Opportunity knocks

If anyone knows anyone interested in doing six months worth of projects in exchange for rent on the Fisherman's House contact me.

The house as you know if you read my blog is  in the alps near some of the best skiing in the world . You really don’t need a car because there’s a train station in town taking you anywhere in France you want to go. Also In town, five minutes walking distance there all the shops you’d need on a daily basis. I rarely use a car when we stay there. Geneva is thirty five minutes away by car or bus and Lausanne is just across the lake in a 20 minute boat taxi. There’s very basic furniture in the house and everything you need to live well plus all the tools and materials necessary for the projects. If you want to do some long term travel this is a great opportunity.

The projects are pretty varied and they don’t really involve a lot of labour or heavy lifting, but they do require a certain amount of skill. For example one project is laying floor boards in an upstairs room so the person would need to have some carpentry skills but other projects just involve painting. We’d ask that the person do one project per month, each project probably taking about a week of work, sometimes less. If you’re a couple though you’ll be able to go through the projects fairly fast and have a ton of time left over for travel or job hunting. And this is a great opportunity for someone retired.

Contact me at  if you’re interested. I can send you the project list and lots of other details I don't really want to share on the blog. We’re pretty open to working out something, so even if you don’t have all the skills needed for all the projects we can work it out so you could do other projects that suit your skill level or speciality.

Where the heart is

We're back from our little exursion to TLB to get the fisherman's house back. It was definitely another saga to add to my yearbook of criminals and con artists. I had thought the book was finished but apparently not. We keep adding pages!

The renter Mssr. G left the keys with his illustrious daughter (the mini conne artiste) who now lives up the street. She smiled sweetly and handed them over saying her father was travelling but he'd be back in a week to talk to us about everything. Okay whatever at least we had the keys! We walked into the house to find a huge mess, dirty sink, dirty floors--everything filthy. There were cupboards full of food and so much junk that we thought he hadn't moved yet. There were old, stained mattresses and a horrible cigarette-smelling sofa set. He'd moved but he'd just left the mess for us to clean up. I got emotionnal and started crying. I think it was the combination of coming home, seeing Marcel's house with new renters and him gone, and facing another big mess in our lives. Seb took me to the port and we had a drink which is definitely what I needed.

We spent a week cleaning and discovering what he'd broken. We would have kept the caution check if we'd been smart enough to actually deposit it. He broke two interior door frames prying open doors because of forgotten keys and he'd apparently left open some skylight windows because there were water stains all over the new wood floors in one bedroom and no floor in another bedroom's mezzanine because he'd taken out the warped floor but never replaced it. Our new mattress left in the house and covered in plastic had been used and was stained too but I think they were just water stains from the deluge---I mean I hope they were (there were condoms in my bedside table). I'd left the bed in a boarded off bedroom for us to use if we came back in the summer. (The original deal was that we'd come back and get the house for two weeks in the summer--never really worked out though)

The worst was the living room floor which is ruined and will have to be resanded. It was a brand new walnut floor just finished the day we walked out the door, we had just sealed it the night before we left, but now there are so many scratches, cigarette burns and wine stains that there's no hope but to start over. The terrace had grease stains on the new boards from where he'd used a fryer outside and everything I left in the house was gone or broken-- iron, ironing board, vaccuum cleaner, food steamer. It was a hard lesson to learn but we will never be so naieve again.

When he finally came back a week later he started screaming at US which was odd but I think relatively common psychopathic behavior. I asked Seb to please be calm and rational but it's true that we were exhausted from cleaning up his mess so it was hard not to scream back and launch into his game. We didn't say much, just said we were disappointed by his lack of gratitude. He started shouting and said some nasty things about us living in Paris with our fancy life (if he only really knew!) and Seb just let him go off. He stormed off and a few days later sent us a bunch of threats by text message. One was just a string of obscenities. We immediately changed all the locks on the house.

The neighbors got on well with him and we didn't air our problems with him very openly because we weren't sure who his friends were. A few neighbors were worried about him because he'd had a difficult year but we know now that most of his stories are fabricated for sympathy or gaining time or money. He always has a story. We have a stack of letters and emails to prove it. In one of his text messages he said we'd never be able to come to TLB because our reputation would be ruined and he'd be doing the publicité. I was really curious what he could say about us. I guess we'll find out next time we go back...or not!

Right before we left we found something really shocking. There was a cable going through our unfinished bedroom outside onto our roof. It lead to the skylight window of our neighbor the dragon lady. He'd been stealing electricity from her house! Seb remembered that he'd mentioned once being friends with a renter in the upstairs apartment and the girl was having dragon lady problems. Evidently he'd convinced the girl to share electricity with him since the dragon lady pays the utility bills for all her little rental apartments. We didn't have time to deal with the problem. We definitely can't call the dragon lady to sort it out. She's a loose cannon and you never know what she'll come back with. We don't want to try to sort it out with EDF because who knows if they'd believe it. We just hoped he'd come back on the roof and pull it out himself. Next month we'll have to do something about it.

In the end we spent one week cleaning and then two weeks vacationing in TLB. Seb crammed in lots of traveling during the extra weeks so we could spend more time together and he came and went from Geneva instead of Paris's airport. We fell back in love with our house and all I could think about was moving back, --eventually one day. To me the house there is home and you can't really argue with that feeling of where your heart feels you need to be. But it was a little bittersweet like seeing an old lover you can't have. The flame was burning strong but there wasn't much we could do about it but lock up and think about who will rent the house next.

(here's the houseblog for The Fisherman's House because I no longer link it here)

The renter

The fallout shelter version of the third bedroom is done (did I mention that we were adding on a bedroom? maybe not) and by that I mean we have a lot of finishing work to do but it's all closed up and has four walls and tiled floors. This project was a far-off-in-the-near-future project but we moved it up on our to do list in order to rent the house more correctly. Hopefully the rental will pay the loan we took out for it. On paper it does work out nicely but it's a little like borrowing from Peter...so it's frightening. I'll post pictures when the tools are out.

