivalent to heat for the winter (using French fuel prices), again due to efficient insulation.
A house in France (or the UK) does need heating, and efficient insulation can dramatically reduce this cost. If you have less than 20 centimetres of rockwool or equivalent in your attic, or if this is not fitted with meticulous attention to gaps and spaces between the sheets of insulation, you do not have good insulation. It is not the case that you get most of the benefits by having just a little insulation. There is more to insulation than simply stopping the draughts. Both rockwool and glasswool type products, end extruded mousse sheets, double in efficiency as their thickness is doubled (if installed carefully). A good solution is to use two layers of 10cm thick rockwool, with the layers laid at 90 degrees to each other, since this helps reduce draughts between the rolls. Many houses in Canada use two layers of 20cm insulation, and still the heating bills drop further.
Generally, more rigid products are necessary unless the insulation is being laid flat on an attic floor, to prevent slight sagging and squashing giving rise to gaps after a year or two. Pay attention to areas of ‘missing’ insulation such as traps and doors that access the attic. The edges, where the insulation meets the roof or top of the walls deserves particular attention. Other products are more suitable sometimes e.g. sheets of extruded mousse but the same principle applies. A new build house extension should have 10cm of mousse in the walls and 15 cm in the ceiling / attic, as a minimum. If at all possible there should be insulation laid in the floor as well.
I am a big fan of the newer, thin, multi-layered and aluminium foil coated insulators, and have used these extensively in the barn. These are quick and easy to fit, but you might take the view that these are too new to have been properly tested yet. In some countries they are widely used, in others not at all.
25th May
We have now been living in the barn for a few months. All is well, and there are still no significant things that we wish we had done differently. There remain several things to do in the barn - bedroom doors and a balustrade for the stairs among them, but it really has worked out as a very good space to live in.
The terrace at the back of the barn is a highlight, being raised above the surrounding countryside, and is now a favourite spot for eating lunch. Two sides of the terrace are open (until the plants have grown a bit more), the third has been 'fenced' with one of the old cow feeding 'stalls' and has a wisteria starting to climb over it. We were right to have the large opening at the back of the barn with easy movement between the kitchen and the terrace - it works very well.
The 'garden' behind the barn, now overlooked by our new terrace, has been receiving a lot of attention, with borders springing up around the terrace, and a tree dotted walk leading to the woods. Not surprisingly, the focus has changed and we find that every mealtime is interspersed with cries of 'there goes a huppé' or 'have you seen the redstarts in the tree' and so on. Unfortunately we know nothing about birds and have to rely on people staying in the gites to tell us what they are called. This doesn't work out as well as we might hope - for example the bird that hovers over the field waiting to dive on its prey has been confirmed definitely to be a kite, a sparrowhawk and a kestrel.
A future renovation would perhaps include a budget for landscaping and topsoil. It would be much easier and quicker to establish a garden in a wilderness if the land was levelled properly, to remove the tracks left by various large machines during the renovations. A 'man with a bulldozer' doesn't cost very much by the hour, and is way more efficient than doing things by hand. Having said all that a bulldozer can also be damaging to other parts of garden that it crosses.
For all that, it is surprising how quickly rough field turns into attractive lawn just by mowing it. The field down from the house was shoulder high in brambles, dock and nettles three years ago. Now it is mostly meadow and grass, and the parts I cut more often do a passable impression of a lawn, with barely a weed to be found. I carefully avoid chopping the little wild trees that emerge, and there are now a couple of hundred ash, oak and willow trees growing away in the four acre field. So I have started calling it 'the park' rather than 'the field'. In three years I can start calling it the arboretum.
Living at the back of the barn also exposes us to more wildlife, and allows wildlife to settle in at the other side of the house. The people renting the house last week were surprised to find a large snake trying to eat a very large toad in the cupboard under the (external) stairs; a deer often ambles through the 'park' in the morning; birds are everywhere, trying to ignore the crows and magpies giving them a hard time; rabbits hop about; red squirrels try and hide in the trees; the kestrel hovers all day hoping to catch something. The grass in the meadow is now so long that a (admittedly not very big) deer walking into it immediately disappeared from view - although hay-baling has started in the area now. Lizards are of course all over the place but everyone loves them. I won't tell you what I fish out of the pool of a morning in case it puts you off coming here for a holiday.
We have also had a mouse (or mice?) in the barn, which I think I have tracked down to an oversize hole the plumber had drilled between the boiler room and the bedroom of our oldest daughter. Having once told her 'it's gone away now' (she refused to sleep in her bedroom otherwise) she went in to play with her friend and they passed a couple of minutes watching it run around. So second time around I tried a bit harder to actually solve the problem.
Pointing a Stone Wall
Ingredients
50 litres of sand (buckets are just over 10 litres, often with levels marked on the inside / wheelbarrows are usually 60 litres). If you are using just one colour of sand it is easiest to measure 50 litres into a wheelbarrow, see how much that looks like, then simply use that amount for each subsequent load – much faster than filling buckets). I am using two thirds yellow sand and one third grey building sand, to match the local Lot-et-Garonne ‘touch of yellow’ appearance. You will need to determine the colours for your department, from a mason or your builders merchant.
