Scene of the grime

While the interior of our house is now more or less complete, the exterior is another story -- a recent chapter of which I am not proud.

One dark and rainy night shortly before Christmas I came home laden with parcels to discover our house completely inaccessible.  It seems the pool company had finally sent its crew to pour the promised concrete around our future lap pool and also create a set of steps leading from the car port to the deck. The cement was still wet (as a tentative toe tap confirmed) and the yard, after two weeks of rain, a sea of mud.

Seeing no other option, I donned a pair of rubber boots and grabbed my various bags to trudge the several meters through the mud. In a cartoon moment, half way through my trek I  sank knee deep and quite literally got stuck in the mud -- no matter how I tried, my feet would not budge in the sludge. The only way out was to abandon the rubber boots.  My leather ankle boots (brand new Navyboot, alas!) also sunk in and stuck.

At that point I had no choice but to leave all footwear behind and wade to the safe haven of the deck in my stocking feet. I emerged like some sort of sea creature, muddy from the waist down, trailing my dirt-drenched shopping bags and purse. In the morning, the cement had dried and we were able to recover both sets of boots. These are all that remain of my great adventure.

People who live in glass houses

It has now been two months since we moved into to our new house. That is just long enough to settle in and fully appreciate how many little things you would do things differently if you had a chance.

All those windows we planned in order to take advantage of the nice views are indeed lovely. However, it makes furniture arrangement in certain rooms challenging. And in order to ensure a bit of privacy we probably spent as much on window treatments as we will on window cleaners.  I am definitely not getting on a ladder to clean these babies. 

The placement of light switches is a another devilish detail.  No matter how well you try and anticipate these things, they are always on the wrong side. 

Our kitchen design is quite functional, except for one flaw:  they put the garbage disposal on the wrong side of the double sinks. (This probably sounds ridiculously picky but you would not believe how annoying it is!) Of course we can switch it but it means replacing a cupboard door and the installer wants to charge us a fortune. At one point you wonder when to cut your losses and just live with it.

Lest it appear that we are not sufficiently grateful, I should add that we are absolutely thrilled to be in our new house. And with Christmas just around the corner, it will really begin to feel like home when the kids come home for the holidays. Especially as we will welcome a couple of new family members. More on the ménagerie next time!

Nuts and bolts

It has been almost a year since we kicked off our home-building project.  For this last blog post before we actually move in, I will focus on a few of the more technical details of our new home. 

It is a wood frame structure with poured concrete foundations. There is no garage but it has a carport and full basement with an outside access for bikes, garden equipment, etc. The basement is also where the electrical installations are centralized.  We have underfloor heating on the main floor and electric radiators everywhere else.

Before: Electrical wiring in the rough

After: Wires neatly organized in the...what do you call this thing anyway? ("Tableau" in French)

In the basement laundry room is our solar-powered water heater. We may need an engineering degree in order to figure out how it works.

The pool is still under construction, and ready to be hooked up to the filtration system in the basement:

Just last week they installed the bathroom fixtures. A glass specialist (miroitier) came and put in a made-to-measure shower door (actually cheaper than buying one ready made).

Hard to see but they are carrying the shower door to the house

 And finally, work began on the kitchen. Here it is, minus countertops, sinks and a few other finishings. 

Next time: moving in.

The home stretch

We have floors!

After a what seemed like an endless summer, the builders are finally back to work on our house. It is amazing how slowly things go at this stage. Where it took mere days to lay foundations and raise the roof, finishings like floor coverings and paint seem to take forever.

We are now just a few weeks away from our move-in date and I am trying to keep the faith. So much remains to be done that it will take a minor miracle – and I gave up religion years ago. So I am doing a lot of deep yoga breathing and practicing my new mantra, “Ho-ome”...

A step in the right direction: bleached oak to match my tan!

So let's focus on the positive. The walls are (mostly) painted and the floors almost done. Although we have gone with white paint pretty well everywhere, we broke down and decided to give the floors, wall tiles and window treatments some colour, albeit neutrals. 

The bathroom tiling is nearly complete, although we still have no fixtures other than a bathtub....

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Guest bathroom tile (shower

Downstairs will have a tiled shower stall (so far we have tiles but no shower)

Nothing but the kitchen sink (rough in)

And in the kitchen, "il n'y a plus qu'à..."









Any bets on whether we'll have running water and electricity?

La Maison Blanche

Always wanted to live in the white house.

Things have finally started to pick up again at our chantier.  The painters have come and put on the first two coats of paint on the exterior, transforming what seemed to be a chalet-style house into something more modern.