And the next order of business is to go and collect the keys in TLB and rent that house. Our renter has turned in to a right psycho in the last few weeks, scary. He wants to leave at the end of August even though you know he hasn't paid us rent in about seven months but hey who cares you know leave when it's convenient for YOU by all means. When we wrote him about doing the état des lieux visit and collecting the keys he freaked and sent us four e-mails, 9:10, 9:20, 9:45 etc., angry and full of all kinds of threats and obscenities and stories. Apparently from what we can muster from all his babble in his emails he feels he was housesitting for us for three years and we were supposed to pay him to work in the house each month, get this.... so he could be able to pay his (measly) rent. Ahhh, but we left him with NO INCOME because we never gave him any jobs. WhaH? This is nuts. We never promised him any work and on top of that he was living in a French region where carpenters like him make more salary than anywhere in Europe and they're in top demand. His final mail said "demmerdez-vous pour les clefs!!" In other words f*ck off find your own way to get your house back"

When Seb called and very calmly asked him "uh hey what's going on?" he just screamed at him and called him awful names, then he hung up. We've been too nice to him. We've never bugged him for late rent or ever asked him for proof of insurance or anything. The trouble is we aren't sure what to do now. We can be arrested if we go on the property before he's officially left but he won't tell us if or when he's leaving and apparently he's gone off on vacation! If you read this and you aren't French you have to understand French law which is completely lopsided and gives renters all rights even if they pay no rent for years and years. I never really knew most of these laws until now and they're really shocking. People actually make a lifestyle out of living rent free in France and this is why it requires so much paperwork to rent anything. Now I get it.

Finally he sent us another e-mail saying he was intending to sue us for some rare paintings that were damaged in a house flood a year ago, and we just scratched our heads. The rare painting part had me laughing out loud but the word flood stuck in my head. What flood? There was a flood? Holy crap.

It's a very good thing we're staying a few extra months. I think we'll need that time to straighten out another mess.

A small break

Seb had a business trip and since it was vacation time for Little S we all piled in the car and hung out in Haute Savoie for two days while papa worked. He had a client to see in Annecy and then we took a detour to see our house in Th*n*n by the "other" lake the next day.



We popped in the old house which was really weird. We chose some tile for the kitchen and worked out a trade with the renter that he'd install a few things in exchange for the rent he can't seem to pay. He's going to be leaving at the end of July and we'll be renting the house for another three year term. I can't wait to clean out the house and open all the doors and windows. Mssr. G is a hoarder and the house is packed with smelly old furniture. One day a few years back I admired a mirror he'd adopted and he said "oh well when I leave this house I'll probably just leave you all the furniture!" I hope he doesn't live up to his promise. We want the house empty of everything except the few things we left inside.

The good news is we get to spend the month of August by the lake. I can't wait!

More renovation

Today it's snowing and one of the good things about not having a car is that I don't have to drive in the sludge when the weather's bad. Don't get me wrong though. I'm dying to get a car because while it's nice to live in the countryside when you don't have a car it's a little scary. I have become a shut in.

The theives also stole Charlotte's snazzy Maclaren stroller so we're really stuck. I'm going to get all June Cleaver on you and remind everyone to save all your receipts for baby items. I didn't save the Maclaren receipt because I thought I'd probably just keep it in the basement for eternity for whenever we might have visiting kids, but now I'm not going to get reimbursed for it. Ditto the car seats. We're out over 500 euros in baby gear, agh.

Okay I know it's pretty lame not saving receipts for high ticket items but we move so much that I got lazy.

In totally unrelated blurbs, we got some good news a few weeks ago. The renter in our other house is leaving in July and we're getting the house back for the month of August. We get to spend a month in our old house! We'll be renting it again, possibly as a seasonal rental but most likely for a longer bail. We can also increase the rent by almost double. That may sound radical but he was renting it for peanuts so he'd accept the place "as is" and hopefully finish off some work. He never really did much work, oh well and he hasn't been great about paying the rent on time but he has been a pretty reliable guy about keeping care of the house and that was really important to us.

In August we'll finish up the work (more renovating, sigh, but at least it's a change of projects) and we'll get it ready for some new tenants. Hopefully I can detach myself from my love of the house. That part's hard and I'm a little scared I'll get completely obsessed with moving back there. I probably will but what a pleasure to see my house by the lake again!

Year in review

January - I was busy meeting my new neighbors and settling in and so was Little S. (It's odd to realize that I barely knew these people who are so much a part of my daily life now). I was enjoying the nature around our house and experiencing the first snow of the year. I was lamenting my new kitchen and complaining about it! I had no idea it would get worse!! What I wouldn't give for my old UPSTAIRS kitchen with hot running water and heat. We ran out of fuel and had no heat for three days. (that seems so tame compared to the three months we've been without heat now. I'm used to it now!).

February - We primed the living room in white (but have since decided to insulate it so it was a waste of time, bah). I started really meeting the people in our town. S started and stopped his Judo class because of boredom (my boredom mostly--I make an awful soccer mom). I took lots of everyday photos of the kids and our kitchen (I need to do more of this!). I unpacked my kitchen things and my pottery (and have since repacked it all). Seb went to China. Little S started learning the computer. Charlotte turned 15 months but still wasn't walking. We visited SW France and I fell in love with Toulouse.

March - We visited Paris at night as was our monthly custom (for a few months at least). Our good friend Marcel died. I did a field trip to the Paris Dali museum with Little S's class. We visited Versailles for my birthday. Seb was in full digging mode trying to get the basement prepared. The house next to us sold and we had no idea who bought it but I was hoping for nice neighbors because their backyard backs up to ours.