Half a 35 kg sac of Renocal – this is white lime, with a bit of white cement and some other additives, to help with breathing, water repellents and so on, all premixed. Other companies presumably make similar products if Renocal is not available in your local builders merchant.
11 - 13 litres of water. The Renocal recommends 10 litres, or ‘according to consistency required’. The exact amount depends partly if your sand has been in the rain for the last few weeks, of course…after our sand had been sitting in the barn for a couple of weeks drying out I was using at least 13 litres of water.
As for total quantities to buy, I do about four square metres with one batch. So for every 50 square metres of wall I will use about 6 sacs of lime, and 600 litres of sand, just over half a cubic metre.
Method:
Give the wall, that you have already cleaned, a good spray with water before starting the pointing, preferably the day before. Try and avoid pointing either in hot direct sunshine or in freezing conditions.
Add the water, then the sand, then the lime (Renocal) to the cement mixer, and mix for a few minutes.
This will give the perfect mix. It will stick to the back of your upright trowel for a good few seconds without falling off. The consistency is similar to thick double cream. It should be easy to apply – if you are having to push hard to get the mortar into the gaps it is too dry.
If you mix more than this in one go you will have to work fast in applying it. If you mix very small quantities – for example, if you don’t have a cement mixer - you will find it difficult to maintain a consistent colour from one batch to the next, and you will spend half your time measuring quantities.
Apply to the wall with a (builders) trowel, ensuring all the gaps are well filled. Apply too much, not too little. Don’t worry much about appearance at this stage. This amount will take an hour or more to apply. Don’t worry that you are covering up some of the little stones completely.
When the mortar has started to harden, usually three or four hours, use a ‘not too hard’ wire brush to remove any excess mortar. This is the fun bit, when a beautiful stone wall appears like magic.
You shouldn’t be able to see the brush marks when you have finished. You will know immediately if you are getting it right. Generally speaking, the stone should not protrude significantly from the mortar, although that exposes more stone. Look at other houses before starting, to get an idea.
Sit back and wait. The mortar will take a few days to dry to its proper colour, while you panic about whether you have got it right.
You now have a well insulated, weather proof, insect proof and environmentally friendly wall. Time taken – about eight square metres of wall a day seems right for me, including brushing, mixing and so on. You could take it easy and do four; you could work harder, miss lunch, and do twelve square metres in a day. The more batches you do in a day the more complicated it gets because you have a mix of mortar going hard in the cement mixer, while the pointing you have already done also needs brushing, and you want to stop for a coffee.
Note also that drying time affects the final colour, as does any damp in the walls. The faster the mortar dries, the lighter it will tend to be. So if you start pointing your wall in February then finish it in June you will probably have a colour mismatch. It is I think impossible to end up with a completely consistent colour over a very large area – certainly our mason hasn’t – but you can get very close.
Restoring colombage
I have mentioned before the colombage walls in the barn and the cottage – colombage consists of wooden struts / supports typically ten centimetres thick, with gaps between them of perhaps 20 centimetres. These gaps are historically filled with some kind of thin wooden structure or thin wooden struts, joining the larger posts together, and on to which ‘torchis’ (‘cob’ in UK) is placed. This torchis essentially consists of clay, with the addition of chopped straw, cow manure or sand according to local practice. This torchis, on the outside of the house at least, is then covered with a render of lime and sand. Sometimes the wood is also covered over with this render, sometimes it remains visible. You will be familiar with the appearance of a wall like this from old houses in both France and the UK – almost always with an appearance of age and beauty.
The problem often arises with houses bought in France that the torchis has started to fall out of the gaps, and that the wood has suffered from the ravages of weather and wildlife. So an approach is needed to restore the wall.
Firstly, the wood structure has to be sound. This may involve your local carpenter but wood that is too weak will need to be replaced. Don’t be too harsh though – if the wood that is currently supporting the wall looks to be in a very poor state , it is quite likely that it can continue to support the wall, if further deterioration is stopped. It is difficult to add new struts without altering the appearance of the wall, and the ravages of time all add to the appearance of the wood. On one occasion we were able to add a new beam across the top of the colombage wall that was supporting the roof, supported at each end on existing stone walls, thus making the colombage wall ‘non-supporting’, which is quite a satisfactory solution. Similarly on another building, the roof has been supported in an alternative fashion thus rendering the colombage ‘decorative’. An alternative approach might be to decide that the colombage will be visible on one side only - that is, either in the building or outside the building. Then it will be easy to construct a supporting wall or reinforcing struts on the side that is to be ‘invisible’. This will also help with insulating the walls, since the insulation can be added in the gap between the new wall and the colombage wall. Incidentally, torchis itself is a very good insulant.
This is a good stage to treat the wood against woodworms, termites, Capricorn beetles and so on.
