This is the "after" picture.

They want pictures?

Here I am, back from a week's contemplation of all the finer things in life and full of things I need to get off my chest by posting here, and what do I find? Comments asking for pictures! I used to want pictures with my stories when I was a small child but now I'm grown up and I am quite happy to read books with no pictures in them. Of course, when I was growing up the old wireless was our general form of entertainment and, just as with books sans illustrations, our imaginations came into play. We formed our own pictures back then in the days before television. And don't you find that when a book you have read is adapted for television, the screen version is nothing like what you had pictured?

I suppose I really ought to confess... no, not confess: that indicates I have done something wrong. Well, I will tell you that all those posts about our French retreat are re-posts. The originals are all on my original blog about Les Lavandes - as are pictures. However, to save you trawling through myriads of holiday snaps taken in other parts of France on our travels through that lovely country. I will, just from time to time, post an occasional picture here.


This was 'Les Lavandes' as we first saw it on a grey morning in October.


The two-storey part on the right was the original house, built in 1840, while the single-storey part on the left would have been cattle sheds or similar, with a hay barn over. The gas tank can be seen at the right-hand edge of the picture. On the left, the shutters are to the kitchen window. Then there is a door into the living room and the living room window. The main front door into the hall is in the two-storey part and the windows in this part are to the bedrooms.


How we were expected to get a car through that door into the 'garage' is still a mystery.



This picture shows the sheds which run down one side of the courtyard between the kitchen wall and the well. Just look at that ugly breeze block wall!


The shutters at the front door were held closed by a breeze block and the drain pipe discharged just in front of the door. The cover of the septic tank is pretty close as well.

Yippee! Terra cotta tiles

As I had expected, Mrs S was over the moon when I told her about the tiles beneath the carpet, although I did try to warn her that clearing the screeding might be an impossible job. This was confirmed by a builder friend who, true to form, sucked air in through his teeth when I explained the problem. I had asked him what was the best substance to use to remove the screeding, to which he responded by telling me that it would prove impossible. The latex used in the self-levelling screeding would cling to the tiles tighter than a barnacle to a bilge and nothing, but nothing, could remove it. When I relayed this conversation to Mrs S she was, not surprisingly, disappointed to say the least – so much so that I promised to see what could be done. I should have listened to Bill the Builder.

On my next trip to France I took with me a wallpaper steamer, cement remover and hydrochloric acid – along with flat-packs containing three 1000mm kitchen base units, two 1000mm kitchen wall units, a sink top, all the relevant doors and drawers and the work top. The poor old car was beginning to learn what was in store for it. Along with all the tools etc I took a camp bed and sleeping bag having decided that our budget wouldn't stretch to a hotel. I think Mrs S also had the idea this would mean I could work longer hours. I did, however, draw he line at self-catering, apart from breakfast and lunch, which gave me an opportunity to check out some of the local restaurants.

Neither the wallpaper steamer, the cement remover nor the hydrochloric acid had any effect whatsoever on the screeding. As a result, I spent one day putting together the kitchen units, removing the wainscotting in the kitchen and stripping most of the wallpaper in the living room. The other three and a half days were spent on my knees with a wallpaper scraper removing the screeding in the downstairs bedroom. With one four-inch-square tile sometimes taking an hour to clear, I had uncovered perhaps two-thirds of the tiles by the time I left Les Lavandes for the drive to Cherbourg and the Portsmouth ferry.

Please excuse the mess

Rolling the carpet up was not too difficult a job, but by this time my brain must have become more addled than it usually is. It was an impossible struggle to manouevre the carpet out of the bedroom door and immediately through a right-angle turn to go out of the front door. After three attempts I gave up, dropped the carpet back on the floor and stood by the window while I caught my breath. Why had I not thought of it immediately? It was a simple job to push the roll of carpet out of the window and then carry it into the so-called garage to be taken to the tip when I eventually found out if such a facility existed in France and, if so, where it was.

The plaster screed was thin, paper thin over much of the floor. Just kicking at it separated much of it from the tiles beneath and I was confident that clearing it would not present much of a challenge. I changed my mind when I realised that where the screed was a little thicker, it clung tighter to the tiles. This might not be such an easy job after all. I decided to leave it until my next visit, and wandered into the living room. Some of the wallpaper was peeling away from the wall so I gave it a little help. Very soon I was standing ankle deep in a sea of overblown yellow roses and the better part of one wall was back to bare plaster. I realised I had not thought to bring any rubbish sacks with me, so the mess would just have to wait until my next visit.