April - I painted Charlotte's room with clouds and a tree. I got to visit the decorative arts musuem in Paris (great museum if you like furniture). Egg hunts and more visits to Paris. I started planning my art studio. Doc paid me a visit while Seb was in China. I started my kid art workshops.

May - We tore out the upstairs walls and started the big work. Charlotte turned 18 months and still wasn't walking. I finished part two of my first atelier with the kids, papier maché masks. I met our new neighbors and they seemed nice (are still nice but not super friendly so far) We paved our mud pit of a driveway with pebbles (eventually we did it in concrete). I got a giant water heater installed in my kitchen. I started walking Little S home from school, 2.5 miles. Our yard came alive with wildflowers! The annual LO festival came to town and it was a lot of fun. I decided to stop being a frumpy mom and wear nicer clothes (still trying to do this). We put the order in for our windows (see how long it took!--normally it takes six weeks but it took six months). Seb moved his basement dirt pile with a backhoe (regrets I've had a few...he really tore up the yard with that thing). I shared my sketchbook started two months earlier.

June - We did another kid art atelier this time with plaster hands. I started really getting interested in gardening. Charlotte started walking. We tore out an old fence in the backyard that "belonged" to the new neighbors, oops. We camped in the mountains near Annecy and had a great time. I did a printing atelier in the yard with the kids and started organizing my end of summer backyard barbecue with the kids.

July - Seb got third degree burns in the backyard burning the old wood from the attic. The Portuguese workers came for two weeks and left us a huge mess. I moved into my neighbor's house for two weeks. Little S nearly knocked out his front tooth going head first on his slide. Our house was beyond chaotic and I was having a very hard time dealing with it (not much has changed there). I celebrated six months of drawing every night.

August - We were waiting for our windows (dum-dee-dum). We ordered our new front door from a menuisiére and we were waiting on that too. Both kids went to the ER for seperate episodes on the same day!! We housesat for a neighbor (same one as earlier) and my fil came to help us reroute our plumbing dwnstairs while Seb tore out my kitchen and transferred it downstairs temporarily. We spent a week in the mountains on vacation. (it occurs to me we had a grand total of about 10 days of vacation for the whole year, no wonder we're so burned out!!)

September - We were still waiting on the windows (and starting to get really worried). We thought about moving into an apartment for a while but it was way too expensive. Little S started Grande Section of Maternelle. I filled my art journal. I cleaned out closets and gave away huge bags of clothes. I also stripped the doors in the living room.

October - Little S turned 5 and we had a fun party, woot hoot! We finally found out what the problem was with the windows--never ordered!! The tile guys we hired came and ripped out all the floors down the the trusses but we had to wait on the windows before they could come back and put the new floors (tap..tap...tap). I took off for my in-laws for a week to escape the floorless house and all the dust. The heaters got disconnected for all the reno work to get started (still disconnected, sigh) We started looking for people to help us finish the rest of the house because the Portuguese renovation company bailed out on us. We had a local guy work one day for us but his work was really, really awful and expensive so we decided to finish the drywall ourselves because we could at least do a better job than that (still working). I started a once a month collage and a printmaking class.

November - Our windows finally came! I tried to do Art Every Day Month but failed. We alll got bronchitus (dust?) Charlotte got her first haircut and turned two. An anonymous neighbor reported us to the city for not have permits (crazy lies!) and we had to start the process of creating a dossier on the house for the city. We got our new front door and the tile got laid. We also had our living room floors done. We started taping the drywall in S's room (his room is nearly finished by now). Sil got all bent out of shape about something and freaked out on the telephone un-inviting us to her annual Christmas Eve family dinner (still aren't sure what brought all THAT on). Little S 's room got emptied.

December - My car got stolen and recovered, but the back seat was burned. It snowed an awful lot but it was really nice. Seb sliced open his finger and cut a tendon requiring surgery. We spent Christmas with my friend Dee and her boyfriend and then went to Normandy to see the in-laws (except for sil). We made it to the end of the year alive in one piece and still married...MIRACLE!!

----------------------------------------------------

What a crazy year. Just reading all this makes me dizzy. It seems that around June things got really awful! It's funny because we recently saw a magnetiseur for Little S at mil's request--like many French people she loves alternative therapy and she will usually pay for it if we'll only just go. Magnetic therapy is used for diagnosis and then healing of certain sicknesses and magnetiseurs are often considered psychic too because they're extremely sensitive people. Little S has terrible tummy problems so we were seeing this guy for that. We'd never even seen him before. As we sat down though he touched *us* and swung his magnetic pendulum between us (I thought he was going to say you guys are incompatable! we'd been bickering all day) and he said "oh wow you have a huge home problem...you have a curse on your house and someone did it in the Spring. It's someone practicing black magic. I see fire so be careful" We were a little dumbstruck. He went on to say that it wasn't anyone in our family but someone in our community and it had to do with a profound jealousy. He said when we bought our house someone wanted it but didn't get it so they got mad seeing us in the house. Wow. We knew that we were in competition against a lot of people for the house but the owners chose us even though we had a low bid. We don't know who the other bidders were, just that there was some reason the owner didn't want one particular person to get the house. It was an old neighbor rivalry thing. Okay so it's kooky but how weird that he picked up on that out of nowhere. I know a lot of people don't believe in this type of thing and even we feel weird thinking of someone practicing black magic. He told us black magic is really common in France and that the Catholic church recognizes it. He also suggested we get our house blessed and he gave us some holy water to do it ourselves!--Poor little S. He apparently does have stomach problems. The magnetiseur zeroed right in on his intestines and said, "Oh yes it's all blocked up" without us saying a word.

