The dirt pile

So yesterday as Seb is digging in the basement he hears the people touring the neighboring property that's for sale and they're negotiating the price. The potential buyer spits out a price and the realtor says "the seller is motivated to sell fast so there's a good chance they'll say yes." The price was about 30,000 euros less than our purchase price and the house is twice the size (although needs about 100,000 euros worth of work) We know prices have dropped but this house was for sale for nearly 50,000 euros more than ours when it went up for sale over the Summer.

But the roof is caving in so you'd really need to be brave and stupid or rich and optimistic to take it on. A ton of people have toured it and it hasn't sold.

We love our house though so no regrets here except for the fact that we bought just as the prices were starting to plunge. If we had waited six months we could have saved a few thousand, but then would we have gotten our loan in the middle of the financial crise? Probably not because we just barely got this one.

Best not to overthink these things.

So back to the dirt pile. The reason you haven't seen all my terrific befores and afters yet on the house is because Seb is busy digging tons of limey dirt out of our basement and we haven't done anything inside the house for over a month. The basement has dirt floors and short ceilings so he's digging about a foot and a half out to level it and make it easier to walk around without being hunched over (him not me...I'm short). It's slave labor! He's done two and a half of the three rooms over the last month and now he only has one more left, the one with the water source in it.

I've never talked about the source. You see we don't have city water in our house--it's entirely dependent on the source underneath our kitchen in the basement. Before you start thinking "wow, cool Evian water!" just realize that it's ground water and it's untreated. It's um, sort of like being in Mexico right down to the occasional malfunctioning water pump.* Just like in Mexico we can't use it for drinking or cooking and the kids can't brush their teeth with it. After a shower we usually have dirtier hair than when we washed it. Think hat head. We just paid to have city lines run to our doorstep (they won't go further than that--and don't think we didn't try to bribe them either) and so now it's up to us to pay a plumber to get it piped to the house. Anyway the source will be kept for flushing toilets, watering the lawn and the washing machine. We'll be the really hip, green bobos in the village next year.

So there's the dirt pile story. After he's finished we can pour concrete and voila! a place for the washing machine, a place to organise our tools and somewhere to put all our crap from upstairs so we can begin our bathroom.

My poor husband though. Can you believe he moved all that dirt in two days?


*proof that life has a sense of irony, don't you think?