The body in the attic

It was only after Monsieur Ebert had left that it occurred to me I had not climbed up into the attic. The door from the upstairs bedroom to the attic stairs was locked but I did finally find the key on the bunch and opened the door. There on the bottom stair lay a mouse, a dead mouse. Indeed, a very dead mouse. I couldn't remember having seen it when we had inspected the house the previous October, but it did look as though it had dropped dead almost as soon as my back had been turned.

Call me squeamish if you like, but I cannot bring myself to pick up putrefying mice with my bare hands. Actually, I can't do it with gloved hands either. What was needed was a quick trip to the local supermarket and the purchase of a trowel. I just hoped, as I flung the corpse into the field next door, that this was not the first of many.

After all this excitement I still had some time in hand so I decided to lift the grubby carpet in the ground floor bedroom. As I pulled back one corner, I realised that there was no underlay. What was breaking up underneath the carpet was a thin screed of plaster laid on top of the original terra cotta tiles. I dropped the carpet and went for the mobile phone to call Mrs S with the news which I knew would cause her great excitement. I was about to press the ‘ring' button when I changed my mind. Better just check, I thought.

Water, yes. Hot water, no.

So now I had water. To be slightly more accurate, I had cold water. I turned my attention to the boiler, which was of a design I had never seen before. Luckily, there was a thick instruction manual tucked behind one of the pipes. I scanned the pages in search of the English version of what I hoped was the idiot's guide. There were pages in French and German, pages in Spanish and Danish, in Italian and what could have been Serbo-Croat. But nothing in English. I turned to the French section and found the page dealing with lighting the boiler. At least, I thought that was what the page was about. An hour or so and three cigarettes later, and after much thumbing of a large dictionary, I had what I believed was a reasonable translation. Sure, there were words missing, but I was able to guess these. But I was no wiser about how to light up the boiler.

As I sat pondering the problem, I found that I had picked up the bundle of papers that I had been given by the notaire along with the keys. Amongst them was the invoice for installing the boiler some four years previously. Light dawned, and salvation was at hand! I telephoned the man who had undertaken the installation and interrupted his lunch. Within the hour a van pulled up outside the house and a gnome appeared on the doorstep. Monsieur Ebert was about four feet six tall, four feet wide, and, unusually for a Frenchman, had a big, bushy beard. It was not long before he had sorted the problem, but I had been quite unable to follow his explanation as he spoke with a very thick, local accent. All the same, I was more than happy to hand him a couple of 20 euro notes and to cross my fingers that nothing would go wrong.

Water!

The first thing I had to do on arrival at Les Lavandes the next morning was find that darned stopcock. Thinking that daylight might help, I went through the same routine as I done the previous day – kitchen, outhouse number one, outhouse number two, outhouse number three, well – but to no avail. Then I started at the well and worked back into the kitchen again. Still nothing. Dammit, I needed that water. I was going to end up filthy and would have to wash before I dared face the receptionist at the hotel to ask for my room key.

The gasman arrived to defer if not vanquish my frustration. I signed the contract to rent the gas tank and for the supply of gas, hoping against hope that I had understood all the small print. I apologised for not offering my first visitor so much as a cup of coffee and told him my problem with the water supply and the elusive stopcock. The gasman explained that these are usually in one of the outhouses and set off to seek it out, quite happy to abandon whatever he was supposed to be doing next to help a client (which I was by then, having handed over a cheque large enough to buy a North Sea gas rig but just for twelve months' rental of the gas tank) out of a hole.

Just as I had done, he banged his head painfully coming out of the first outhouse and thereafter remembered to duck. Just as I had done, he followed the pipe through outhouses one, two and three and into the well. Just as I had done, he spotted the pump in the well with the pipe leading further down. Just as I had done, he found no trace of the stopcock. He scratched his head and reversed the routine, following my steps exactly. Still nothing.

He went out of the gates and looked up and down the road as if hoping to see a stopcock suddenly drive up. What he was really looking for, I finally deduced, was a sign of where the water main might be. His eyes lit up and, like a bloodhound following a scent, he went into the field beside the house. There, under a green manhole-size cover and three kapok-filled plastic sacks, was both the water meter and the stopcock with three or four lizards hibernating contentedly beside them. A minute later the kitchen tap was gushing merrily, but I still couldn't offer the gasman a cup of coffee as I had no cups! Nonetheless, he seemed quite unperturbed that he had wasted an hour of his company's time and drove away waving happily. As for me, I was just mightily relieved that I now had water.