Ohhhh perspective

Time away is always a good thing. It's all about perspective.

Seb's on vacation and we're taking some time off from our place and housesitting for a neighbor friend now and all next week. It pays to be the only person left in the village! We have a nice house to look after and all the amenitites, dishwasher, t.v. and a bath. Yay! A nice bath puts it all in the right perspective.

We haven't completely abandoned the house. We're working here all week, digging holes, doing plumbing, packing the kitchen. After next week we're off on a little excursion of our own. We need some mountain air. I can't wait to round the bend on that autoroute and see the alps. I think that by the time we get back to the house we'll be feeling really motivated to finish the work and live in the middle of an awful lot of packed up boxes. The REAL work starts in September and October.

I wish I had more blogging time. I have so many art projects to share, and my newest passion -- carving stamps. I'm completely obsessed! I've already done way to many to count and I'm still averaging two or three a day. It coincides really well with journaling and collage work and I love it. I'll try to share some photos next week, some of my favorites that I've made and some of my ideas borrowed from a few different blogs.

But then again I might not get back on the computer because there's just so much going on. Oh well!

Gribouillage

When Little S plays sometimes he uses pens and because he's a Real Boy he uses his pens like explosives. Suddenly he'll be drawing straight lines then he'll start making the airplane sound, then the explosion sound and BOOM all those sound effects. There's always a narrative like "the airplane is going reallly, rreaalllly fast and then ...pooooo, aghgg pow!" It always surprises me to see all the scribbling. The calm stillness of his straight lines is suddenly an explosion of color as he fills the page. It's out of nowhere. Last night I was thinking my life has been like that lately, calm lines then an explosion of airplane crashing scribbles.

So much happend in two weeks it's hard to imagine that it's been so short, wow. Writing about it all in detail would take me three posts so I'll just try to summarize. School was finishing up for Little S and we were planning a party with a few moms, straight lines and then it all started snowballing into about 15 moms and all their siblings, scribbles starting. I was cleaning all weekend in preparation and Monday night I got mad because Seb brought home a last minute dinner guest, an Arab collegue. It was a trying evening because he was anti feminist, heck anti woman from what I could see, and I had to REALLY bite my tounge the whole evening to keep from starting an argument. I was happy at the end though that he was there just as our bathtub came in a truck from Lyon at 9 O'clock, a long story funny story actually, but the short version is that a teenage couple brought it in a pickup truck, and anyway he was there to help unload it, so he did serve a purpose even though I was ready to pitch him into the driveway for being an asshat.

The next night I told Seb to try to get home early to help me with the garden because we'd lost a night. He owed me this after forcing me to entertain his lovely dinner guest. Seb was tired but one of the jobs was to burn all the trash at eleven o'clock when the neighbors are sleeping. And that's when after pouring gas on the fire I saw my husband in slow motion flying through the garden backwards. He ended up with second and third degree burns on his legs and he couldn't walk for a week. I still had to have the party because at least half of the moms coming were casual aquaintances and I didn't have phone numbers, plus Little S was a completely traumitized seeing his dad taken away in an ambulance at midnight. The party was a good distraction. Ummm, yeah you could say that.

We still had the workers coming from Portugal to begin the job on the house in three days and there was no way to cancel it. That meant lots of boxes had to moved, heavy furniture stored and we had to prepare the work area. Their boss, Seb's friend who was loaning us his guys said over the phone that he couldn't cancel, "but don't worry they'll help you move everything." I tried to move as much as I could, running up and down the steps over the next few days, filling boxes, fetching Velux windows, but I started to lose my mind with Seb in bed needing full care (he should have stayed in the hospital, we realize that now) and the kids under my feet, bored and restless. We called the in laws but they launched in to their usual speech about how they were busy. A day later I called back and we begged. Could they please come? They came the next day with their camping car ready to go with us into a campground. It seemed like such a good idea at the time but it makes me laugh now. Lots of scribbling.

The Portuguese arrived at 10 am on Monday. The camping car was in the driveway, husband was in the bedroom surrounded by piles of laundry and I was taking Little S to a birthday party. Everything normal right? A mom at the party asked if I could water their garden while they were gone on vacation the next few weeks and then she said "hey why not just stay in our house too?" What a stroke of luck. I think sometimes we have an angel. I thought about that when I saw Seb flying through the garden too. An angel because he had singed ear hairs and eyebrows but his face wasn't touched, just one leg very badly.

The Portuguese, all four of them, ahem took over our house. They did great work but for two weeks they used my tea towels to mop up grease, slept on the kid's mattresses and blankets in the dust upstairs (they borrowed them from the living room boxes) and littered our yard with beer and YOP bottles. They broke every trash bin in the vicinity and they never did move the furniture from upstairs but instead used the handy sofa table to cut boards. Seb's response, so typically male you have to laugh, "why do you even like that table anyway?" There was a lot of cringing in between admiring their work, truly a love-hate relationship. I was torn.



Yesterday we moved back in and I cleaned the toilet while Charlotte screamed in that whining "mom, bananas, nowwwwwww" voice. I was completely grossed out and I said to myself "are they really coming back in two months?"

The whole two weeks was like that. I also got a root canal, Little S knocked out his front tooth on his slide, we had dinner in Normandie with Seb's parents and I had a lot of moments where I sat in the wonderful garden at my adopted house and drew pictures of the view. And we watched the town empty as all of Paris went on vacation.



And that was what all the scribbles were about. Like when I moved to France and later to Mexico. And when Charlotte was born. And so many other times in my life.