"Quel dommage," commented a couple of people here in France when we told them we would paint our house white rather than go with the knotty pine look. When people discover you're Canadian they just assume you would love nothing better than a natural wood finish.

Call me old fashioned, but I just feel good in white. White walls. Pale floors. Mostly neutral furnishings. I admire bright colours in other people's homes, but it doesn't feel like me. The trend here has been to darker colours recently but I am proudly resisting. Vive la vie en blanc !

Breaking and entering

Our new chez nous: Anyone know a good window cleaner?

Now that our house is "hors d'air, hors d'eau" (meaning it has a roof, doors and windows) we are locked out. The builder and his cronies have the keys and are allowed full access privileges while we, as mere owners, are only allowed in when invited for official visits.

Our chef de chantier, a personable enough fellow for a Frenchman, explained to us at some length about liability, insurance and maintaining secure control of the building site...blah, blah, blah; regretfully, he could not give us a key.  Monsieur C. did not count on the subversive nature of his fellow countryman, aka mon mari, who left a window slightly ajar while I was nodding politely. So now we have been sneaking over to see our house illicitly.

Scene of the grime: an unlocked (dirty) French window

It feels a bit strange to break in to your own house.  The first time we went in, I hardly dared open the windows for fear of being seen.  Stefan laughed at me at first, then promptly lost all credibility by hiding behind a beam when a car with the builder's insignia drove by. 

From our new balcony we have a lovely view: a bit of the lake, the Jura mountains on one side, the snow-capped Alps on the other. And just next door, the sweeping bay windows of our new neighbours. Unfortunately they are curtain-less. We are not sure if they are just taking a while to amass the additional cash needed for window treatments or displaying (pun intended) a certain exhibitionist tendency. The workmen, who provide regular reports about such events, have dropped hints about housework done "à poile."

Monsieur admires the view (but which one?)

But as the saying goes, "people who live in glass houses..." The problem with windows is that you want to see out but not be seen. So you design your house to take advantage of the views and then discover that you must be careful of your own, ahem, southern exposure.

Given the amount of glass in our house, window treatments will be de rigueur, especially as we have no exterior blinds. This is quite the innovation in France where until recently home insurance was contingent upon being able to barricade every door and window with metal or wooden shutters. Now the experts have decided that double-paned windows are just as hard to break into, so we were able to save a major budget (and improved the aesthetics) of our windows. At least so I thought until we received the quote for blinds and drapes. Gasp.  Guess we'll just have to find a happy medium between living in a fishbowl and covering all our openings.

Lost in space

Imagining our island in the sun (kitchen)

Blinds or drapes in the bedroom?

We've been taking advantage of a lull in our house construction to make up our minds about the kitchen layout, bathroom tiles and window treatments. Tough life, right? But it actually takes some mental gymnastics to imagine yourself in your future space.

I have always been somewhat spatially challenged. Give me a surface and I will clutter it. No matter how big the desk, I end up working in a cramped corner amidst a sea of paper. On the train, I can easily take up four seats. And the supermarket aisles are too narrow for me and anyone else's shopping cart.

I need room, but have little sense of space.  I judge distances not in kilometers but in the time it takes to get from point A to point B. My notions of geography are approximate. The confusion began as a kid when we moved north from Canada to the US (Toronto to Minneapolis). After a few years in America I knew where most of the states were but the rest of the world had fallen off the map.

The other day my husband Stefan and I were looking at a map of the European Union, and I asked him, "What is that big lake in the middle of Europe?" "Switzerland," he replied. 

Switzerland,  the EU's biggest lake

Room for a pool?

So when it comes to imagining the spaces we are creating in our new house, I am having some trouble. The floorplans make the rooms seem really big, but the reality feels awfully small. Compared to North America, everything in Europe seems small. Our house will have 180 square meters of living space -- a good size house in this country but probably small by many people's standards. The second floor will also have sloping ceilings, which I adds a level of complexity that deepens my confusion. All I know is that the triangular window treatments will be challenging.

As for the outside, we have planned to put in a lap pool on the side that gets the most sun. Unfortunately, our neighbours on that side have built their garage wall right along our property line. (How they received planning permission for that is one of the mysteries of the French urban planning system). So I have been out there in the mud with my measuring tape, trying to figure out if I can move my pool and still be four meters from their property line, which is the rule we have to abide by.

Within the next two weeks, our spaces will be further defined by doors and windows and we will have to finalize all of the plans. In the meantime, we are enjoying the breathing room.