Slug

A backdated post from last month...


in the kitchen--a pully system light from the turn of the last century --we'll restore it with new wiring

We got our answer and it was yes! We both feel like there was some kind of divine intervention at work or something because the bank said no at first and Seb just kept pushing for a yes and we got it. It just goes to show you how persistence pays off. They also want to loan us some renovation dough. We felt an immediate sense of relief because we'd been getting so attached to the house. We had gone back to looking for a rental because we knew we might have to and we found nothing but rentals costing more than our mortgage would have been so we were really feeling down about it all. Like I said ..relief, whew.

Little S still loves school and his teacher is so sweet and friendly and all the kids love her. I am really happy for him. I still think there is a problem with the cours de recreation being so sparse and looking like a playground you'd find in the concrete jungle of central Paris and not in the country, but he's happy and that's what is most important to me. He is busy studying turtles right now and they have a pet turtle at his school that all the kids are obsessed with. Little S talks non-stop about this turtle and he tells me funny things like "mom he doesn't even have a nose but he does have legs like me." He says the funniest things lately that make my heart just melt in a giant pool.


looking all innocent but when you lifted the lid it was full of horrors--an inch of dusty grease!

I have continued to clean in the potential new house all along this saga in spite of all of our bad news. I couldn't help but plow through and think of "what if?" I knew that a positive response would mean we'd move in fast so I decided to attack the kitchen. I cleaned until my fingers were pruned inside of my small green gloves. I dismanteled the gas stove myself and I have to say I have never,ever seen such a disgusting sight in my life as when I moved that thing. There was a pile of dirt filled with grease and black muck, a dead mouse and a live slug! I could barely bring myself to begin but I did somehow get through it moving mister slug outside and delicately disposing of the mouse carcasse. I just said to myself "I will just clean it three times and see where we are then."

I challenged myself to get it clean in three goes just to make a game out of it. Anything to get myself into it, ugh! The gas stove came apart in pieces when I went to move it and there was a layer of fat and grease at least an inch deep all the way around the perimeter of the little metal support that the unit sat on. Somehow I got it outside. When I went to move the greasy cupboard next to the stove it simply fell apart. I took out all the old dishes inside, most covered in layers of dust, and I pulled the whole thing apart once and for all. I am a superwoman for getting through that without knowing if we would have a yes on the house or not.


When we told the owner that we got our yes from the bank he shocked us by saying that by the way he was planning on coming to stay two nights in the house next week. We gasped! How could he want to stay there again? And besides we thought that he wouldn't be coming back again so we'd aready cleaned out a lot of old furniture and things and put them outside in the shed or in the garbage. This was of course what he told us we could do from the start so we did it with reckless abandon. The smell of dusty curtains and old carpets was overwhelming us. But to come back for a visit? What sort of visit? It turns out he wanted to say goodbye to the house one last time. Seb dropped by to see him and his wife last night at the house and they were being very nostalgic. They were really impressed with my cleaning job and how the house looked (and probably smelled!). They never knew about the marble fireplace because evidently it was like that when his parents bought the house in the late 1950's as a vacation house. The wife of the owner, Madame Lifting, seemed embarrassed about the state of the kitchen and told Seb that she personally would never go in there anymore and that in fact nobody did except maybe to make coffee or open a wine bottle. She said in fact the house didn't get used all that much after the 1980's because it was the house that needed the most work,-- implying that they had other vacation houses that didn't need work which was funny to us. How many vacation houses do they have? To date we've counted three just in talking with them a few times.

We found out that the house was built in 1913 not 1929 like we thought. The house is definitely frozen in time. Luckily for us.