Seeing the lake

We leave tonight for two nights in Th*non, a welcomed trip away to our old home turf. We have to do some papers and pick up some tools from our workroom so we have to go. I'm as excited as a little girl. I'm really looking forward to turning that bend in the road that lays the lake out in front of me. I love that moment. It represents home to me. And I'll be able to see some of our neighbors which will be nice. I'm not looking forward to seeing our old house because it kind of makes me sad that we can't live there any more. I know it's still our house but I also know that it will be a long time before we can have it back for us and that it will be rented for so many years that it won't be the same house when we do get it back and we'll have to start over with the work and making it ours again.

The good news is there are warm winter clothes stashed in the little storage attic outside in the workroom. If we can get permission from the renter to get in those storage rooms we can get our things. I think I remember putting my warm boots and jackets in a box at the last minute. I hope so because I really need them. I'm freezing to death.

Hopefully we'll have our stuff from storage next week too. I can't wait! I know we will probably be completely overwhelmed with it all. It means finding a place for stashing kayaks and sports gear and extra furniture all at a time when we should be enjoying Christmas, but I will be so happy to see my clothes and beauty products and kitchen things that I won't care. Living out of our suitcases for over five months should merit us some medals. It's been really difficult and I haven't bought anything except for the pair of jeans and boots I bought last week. I am Miss Frugal Living!

This grubby house

We spend each afternoon in the house lately. We need to get it ready to receive our things from Mexico arriving in France on the 31st of this month. It's amazing how quickly things have come across the Atlantic from this direction without interference from Seb's company on the Mexican side!

Yesterday I worked for two hours doing the thankless job of scrubbing walls and floors. I didn't get far as each bucketful of grime had to be changed and dumped after just a few swipes. I made lots of mud but it was a good feeling to look back and see one clean wall after over four hours of work.

The previous owner was 106 years old when she died and moved to a nursing home about ten years ago or more. The home was still used from time to time as a vacation house of sorts for family visiting Paris and as a summer getaway. It isn't clear really how they could live there and cook (the kitchen is a war zone) or live in the dirt and grime, but it seems that their love of the house overshadows the muck because they stayed there two weeks ago. They're a funny little petite bourgoise family, very nice and friendly but a little bizarre as the wife talked openly to me about her recent lifting and the reason her face was so red. Her doctor was reputedly the best in Paris. He's on the Champs Elysee. I didn't know what to say but as I cleaned the buckets of dirt out of that room I could only think of how unhealthy it was for her to spend her recovery time in that awful, dusty bedroom.

We are eager to get all of the nick nacks and old furniture out of the house. We asked them to leave everything as a favor to us but our real reason was that we know it can take weeks for owners to get around to cleaning their family things out of an old house and we can do it much quicker without involving sentiment. Not much of the furniture interests us, a couple of mirrors and maybe some pottery pieces but most of it is destined for the dump or the local charity. I kind of like the dining room table and the buffet and my Mexican table is really cheap so I can always sell it for a bit of cash and keep this one which is oak.

I think we'll be selling a few of our pieces, lots of theirs and reducing everything down to near nothing. We can't afford to take on a storage unit and without the use of our storage rooms in Th*n*n we have nowhere to put everything. We seem to be inundated with stuff lately. I hate that feeling.

I hope we hear from the lender by the end of today.

1929... it was a very good year

We're at the hotel and I suppose I forgot that we'd have this brief week before we move to the gite out in the country for the month. I have one more week of internet!

Yesterday we spent the day at our new house cleaning. I may be bold enough enough to call it our house, but it isn't quite yet. We have a few more days of waiting for the lender's response to our paperwork but we feel like it will be a yes. In the meantime the owners have given us the keys so that we can start taking down the wallpaper in the first bedroom which is downstairs.


Our first job was to empty the room of the two old 1960's armoires and the various nicknacks perched on the mantle and then it was time to clean. There was a lot of dust behind the armoires and spider webs and black grime. We were back in time to our house in Th*n*n five years ago, sweeping and dragging out old carpet. A few surprises ! We uncovered the green dusty carpet to find the wood floors in pretty good shape. The agent told us the floors were oak but we were wiser. We didn't correct her but we knew they were a standard pine floor. In the 1920's when the house was built they installed pine in all the rooms on all of the floors and then this was often covered with carpets or later linoleum. The pine floors in the bedroom are just in need of a good cleaning (peroxide, ammonia and water) and then we can start to staining and sealing them. The bedroom has a wood frame fireplace which when we moved the armoire revealed another surprise. It wasn't wood at all but marble! They had painted over the marble. It's a lot of fun to make discoveries like this when renovating an old home. There's always a lot of surprises. The walls are plaster papered over with floral paper we've been picking at all weekend until we can rent our wallpaper steamer. The bedroom is growing in size with each scrap of paper that comes down. We should have a nice downstairs bedroom big enough for all four of us. The first six months we'll have no choice. The upstairs bedrooms are a whole other project. We'll be breaking everything and starting over at zero.

a jolie surprise...marble painted over with green latex paint --we talked about looking for an old marble fireplace for the house and even looked for one on the internet so we were really excited to find the exact same one we would have chosen -- pretty red tones

Once we get the official response from the lender we can become renters and move in...and we can breathe again! I have been holding my breath for two weeks now. The renter status is just until the final papers pass through. The owners have been really nice to us and although my idea to ask them to let us rent the house seemed a little crazy at first it was just because it isn't so common in France. After they got used to the idea they were okay with it. Oddly enough the wanted to meet us first to see what type of people we were. They liked us and adored the kids so they said yes.

We have a lot of work to do but we love the house. It's much more recent than our first house but it still has many of the same problems. The project should go much faster though.

We're also much wiser this time around and we know better than to launch off in all different directions but to finish one room at a time. We hope to have the bedroom done in three weeks.

I'll share some photos in another post. I'm feeling a little funny about sharing too much until our papers go through. I do have a few more pictures over on Flickr.

