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.

Halfway home

As a former copywriter and relentless punster, I cannot conceive of writing a heading without some sort of word play. So when I started drafting this post this morning, our house was half built and it seemed appropiate to talk of being halfway home. By tonight, though, they had finished the frame and actually completed the roof, so my heading has lost some of its luster.  I can only credit this to the fact that the French are subject to astonishing bursts of efficiency when preparing to go on vacation. As it happens the company that is building our house is closing on Friday for ten days of Easter vacation.

 To put it in perspective, in one week we went from the ground floor:

To halfway home...










And in the space of a day, they finished the frame and raised the roof. 


Now we will wait over Easter while the dust settles, and the carpenter bronzes somewhere in the south of France. It will give us a chance to catch up on our homework (ah, another headline opportunity!). Seems we are running late in finalizing our choices for the kitchen and bathroom.

If all continues on schedule, we may still be able to take possession of our new home by August. Our construction team will be hurrying to put the finishing touches on our house before they close for a month of summer holidays.

How to grow a house

1. Dig a big hole.
2. Throw in lots of money.
3. Repeat.
4. Repeat.
5. Repeat.
6. Et voilà!

Spring is in the air, along with the usual "giboulées de mars" (translation: probably similar to what we call April showers but everything happens earlier on this side of the Atlantic...).

Like spring flowers, our house is taking root and sprouting out of its hole with surprising speed. This week they are completing the foundations and laying the ground floor concrete. Then they will start building up the wood frame structure. So far so good. Famous last words?

Speaking of words, one of our future next-door neighbours whose house is just getting the finishing touches apparently had a hissy fit with our bricklayer because some of our dirt was on their property. The poor man seemed quite shaken up by the vehemence of her reaction, not to mention her language. She apparently neglected to notice that a huge mound of their dirt has been on our property line for the past several months.

I have not met the lovely lady yet but apparently she is a real Parisian (read fish-wife.) As in shout first, ask questions later. This does not bode well for future neighbourly relations as Stefan and I are both rather allergic to the typical French persona. The good news is that we have heard only good things about the other neighbours who all apparently hail from somewhere else. American, Australian, Scottish, Swiss. And now Canadian. I will keep you posted on any future diplomatic incidents.

Permis de construire

Construction has finally started on our new house. 

After months of waiting, our building permit is proudly displayed and the builders are digging in. On the first day we were so excited we ran out with cameras prepared for an official groundbreaking ceremony -- if not a ribbon-cutting by le maire, at least a smile from the guy in the digger.  We got neither. In fact, all they did the first day was drive the truck to the lot and leave it there. That has been the story of this project so far:  a lot of waiting, a flurry of excitement culminated by a short burst of activity. Then repeat.

At first everything happened very quickly. In a matter of months we sold our house, bought a piece of land, finalized the plans and got the bank to agree to lend us a rather terrifying sum of money.  What we did not bargain for was how long it would take to get a building permit.

“It’s really a formality,” reassured our builder when we met to sign the plans. He had already built a similar house on a neighbouring lot and seemed well versed in the fine print of the zoning laws in our new town. “Normalement, there shouldn’t be a problem.” A word to the wise:  "normalement" often spells disaster in French.

 

They did eventually get moving and you might even say the earth moved....the excavation appears to be complete.

We are now the proud owners of a big dirty hole.

Now things have gotten quiet again as France huddles under the blanket during the coldest weather we have seen here in years. Cross my fingers and pray for an early spring!

New lot in life

Port of Tougues in Chens-sur-Léman

This is our story of building a house in France.

As anyone who has ever built – renovated, decorated or even bought – a home knows, things never quite turn out how you expect.  And as anyone familiar with France probably knows, you can multiply that by the “F” factor.  So what, you may ask, has possessed us?

After 25 years of marriage, we have officially entered that sought-after demographic known as “empty nesters.” Funny, I don’t remember getting old. Seems like only yesterday we were in the diaper zone, chasing after kids and dogs with barely a moment to ourselves. Now, the kids are all growed up and we are supposed to be free to do all those things we always dreamed of.  Oddly enough, instead of downsizing and investing in a good set of luggage, we have decided to sign on for another 25-year mortgage.  Which I guess makes us optimists. Or foolhardy. Possibly both.

Despite our supposed empty-nest status, we still work full-time. Both with pretty demanding schedules. The kids have flown off to distant climes but still make fairly frequent trips to home base for moral – not to mention material – support.  So we need a place for the family to call home, a place to hang our hats, a place with plenty of space.

If there’s one thing you learn from living with someone else, it is the value of space. Personal and physical. We are joined in matrimony, not at the hip. So he has his ski weekends, I have my yoga.  He seeks adventure, I am a homebird.

5, clos du Couchant - Our first house

When we built our first house, I personally swore we’d never move again. That was after moving five times in seven years, including one transatlantic move with a toddler, two french bulldogs and a container full of stuff.  After several years of living in the city, apartment-bound with kids and dogs, it was such a relief to see open the shutters and the sky, enjoy the garden, get to know the neighbours. In ten years we built an addition, an inground pool, the trees grew tall...it began to feel like we’d always lived there. 

Alas, we must work to pay for all those things. As it happened, career moves took us both to the Geneva area and we entered a period of weekly commuting.  After four years of schlepping between home and work, keeping two refrigerators stocked, getting dressed in the morning with the one thing you need in the other closet, we decided to sell up and move closer to work.

It was painful to say goodbye to our house in the Lyon area, where we’d built a new life for ourselves, put down roots, seen the kids grow up. Where I had finally acclimatized to the French culture, even acquired French citizenship. And yes, taken on certain bad habits like flashing slow-poke drivers and cutting in line to get through traffic jams. But we realized we could become part of a fairly exclusive club of people: les frontaliers -- those who work in Switzerland and live in France, ie. get paid in Swiss francs and buy our daily bread in euros, while enjoying the perks of some pretty awe-inspiring scenery. The mountains are nearby for ski weekends, with the Jura on one side and the Alps on the other. Lake Geneva is a beautiful lake that manages to stay clean and is good for swimming, sailing or just strolling by. 

After several months of searching on the Swiss side above Lake Geneva, towards the Jura, we ended up on the other side of the lake. It’s an area known as the Chablais region of the Haute Savoie, stretching more or less from Annemasse to Evian. We had discovered the region some years before when vacationing at a little town called Yvoire. It is a tiny medieval village with cobblestone streets overlooking the lake, and we fell in love with it.

Our new home is being built in Chens sur Léman, a short distance from the Swiss border at Hermance, another cute little village with a lot of caché.  As the old real-estate adage goes, there are three things to look for when you buy: "Location, location, location." So this is the place for our home, suite.