The torchis itself will often need repairing or replacing, and there are several possible approaches, depending in part on the condition. If the torchis is in very poor state, it may be necessary to remove it and replace it. If it is still reasonably intact and quite secure it may be possible to simply brush it with a wire brush to obtain a firm support. Common modern replacements for torchis include:
earth based products (for example from a company called Akterre in France), which can take the form of earth and straw to which water is added or earth formed into brick shapes which can be cut to size and then built up int the gaps
insulant based products, including hemp (available from a company called Isochanvre in France) which can also be cut to shape and size easily
brick type products, with thin bricks being used to fill the gaps – each brick will need a nail to be hammered into the adjacent wood and then hooked under the brick, to provide extra support and rigidity. This approach is perhaps best used for small wall areas only
It is also possible in some areas to find a local artisan who can recreate the wall using original techniques.
Having obtained a solid base in the wall, it will the be necessary to crepi (render) over the torchis, using a mix of lime and sand (pay heed to local sand colours) and reinforcement fibres. It is not very easy for the non-professional (myself included) to get a very good finish on crepi – the professionals wait for the crepi to be quite hard but not completely set, and then rub vigorously with a tool that consists of a handle attached to a flat metal plate about 15 centimetres by 20 centimetres, which has stiff metal bristles sticking out (NOT a wire brush, which has much more, less stiff, bristles).
You will then probably need to give the wood a good clean to remove residual surface render – a pressure washer would help, but try not to pressure wash the new render too enthusiastically.
The wood can then be protected either with an ‘off the shelf’ stain or varnish, or more authentically with a mix of 3 parts linseed oil (‘huile de lin’), 1 part turpentine (‘terebenthine’) and a small amount of drying agent (‘siccatif’) which helps the oil go hard. Cheap and quick, this will need redoing every year, whereas varnishes and other bought products will of course last many years.
Before the photos - some other books you might consider useful or interesting:
Photos (see last for most recent photo postings)
The potting shed, situated under part of the overhanging roof, soon for demolition
The problem with the roof support - the main beams support the roof about two metres to the right of the top of the roof. Extra posts will be added in the barn.
Two views of the front of the barn. The colombage is hard to see in the shade of the overhanging roof, but is more clear in the picture on the right. I am standing with my back against the house front door to take the first picture.
The rear corner of the barn, with the colombage in a poor state being the rear wall of the annexe room (our future bedroom). See the pictures of La Glycine below for the stages in renovating colombage.
The back of the barn. Awaiting terrace, doors and windows. The wooden structure on the right was also roof, but we have removed that and the remnants of the structure will be a rose arbour.
The overhanging roof. Should it stay or should it go...The shadowy building on the left is part of the tobacco barn at the top of the courtyard. The wall on the right is the colombage of the stone barn.
La Glycine (renovated early 2003)
Three pictures showing the earlier renovation of this building, in various stages.
January 2003. The chicken coop has been removed but the (blue) concrete render is still largely on the wall. The right hand end of the building is a low rooved 'extension'. Originally stone walled, it had now largely been replaced by concrete blocks. This whole end has now been removed (ceiling height was too low for use as rooms).
February 2003. The wall is now exposed, and the old torchis (clay and hay) that was between the wooden skeleton of the wall has been removed. Also a new doorway is being added in the wall on the right.
May 2003. Exterior finished. The wall containing the doorway was too weak and eroded to keep, and had to be replaced with a new wall. The gaps between the wood have been filled with bricks and then rendered over with a lime and sand mix. The roof was completely overhauled, keeping the original internal 'A' beam structure, and reusing the original tiles. The roof now also includes a substantial insulation layer.
Fonguilleres
I could have included hundreds of pictures here - the transformation is enormous. Instead just two:
The stairs are falling away from the house, and the platform at the top is missing. The red-brick extension is very unattractive, and the walls of the house are very dirty with crumbling render letting in water and wildlife (lizards and mice die in the walls, then flies emerge both inside and outside the house).
Now that's better... The steps were individually numbered, then dismantled. Substantial foundations were installed, then the steps rebuilt. The stonework on the house was cleared of old render, and repointed. The brick extension was also rendered. Top marks if you can identify the species of tree on the left (answer at bottom).
And just a couple of interior pictures...
La Glycine: from boiler room to living room
The lounge in the main house:
Answer: The tree in the picture is a pomegranate tree
If you have got this far and are still awake and or thinking of doing something similar yourself, as a first home or as a second home, please feel free to get in touch for advice or with any other comments or suggestions about areas that I have not covered. Part of my goal and also my favourite mission is to help people avoid being overcharged or taken advantage of by unscrupulous property renovators, so I will be happy to offer an opinion on whether you are being overcharged or not for any work you are having done. francethisway@gmail.com
barn - colombage wall in progress - the original torchis (cob) has been retained, being thoroughly wire brushed, the crepi (render) applied on top, reinforced with fibres for extra strength.
As at may 2004...a couple of before and after shots and no there is no trick with the lighting of the 'after' shots. It is the demolition and renovation work that has totally changed the amount of light in the 'overhang'.
barn conversion details are at www.france-renovation.com
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