Vacation plans

Vacation started off well. We had a beautiful two days in a Norman chateau for the wedding of my good friend Jess. What a wonderful job her and her beau David did organizing such an event. We were really impressed. It might sound from reading this that they drive matching BMW's and spend their summers in The Hamptons but the actual fact of the matter is that they're just a regular working class couple from Manchester with a lot of creative ideas and they pulled off this amazing feat all by themselves. I have to post photos later because the whole thing looked like something a wedding planner had done. It was gorgeous!

After the wedding we spent a weekend in Paris and then headed South to Haute Savoie for a two week rest in our old house. We were as keyed up as two little kids during the drive and I felt like I would explode with anxiety as we drove past Lac Léman towards our old neighborhood. I have missed my home so much!

But life throws funny things in your path and plans can change quickly. No sooner had we posed our bags in the kitchen of our old house, then the renter rang to say he'd be coming back from his planned leave and he'd be bringing his two teenage grandkids with him to stay for the rest of the month. We sank into one of his strange leather easy chairs and sighed. Originally we were to have the house for the next two weeks, a sort of unwritten arrangement we'd worked out with him when we rented him the house last year. We'd planned between us that he'd always have the two first or last weeks blocked out in August and let us have our house back. He good naturedly welcomed us to stay with them but of course we said no. It wasn't at all what we had in mind for our time off. Oh well it was a good lesson. It isn't our house for the next two years or more and we just have to accept that as difficult as it may be. Next year we will plan on going somewhere else. It make me sad to think that we can't go back and stay in our home for a while.



After lots of scrambling about and two hours of telephone calls we ended up securing two measly days in a nearby hotel and it was nice because we were able to see all of our old neighbors, especially our pseudo grandparents Mr. and Mme. P who cried when they saw us. I really miss them. They won't be around much longer and it breaks my heart not to have them right next to us anymore. Our other neighbors were genuinely upset to see that we weren't coming back and it surprised me because many seemed so blasé about our living there the past four years but they were sad to hear we'd not be there for even the two weeks. Others were still the same, including Mme. B (the B doesn't stand for her name but for something more fitting...ahem) who greeted me with the same cold "hmph" and it made me laugh to think that she was always going to hold this invisible grudge against me and now obviously my baby. Some aspects of French village life never change.



We left after our short two days to wander off to an old haunt of ours, a small village near Macon. My friend Dee graciously opened her apartment to us and it was a good thing because this is the week in August in France where everything is booked solid. Dee is gone on her own vacation and it's weird to be in her place without her but very sweet of her to have left us a key. We're lucky to have such good friends in such a crisis. Even the Holiday Inn in Paris where we more or less live was booked for these next ten days. Vive le quinze aout!

(I must find a way to attach a French keyboard to my laptop because I can't memorize the keystrokes--in the meantime please pardon mon mauvaise orthographe)

Some vacation in the middle of it all

We're checking out of casa Holiday Inn tonight and heading to Normandie for the wedding of my dear friend Jess. Then after the wedding we just have a couple of days of roaming and work days until we go on our two week family vacation in beautiful Haute-Savoie. We get to spend two weeks in our old house which I imagine will be just as weird as it was at Christmas. Oh well at least it's some semblance of home even if it does have all kinds of strange sixty-year-old bachelor furniture in it and it smells weird (not a bad smell just strange). I just hope this whole thing doesn't confuse Little S too much and I will kill Seb if he even thinks of lifting a hammer while we're there!

I'm not sure if there's internet at the old house. Nevertheless I'll be back soon!

House hunting

With all the chaos of running back and forth between France, Mexico and Eastern Europe Seb hasn't had much time to do what he promised me he'd do which is look for a place to live. It is my job to search the internet each night and send him my prospects so that he can call about the things I find the next day and then make appointments, reporting dutifully back to me about what he saw or what information he uncovered over the telephone with the rental agent (usually that the house is being rented furnished or something weird like that). This scenario of me being the searcher was working quite well until we discovered that my parents have internet issues and we were stuck for at least half the time because I couldn't do my searches. I should say I was the one stuck because I couldn't send him my prospects and that gave him free reign to look at his own prospects. I have no problem with Seb looking as far as taste is concerned because we have the same exact tastes in houses, well mine being slightly less modern, but I knew he'd be busy looking on his own each evening not for something to rent but for something to buy. Seb is forever wanting to buy another old house and fix it up. I know this about him, it's an affliction, and I should have been worried because he did just what I thought he would. He called about a lot of houses in the last week but all of them are houses or apartments that are for sale not for rent. And he visited two or three of them just out of curiosity.

Of course they are all homes in need of renovation. Of course they all have plumbing issues. Of course we are in love with all of them.

Oh dear, where is this going to lead?

The old house blues

We are still travelling in France and I feel really lucky to have been able to come home for the holidays. We didn't think we'd be getting home for a while. The fact that Seb has business trips and a contract to renegotiate was a boon for us. We even got to hang out in Paris!

Now we're in our hometown and we're even staying in our house. The renter is on vacation for a few days and offered us the keys. The house feels really weird to me. It has some of our things in it and yet a lot of strange things in it. Our cat is here and is looking at us like "whoa where did you guys come from!" And the house is frozen in time workwise--our builder has decided to stop working for a year.

Coming home I thought I'd feel blasé. It's only been six months. I feel like I did the day I left though--overwraught with emotion, intensely attatched and eager to get back again. It definitely feels like home here.

Those floors are finally finished

We spent the weekend as busy bees doing a lot of cleaning out and packing for our trip to Mexico of course but mainly we spent time finishing our wood floors in the living room. After all we still have to finish a lot of projects before leaving. So the new walnut floors had to be sanded and then protected and then varnished.


