our place in france: 8. A mad mad week !

On a previous visit to France in October 2006, I met up again with the builders' site manager, the enigmatic Monsieur Monica and during the site visit was pleased with the progress being made by M. Monica and his colleagues.

The house looked like this at the time:-

The roof now on and the walls waiting for the crepé and the 'Parement de Pierre'.

A frantic couple of days were then necessary, touring the local DIY stores, in order to make the final choices for materials to complete the construction and 'kitting out' of our new house in the beautiful countryside of the lot-et-Garonne in the South-West of France, near to Villeneuve-sur-lot. I had chosen two bathroom suites, a kitchen, all sanitaryware and all the wall and floor tiles for the house and Terrace in those two days. The works were due for completion by April 2007, but the builder was actually ahead of schedule. (So much for the reputation that French builders are both slow and lazy). All that remained to be done was for Christine and I to arrange a trip over to France in March 2007, so that we could decorate and put the finishing touches to our new “Maison Secondaire“. We decided that we could just about decorate and furnish the whole house in a week, with a bit of help from family and friends.

And so in March 2007, we hired a transit van and squeezed into it, all the furniture, ornaments, paint, knick knacks and tools, that we had accumulated since the start of the build, some ten months previously, plus my mate Stefan and we set off for France. Seven days of hard graft lay ahead of us. Our French builder had told us prior to leaving, that the interior of the house was finished )save for our decorating) and that rather than send us photographs of the completed work, it would be better for us to have a “Grande Surprise” when we arrived. To some this may have sounded a little dubious, but so far he had not let us down and again we put our trust in him, that everything would be just as he had promised.
After more hours driving the transit van than I care to remember, we arrived at “Valmar” on a glorious sunny Saturday afternoon. I did say that we'd crammed "everything" into the van didn't I !

The big smile on the faces of Christine and I, express the amazing relief we felt, as much as anything else, that we had managed to drive several hundred miles, through England and then France, in a VERY heavily laden van, without so much as a flat tyre or accident of any sort (or me falling asleep at the wheel).

As we entered through the front door of 'Valmar', we were pleasantly surprised that the house actually seemed larger than we had envisaged. The interior was finished, save for the decorating, just as Monsieur Monica had said and we were both impressed by the high standard of the finish and attention to detail.
So we unloaded the van (which fortunately always takes a lot longer than it does to pack full, doesn't it !) and crashed out for the night.The next morning we collected my mother from the airport at Bergerac (she chose not to spend several hours crammed into a transit van with us - The older you get the wiser you get ! ) and we all set to work in the house, sanding scraping and then finally painting.

With the occasional break for a 'beverage' - of course !

(This is me and my mate Stef - partaking in one of those 'beverages !)

As I’d read that French paint was expensive to buy, we decided to buy our paint in the UK and take it over with us. This plan almost worked, until we ran out of white emulsion for the hallway walls and ceiling. Stef and I trotted off to the supermarket and to our amazement found a 10 litre tub of emulsion paint for eight euros fifty. We both thought this was a bargain, until we tried applying it to the walls. To cut a long story short, the quality was not good. I suppose wherever you are, you get what you pay for.
Four days later we had painted all of the interior walls, ceilings, the “Volets” and all of the exterior woodwork. Guess who got to go up the ladder and stain the first floor volets ?

Yes, me !

Our next task was to furnish the house. We had bought some furniture with us, but we still needed to buy white goods and a few other things. We naively thought that as we had our own transportation, we could simply walk into one or two large furniture stores, find the best deals and carry the goods off home with us, in our own van, time was after all, of the essence.

Our experience of finding new white goods in France,was not nearly as easy as it would have been in the UK. Unlike in the UK, many of the French stores we visited only stocked the display items and we were told that we would have to wait anywhere between one and six weeks for delivery of most items. This, however, worked in our favour in some cases, when the store allowed us to purchase items from display and gave us a five percent discount to boot ! I found that in general that was as much a discount as I was able to negotiate on 'ex-display' goods.

As “Valmar” was going to be available to rent as a Gite, we wanted to ensure that it was equipped with good quality appliances and it took us three days to buy a fridge, dishwasher, washing machine, cooker, two single beds, a sofa-bed, television, dining suite and all of the soft furnishings.
By the end of the week we were all exhausted, but satisfied in the knowledge that we had succeeded in completing the bulk of the tasks that we had set out to accomplish, to decorate and furnish 'Valmar'.

On the Friday afternoon Monsieur Monica arrived, with the architect Monsieur Dias and two bottles of champagne and we all sat on the terrace and toasted the completion of the project.

But wait !

It wasn't quite that easy. There was still lots of 'touching up' to be done, the swimming pool still wasn't finished, the garden wasn't landscaped, we had no pool furniture, we hadn't purchased a BBQ yet and a lot of the furniture was still in it's polythene wrapping. Although the exterior now looked like this :-