It's been a long trek to getting these floors. When we first moved in to the house we tore up the linoleum to reveal the original wood floors. They were a horrible mess, - gray and grungy. The planks varied in size and had woodworm in almost every board, charming but not salvageable. After a year and a half Seb poured rough concrete over them and we lived with that for a few months (ouch!) until I insisted on some carpet because after all we had a baby coming. The baby came and celebrated his first birthday and still no progress on the floors. Then one February when Little S was about 18 months (and oh sooooo cute I might add) we had our fireplace installed. The workmen destroyed the cheap carpet in the living room and so we took most of it up and relied on moving blankets and throw rugs to cover the floor. Talk about hideous! I got tired of explaining to everyone that this room would one day be finished. After a while I just warned friends "oh yeah be careful with the baby because that's a concrete floor." Finally we threw away the rest of the carpet and Seb worked hard to lay slats for the new wood floors. He left the slats for months and I kept tripping over them. Little S actually learned to walk over them doing wobbly, see-saw jumps in between the concrete. Seb had started his new job in Lyon though and he wasn't around much so he never had time to finish anything let alone that low priority project. I went ahead and unscrewed his slats. They were driving me nuts.



During the summer of 2006 we took out our loan and hired our contractor. But when we laid out everything in the work contract we decided that paying him for doing anything downstairs was excessive. After all the downstairs was almost done (you'd have to have seen the upstairs to truly understand this...) and we could finish it ourselves.

Then one day four months ago, and three and a half years after the concrete first got poured, we laid new slats and poured some extra concrete to balance out the floor once again. We just needed to let it dry for two weeks and bring our new boards inside to dry out, and in a few short weeks weeks we'd have our living room floors! It took four months, another stint of cheap carpet and throw rugs and a sympathetic father-in-law to get there but we finally got the floors installed in May. Then of course to protect them until we could varnish them we put the ugly carpet back for a short while.


Finally the project is done and somehow all those years of waiting are forgotten. A very content calico lies basking, admiring. We feel exhilerated. We chose the wood, the colors, the varnish. We did all the work ourselves. There's something incredibly rewarding in all that sacrifice.

Our house in the middle of the street

Our street in 1900, a sleepy village full of fishermen where everyone sat on the steps at night and told stories


Today after two big wars and lots of Dragon Lady spittle. People are no longer chatting on the steps but fighting over them.



Our tortuous neighbor The Dragon Lady is at it again. So far in 2007 she has strong-armed us in to paying for part of a roof she says we co-own, robbed our insurance company of about 2000 euros for a mysterious leak she said was caused by our roofer in February and now it seems she wants our two front steps.

For the past two weeks she had surveyors out measuring our house front and back. Conclusion? Our bottom two steps belong to her and she wants us to know she intends to expand her front terrace and eliminate them. She has requested that we change the entryway to our house.

It didn't escape out ears that she tutoyers the surveyor.**

First of all the entry to our house includes a droit de passage so she can't build a terrace because we have the right to cross her front stoop to get to ours. It's our only entryway and it's been there for at least 107 years (see photo)***. Second if the Mairie approves her building a terrace on this street I'll lose all faith in France's respect for patrimoine. Third if we give up our droit de passage she can claim the front entry area as her property and gain a considerable chunk of real estate for free.

I'm not sure why she won't leave us alone. Her house is actually divided in to four apartments rented to students part of the year and tourists during the summer. She doesn't even live here. She makes no effort to preserve the patrimoine of the village. This is just one of her many nest eggs and because her grandmother was born here somehow she thinks that gives her a divine right to spit fire in all directions.

*more like blackmailed us but the details can't really be discussed here
**she also tutoyer's the mayor.
***our house is the one further in the distance on the left with the staircase--hard to see in these pictures

Let the bidding begin

Here's a funny thing we never thought would happen. A whole crap load of people want to rent our house.

It's almost comical. Here we thought we'd have to beg people to take it on, bribing them with stories of cool summer breezes and friendly (HA!) neighbors. Instead there is a crowd coming to us. We haven't even let the word out yet, in fact had only just decided ourselves two weeks ago to even rent the place full time. We originally had it firmly pressed in our head that we could somehow keep the house as a luxury palace to visit any time we liked, but then reality sunk in. We can't pay all the loans and have a good life in Mexico. We need a steady income on the house.

So far four seperate parties are interested in renting our house more or less as is, (meaning that we don't have to fill all the little holes in the walls but that we do have to finish the kitchen and bedrooms). The stories of these folks are all as varied as can be and yet they share a common thread. They all have little resources and most have emotional baggage. Most of them see our house as a simple solution to their problems, four bedrooms on a lake for half the rent that they can afford. Life as they see it could be good. Life could change for the better.

Candidate(s) one and two are old colleagues of Sebs who keep getting word of mouth updates about us and our Mexico adventures. They have large or soon to be budding families and they'd like to be in more space for a lot less money. One couple has boy/girl twins born the same month as Little S and they also have another child. We can understand this need for space but we aren't too keen on the idea that these people view the house as rundown and something they can "live with." Both couples we know are apartment dwellers and have no experience living in old homes nor do they ever say things like "we love that your house is old, crumbly and lovely!" I think they just want sheer volume at any cost. Conclusion is that their wives will be at the end their ropes after one year and the kids probably won't realize that they mustn't take little, Mattel matchbox cars into the cast iron bathtub because it marks up the enamel (as we quickly discovered with Little S).

Candidate three is a 40 something divorcee who lives up the street. She's got a nice house in the village that's beautifully decorated (she always leaves her door open). I love her taste and I appreciate that she spends a lot of time and money decorating her home. But she has these drunken parties that keep us awake a lot and she does this annoying thing where she sunbathes in a string bikini on the neighbor opposite her's front porch stoop. The poor old couple are in their 80's and she barely knows their names let alone asks them if it's okay as she lies there chatting on her cell phone. She also presumably has financial dire straits as she keeps stalling in telling us how much she thinks the house is worth because she needs to see how much she'll "be getting" once her affairs are in order.

Finally there is our contractor who has pretty much become part of the family because he's been here so long working on our house. We realized why he'd been so down lately when we chatted with him over lunch this weekend. His wife of 30 years has left him. He asked us if we'd rent the house to him for the three years we'd be gone. He said that he thought he could be happy here, he'd continue doing projects for us and he also mentioned that he loves the house, something we already know. I guess that makes him our top candidate so far.

Who knew we'd have all these kooky choices though.

Adventures in casa hunting

One of the reason we went to Mexico was to start looking for a house to rent. We started house hunting on day two and spent a full day with a peppy, giggling, botox-induced agent looking at about 20 different houses to rent until we thought we'd drop over from exhaustion. We had very few stipulations, just one really: we wanted something completely finished. We didn't even want to hear that a pipe needed tightening or a door hinge squeaked or anything. We will be after all on renovation hiatus(!!) for three solid years...god that feels good to see that in print.

Surprisingly most of the houses we saw were modern as this seems to be the predominate style in big city Mexico, so you can forget all your notions of a lovely hacienda* with that gorgeous inner courtyard--Frida's house *sigh* I was a little disappointed about that and kept trying to get the agent to show us more traditional homes. This only caused her to show us houses with garbarge in the bathrooms, broken toilets and knee high grass. To her, or at least to Mexico, traditional seems to mean neglected. We ended all that very quickly and got back on track. "Okay, okay just show us the gringo, expat homes in the gated communities" and that was fine because that's what she wanted to show us anyway so everyone was finally happy.

I won't complain because from there on out we mostly saw dream homes. Homes with enormous picture windows, open living rooms and large open spaces everywhere you looked. Lack of character? I didn't complain once! It was like we were in the European version of the Beverly Hillbillies, "yee ha! pack up the truck hunny we're movin'!"

I guess what really shocked us the most was the low rent in Mexico. A particular house we looked at had five enormous bedrooms, a bath in each of the four bedrooms, marble floors, maids quarters and a two car garage and rented for just over a thousand dollars. It was a Barbie Dream House that in France would not exist but if it did would cost three times that price to rent and probably be situated on the Mediterranean. After living in 65 square meters for four years and showering outside we were in awe. "You mean we all get our OWN shower?" we said each time we saw a house.

We loved that outdoor living is so embraced in Mexico. All the homes had huge, glass back doors that opened to a nice courtyard or at the very least a 50 meter grassy patch, perfect for year round barbecues. There was always a brick privacy wall around the back which seemed to protect you from prying eyes or in our case escaping toddlers. We loved that.

We have asked if we'd be eligible to rent the Barbie Dream House and we should hear back from the company on that soon. Unfortunately the company decides nearly everything in expatland so sometimes I feel like Seb is working for The Firm. Meanwhile here's a sneak peek so you can see what we drooled over. Click on it for a better look because if you're nosy like me you'll want a better look.





We are more than pleased to go modern for a few years. I wouldn't want it for the rest of my life but I have to say I do like it. Everything is so clean. Everything is so perfect; built for today instead the 15th century (like our house). Seb, like most Frenchies grew up in old, skanky France so he is really into modern houses. He was in heaven but I wasn't so sure until I started seeing more homes. Now my only fear is that I will become spoiled. For example in the kitchen in that particular house there is room for a double wide refridgerater in the fridge nook! All of the houses we saw had this. How can I go back to 250 litres after that I ask you? What will it do to me? I am a ruined woman from here on out.

* If you have a house to rent in Mexico like the one in the top picture give us a call...by all means I beg of you!

Le weekend de Paques

We had a nice Easter weekend even if there was a lot to do. At least we had some time together. Seb took Friday off to work in the house and make some progress on our bedroom, the only room we aren't contracting out. He worked Saturday searching for building materials in Annemasse 45 minutes away, driving a rental truck back and forth and back and forth. On his last trip, the one where he was to turn in the rental car and recuperate our car he realized he'd forgotten his keys at home. He called me to see if I had any ideas of how he could get home but all I could say was take the the train. The problem was he had taken grumpy, tired Little S on the last run so I could catch some sleep and the trains from Annemasse were few and far between. We only have the one car now because we killed the engine in our Renault by hauling building materials (go figure!) and so I couldn't really go and rescue him. The other catch? He'd taken all the credit cards, cash and the checkbook. The next train on my end of town going to Annemasse was leaving in 15 minutes and I frantically dug through my purse for Swiss money which I prayed that SNCF would accept. I made it to the gare with two minutes to spare and was very proudly able to rescue my husband and son from having to spend four hours in the train station on a Saturday afternoon.

On Sunday I was very ill so we cancelled most of our planned day off and Seb just decided to work. I slept a lot off and on and felt well enough to go walking at five o'clock in the afternoon. Little S was ill too and we all looked a little ragtag walking by the lake trying to pretend we were having a great time with all the other tourists. We bought Little S ice cream and let him ride on a few of the manèges and we did somehow walk all the way to the swimming pool which is a pretty long walk. In the evening I tucked in early without eating and then it was Monday before we knew it, another day spent slaving in the house, trying to meet all of our crazy Summer deadlines.

I suppose there is solace in knowing that next Easter will be different. It's hard to believe that in one year we'll be settled in a completely different country, a whole other culture. I know that Easter is a huge religous holiday celebration in Mexico and that most companies close for the entire week beforehand. That probably means we'll be travelling because we've decided that any free time we have in Mexico will be spent exploring. Hopefully we'll be looking back at this last year and shaking our heads saying "wow, how did we survive all that?" as we stare off at a mayan temple or dig our toes a little deeper in the sand of a gorgeous, azure shoreline.